Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 14 Jan 2016 09:16 | #

Daniel,

I still don’t think you are really addressing the argument I make.  I will re-order four key passages from my last few comments in an attempt to clarify for you the consciousness-driven, subtly assortative, freeing process I am interested in.  This is not a matter of pure thinking, and certainly not thinking about a social unit (the connective tissue of which is communication).  It is the reality of what happened to the German people in the period from 1933 to 1939, even though the National Socialists didn’t know what they were doing in this regard.

A race is primarily a level of genetic variation at which a certain instinctive, shared particularism may or may not apply.  The “may or may not” is determined by the degree to which the instinctive reaches into the general consciousness, and that is determined by the quality of that consciousness.  The race as such has its own being in which its members have no choice but to live out their part.  If they live in absence and mechanicity, of course, they will be unaware of that reality.  Their heads will be full of whatever it is they’ve been enculturated in.

I would also add that the aspects of modernity which present as technology, industrialisation, and urbanisation are substantially products of the European nature.  I am not convinced that they are irredeemable negatives.  There ought to be ways to re-humanise experience of them.  Negativity enters only where the value of the European life is always reduced.  So for example, the massifying and universalising and/or self-estranging tendencies of Christianity, liberalism, socialism, Marxism, economism, consumerism, etc, all reduce us in that absolute sense.

What arises as vivifying change in the world ... change which does not have degenerative consequences ... can only do so out of an emergent quality of a more consciously lived collective existence.

So, for me, it’s a matter of the quality of consciousness, not thinking.  But either way, our sense of self – a sense which, in my view, is sparked mechanically in us at all times (as, in some, is the sense of the divine) - becomes lost to or estranged from that essentiality we know instinctively by its profound familiarity, salience, detachment and naturalness, integrity, possession, authority, and authenticity.

 

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 15 Jan 2016 08:47 | #

Moment…I will get some coffee and have a look.

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 15 Jan 2016 10:58 | #

Daniel,

I still don’t think you are really addressing the argument I make.  I will re-order four key passages from my last few comments in an attempt to clarify for you the consciousness-driven, subtly assortative, freeing process I am interested in.  This is not a matter of pure thinking, and certainly not thinking about a social unit (the connective tissue of which is communication).

It is still about communication by my definition of the term (which is not based on mere transmission, but interaction). It is also a social unit, or group, by my definition. You prefer to focus on its biological underpinnings and corresponding behavior; but let me not disrupt the coherence of what you are saying because it is worthwhile inquiry, even if framed in static manner. Probably a bit too deterministic and that would be the concern.

It is the reality of what happened to the German people in the period from 1933 to 1939, even though the National Socialists didn’t know what they were doing in this regard.

Well, ok: their racial nationalism was manifest..but..

The manifestation of racial-national being came about in part through the reassuring verification of naturalism, biological and otherwise, which you focus on, but also, initially through its social (leftist) accountability - which came unhinged after the night of the long knives.

It would have been good if they could have maintained that social aspect, instead of seeing themselves in sheerly “naturalistic terms”, in either/or terms of competition, expansion-at others expense-or-die, conquest and rule over the undermen; that instead they could enjoy the fact that they did well for themselves and others in trade; that they could enjoy encouraging and fostering that same sense of satisfaction in other racial nations to take pride and enjoyment in their different ways and the things they do well.

But that seems to be the problem with Hitler’s philosophy, it went a bit too low into the biological if not physical level. By doing that one can put things in terms simple enough for everyone to easily understand, I suppose. And I imagine it will have the added benefit of pandering to a base female instinct to incite genetic competition - so, unlike most racial programs, it will actually get women on its side: the thing is, it is for them, on that level, not really about race, but the competition as a crucible. Hence, they will not care too much about who dies - they are just the losers.

It is the problem altogether with striving after reassuring axioms of nature: i.e. they bipass the agentive complexity of our human nature, which is granted agency particularly in praxis (social construction) and hermeneutics.

It seems that Hitler lacked Aristotle, particularly Aristotle’s more astute observation of human nature.

That human nature, though partly in the realm of theoria (hard facts) that you are interested in, is also in the realm of praxis (the social world) and it makes us importantly different from other aspects of biology and nature.

Now, it seems Heidegger was very shy about undoing the Cartesian debacle - an errantly hoped for pure separation of theoria from praxis, but undoing that was what he was doing at his best.

He was also quite brilliant to enlist Aristotle’s other category, of poesis, to illustrate that even it, in some ways, was more like the human way of thinking than technology as it aims imperviously toward axiomatic theoria.

I have long been working with Aristotles’s trichotomy: Theoria - Praxis - Poesis.

As I understood my professors to say: Theoria corresponded with techne (technology and technique); Praxis corresponded with poesis (facile, practical judgement); Poesis corresponded with epistemology (thinking about thinking, pure premises).

Or so I thought my professors said, or so they said with good reason, changing slightly Aristotle’s arrangement, which was:

Theoria/epistemology, Praxis/phronesis, Poesis/techne

Either my professors were mistaken, I was mistaken, or my professors transposed the places of episteme and techne with good reason, or I transposed them semi accidentally but perhaps with good reason.

I tried to clarify this with Greg Johnson. He either could not or would not. Tanstaafl, perhaps seeing this, tried to say that I was in a permanent state of confusion (dishonestly, it seems to try to make points for his Hitler team; I had hoped he was better than that; maybe he will see fit to be more reasonable).

But in discussing it with Kumiko, I am more confident that where my professors, Heidegger et al., did not make this alteration to Aristotle, they probably should have for terms better in philosophical description and prescription of remedy following the transformation of modernity set in motion from its apex in Descartes.

That is, it was no longer “pure thinking” that was revered as the means to pure theory but more and more scientific apparatus and method - i.e., techne.

Hence, techne, not episteme, became commonly understood as the means to theory. This critical re-framing is not, of course, not to deny the crucial importance of science and technology as a means of discovery, but rather to provide an analytical frame to observe ways in which these can be alienating and destructive to people as per their nature, social and otherwise; particularly inasmuch as these technological means are set in quest of pure theoria, imperviously to our biological, human, social ecological nature.

Conversely, in regard to epistemology, “pure thinking”, it would make more sense that it would correspond with poesis anyway.

Kant discussed, and Ardent picked up upon, the idea of judgment’s correspondence to aesthetics.

Anyway, long story short, I believe the re-arrangement of Aristotle’s trichotomy is the correct one for addressing pathologies (and, yes, good things too) about Modernity (Cartesianism) as they divide us from concern and accountability to our social group - i.e., praxis. And it is the outlook of post modern philosophy that Heidegger and others were correctly setting forth.

A race is primarily a level of genetic variation at which a certain instinctive, shared particularism may or may not apply.  The “may or may not” is determined by the degree to which the instinctive reaches into the general consciousness, and that is determined by the quality of that consciousness.  The race as such has its own being in which its members have no choice but to live out their part.  If they live in absence and mechanicity, of course, they will be unaware of that reality.  Their heads will be full of whatever it is they’ve been enculturated in.

Ok, it’s a fine description, but I believe that especially with people as creative and independent as ours, there needs to be deliberate communication, i.e. argument as to why they are better-off to consider the fitness of their behavior. I.e., you may be wanting to go a bit below the level of our human nature, especially at our European best, and into a kind of Tractatus-like determinism.

Your wish for rigor is not wrong up to the point where it seeks to exclude praxis, the social dimension. It is an understandable response to the treacherous flux of brown liberalism that has been flung upon us, but left by itself, without the dimension of social accountability it is a reaction; which can be obstructive, destructive and dangerous (not only to them, but to us) if left uncorrected.

I would also add that the aspects of modernity which present as technology, industrialisation, and urbanisation are substantially products of the European nature.  I am not convinced that they are irredeemable negatives.

I didn’t say they were. I agree that all of these things can be fine and necessary.

There ought to be ways to re-humanise experience of them.

That’s the beauty of availing ourselves of praxis and its agency, there should be ways to re humanize them.

Negativity enters only where the value of the European life is always reduced.  So for example, the massifying and universalising and/or self-estranging tendencies of Christianity, liberalism, socialism, Marxism, economism, consumerism, etc, all reduce us in that absolute sense.

The negative sides of modernity are complex, so I am not going to grant right now that you’ve summed it up right there. Rather it seems you might be confusing the critique of modernity, which freaked Bowery out, with his critique of civilization - which made my eyes roll to begin; however, I attempted to sort the issues, the problems rather of modernity or civilization in these essays (which probably nobody read, though they should have).

https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/the_pejorative_side_of_modernity_or_civilization_competing_theories_or_alli

https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/the_pejorative_side_of_modernity_or_civilization_competing_theories_or

https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/the_pejorative_side_of_modernity_or_civilization_competing_theories_or1

  What arises as vivifying change in the world ... change which does not have degenerative consequences ... can only do so out of an emergent quality of a more consciously lived collective existence.

Well, I am not arguing against that. Post modernity proper, (what I call White post modernity), maintains that there are good aspects to modernity. Its program is to take the best of modernity and inherited forms and to guard against the negative effects of modernity and tradition, custom and habit.

So, for me, it’s a matter of the quality of consciousness, not thinking.  But either way, our sense of self – a sense which, in my view, is sparked mechanically in us at all times (as, in some, is the sense of the divine) - becomes lost to or estranged from that essentiality we know instinctively by its profound familiarity, salience, detachment and naturalness, integrity, possession, authority, and authenticity.

Ok, I recognize your ontology project as one, non-trivial end of hermeneutic inquiry - the broad social perspective being the other.

Posted by staged defiance on Sat, 16 Jan 2016 07:40 | #

One of the interesting tidbits of the Kennedy biography is that his brother, Bobby, was apparently quite willing to allow for the sinking of a U.S. battle ship off the coast of Cuba in order to stage the occasion (confirming that false flags are an operating procedure, whether standard or not) to end the Cuban missile crisis by invading Cuba, taking-out Castro, his regime and the nuclear rocket installations.

With that, the stagedness of Katzenbach’s confrontation of Wallace at the door of The University of Alabama to provide an occasion for Kennedy to go on national television and ask Congress for an anti-racial discrimination “civil rights” initiative is only more clear - especially when you consider that Governor Wallace went to the head of local Police at his house the evening before to plead for leniency on the basis of a plan, assuring him that he would stand-down after a public display of defiance.

Posted by Katzenbach's directive: Oswald alone on Sat, 16 Jan 2016 13:37 | #

Former Senate investigator, Harold Weisberg -

On Katzenbach’s premeditated directive that Oswald was to be strictly presented by the media as the lone assassin.

From “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” Part 1, min. 33:21 - 34:01

Weisberg: “Kennedy was killed on Friday, November 22nd, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was Killed by Jack Ruby on Sunday, the 24th of November (1963). Nicholas Katzenbach was the acting Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General - and he knew immediately that Oswald was not going to be tried. They didn’t have to put this evidence * into court: so, he (Katzenbach) takes a lawyer’s yellow legal pad and writes out in long hand a memorandum to Bill Moyers, that was the channel to Lyndon Johnson; and in essence he says we’ve got to convince the world that Oswald was a lone assassin and the evidence was such that he would have been convicted if he had gone to trial. This is before they collected any evidence.* This is Monday morning - the Monday after the assassination.”

* Autopsy evidence of Kennedy’s wounds indicating trajectory of bullets.

       

Posted by Katzenbach also instrumental to Vietnam policy on Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:09 | #

In addition to being instrumental in the President John F. Kennedy assassination investigation (cover-up), Katzenbach was instrumental in putting over “civil rights” anti-discrimination/integration legislation with both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; moreover, he was instrumental in Vietnam policy - defending President Johnson’s escalation of the war.

NY Times, ‘Nicholas Katzenbach, 90, Dies; Policy Maker at ’60s Turning Points’, 9 May 2012:

His 6 years in government put him in the thick of some of the major events of the ’60s. He advised President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, negotiated the release of Cuban prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion and pushed for an independent commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination. He was Robert F. Kennedy’s No. 2 in the Justice Department and took on J. Edgar Hoover, the pugnacious F.B.I. director, over his wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. As an under secretary of state, he defended Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War before Congress.

“Few men have been so deeply involved in the critical issues of our time,” Johnson wrote to him when Mr. Katzenbach left government in 1968.

Perhaps his tensest moment came on June 11, 1963, when he confronted George C. Wallace in stifling heat on the steps of the University of Alabama. Mr. Wallace was the Alabama governor who had trumpeted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and vowed to block the admission of two black students “at the schoolhouse door.”

Mr. Katzenbach, in front of television cameras and flanked by a federal marshal and a United States attorney, approached Foster Auditorium, the main building on campus, around 11 a.m. Mr. Wallace was waiting behind a lectern at the top of the stairs, surrounded by a crowd of whites, some armed. “Stop!” he called out, raising his hand.

Mr. Katzenbach read a presidential proclamation ordering that the students be admitted and asked the governor to step aside peacefully. Wallace read a five-minute statement castigating “the central government” for “suppression of rights.”

Posted by L.B.J. Jewish ancestry and allegiance on Sun, 17 Jan 2016 20:04 | #

5 Towns Jewish Times

5TJT, ‘Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!’ 11 April 2013:

A few months ago, the Associated Press reported that newly released tapes from US president Lyndon Johnson’s White House office showed LBJ’s “personal and often emotional connection to Israel.” The news agency pointed out that during the Johnson presidency (1963-1969), “the United States became Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and primary arms supplier.”

But the news report does little to reveal the full historical extent of Johnson’s actions on behalf of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.  Most students of the Arab-Israeli conflict can identify Johnson as the president during the 1967 war. But few know about LBJ’s actions to rescue hundreds of endangered Jews during the Holocaust – actions that could have thrown him out of Congress and into jail. Indeed, the title of “Righteous Gentile” is certainly appropriate in the case of the Texan, whose centennial year is being commemorated this year.  Appropriately enough, the annual Jerusalem Conference announced this week that it will honor Johnson.

Historians have revealed that Johnson, while serving as a young congressman in 1938 and 1939, arranged for visas to be supplied to Jews in Warsaw, and oversaw the apparently illegal immigration of hundreds of Jews through the port of Galveston, Texas….

A key resource for uncovering LBJ’s pro-Jewish activity is the unpublished 1989 doctoral thesis by University of Texas student Louis Gomolak, “Prologue: LBJ’s Foreign Affairs Background, 1908-1948.” Johnson’s activities were confirmed by other historians in interviews with his wife, family members and political associates.

Research into Johnson’s personal history indicates that he inherited his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was a member of the Zionist Organization of America.

According to Gomolak, Aunt Jessie had nurtured LBJ’s commitment to befriending Jews for 50 years. As young boy, Lyndon watched his politically active grandfather “Big Sam” and father “Little Sam” seek clemency for Leo Frank, the Jewish victim of a blood libel in Atlanta.  Frank was lynched by a mob in 1915, and the Ku Klux Klan in Texas threatened to kill the Johnsons. The Johnsons later told friends that Lyndon’s family hid in their cellar while his father and uncles stood guard with shotguns on their porch in case of KKK attacks. Johnson’s speech writer later stated, “Johnson often cited Leo Frank’s lynching as the source of his opposition to both anti-Semitism and isolationism.”

Already in 1934 – four years before Chamberlain’s Munich sellout to Hitler – Johnson was keenly alert to the dangers of Nazism and presented a book of essays, ‘Nazism: An Assault on Civilization’, to the 21-year-old woman he was courting, Claudia Taylor – later known as “Lady Bird” Johnson. It was an incredible engagement present.

FIVE DAYS after taking office in 1937, LBJ broke with the “Dixiecrats” and supported an immigration bill that would naturalize illegal aliens, mostly Jews from Lithuania and Poland. In 1938, Johnson was told of a young Austrian Jewish musician who was about to be deported from the United States. With an element of subterfuge, LBJ sent him to the US Consulate in Havana to obtain a residency permit. Erich Leinsdorf, the world famous musician and conductor, credited LBJ for saving his live.

That same year, LBJ warned Jewish friend, Jim Novy, that European Jews faced annihilation. “Get as many Jewish people as possible out of Germany and Poland,” were Johnson’s instructions. Somehow, Johnson provided him with a pile of signed immigration papers that were used to get 42 Jews out of Warsaw.  But that wasn’t enough. According to historian James M. Smallwood, Congressman Johnson used legal and sometimes illegal methods to smuggle “hundreds of Jews into Texas, using Galveston as the entry port.  Enough money could buy false passports and fake visas in Cuba, Mexico and other Latin American countries. Johnson smuggled boatloads and planeloads of Jews into Texas. He hid them in the Texas National Youth Administration. Johnson saved at least four or five hundred Jews, possibly more.”

During World War II Johnson joined Novy at a small Austin gathering to sell $65,000 in war bonds. According to Gomolak, Novy and Johnson then raised a very “substantial sum for arms for Jewish underground fighters in Palestine.” One source cited by the historian reports that “Novy and Johnson had been secretly shipping heavy crates labeled ‘Texas Grapefruit’ – but containing arms – to Jewish underground ‘freedom fighters’ in Palestine.”

ON JUNE 4, 1945, Johnson visited Dachau. According to Smallwood, Lady Bird later recalled that when her husband returned home, “he was still shaken, stunned, terrorized, and bursting with an overpowering revulsion and incredulous horror at what he had seen.”

A decade later while serving in the Senate, Johnson blocked the Eisenhower administration’s attempts to apply sanctions against Israel following the 1956 Sinai Campaign. “The indefatigable Johnson had never ceased pressure on the administration,” wrote I.L. “Si” Kenen, the head of AIPAC at the time.  As Senate majority leader, Johnson consistently blocked the anti-Israel initiatives of his fellow Democrat, William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Among Johnson’s closest advisers during this period were several strong pro-Israel advocates, including Benjamin Cohen (who 30 years earlier was the liaison between Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and Chaim Weizmann) and Abe Fortas, the legendary Washington “insider.”

Johnson’s concern for the Jewish people continued through his presidency. Soon after taking office in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Johnson told an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.”  Just one month after succeeding Kennedy, LBJ attended the December 1963 dedication of the Agudas Achim Synagogue in Austin. Novy opened the ceremony by saying to Johnson, “We can’t thank him enough for all those Jews he got out of Germany during the days of Hitler.”  Lady Bird would later describe the day, according to Gomolak: “Person after person plucked at my sleeve and said, ‘I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him. He helped me get out.’” Lady Bird elaborated, “Jews had been woven into the warp and woof of all [Lyndon’s] years.”

The PRELUDE to the 1967 war was a terrifying period for Israel, with the US State Department led by the historically unfriendly Dean Rusk urging an evenhanded policy despite Arab threats and acts of aggression. Johnson held no such illusions. After the war he placed the blame firmly on Egypt: “If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision [by Egypt that the Strait of Tiran would be closed [to Israeli ships and Israeli-bound cargo].”

Kennedy was the first president to approve the sale of defensive US weapons to Israel, specifically Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. But Johnson approved tanks and fighter jets, all vital after the 1967 war when France imposed a freeze on sales to Israel. Yehuda Avner recently described on these pages prime minister Levi Eshkol’s successful appeal for these weapons on a visit to the LBJ ranch.  Israel won the 1967 war, and Johnson worked to make sure it also won the peace. “I sure as hell want to be careful and not run out on little Israel,” Johnson said in a March 1968 conversation with his ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg, according to White House tapes recently released.

Soon after the 1967 war, Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asked Johnson at the Glassboro Summit why the US supported Israel when there were 80 million Arabs and only three million Israelis. “Because it is a right thing to do,” responded the straight-shooting Texan.

The crafting of UN Resolution 242 in November 1967 was done under Johnson’s scrutiny. The call for “secure and recognized boundaries” was critical. The American and British drafters of the resolution opposed Israel returning all the territories captured in the war. In September 1968, Johnson explained, “We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders. Some such lines must be agreed to by the neighbors involved.”  Goldberg later noted, “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate.” This historic diplomacy was conducted under Johnson’s stewardship, as Goldberg related in oral history to the Johnson Library. “I must say for Johnson,” Goldberg stated. “He gave me great personal support.”

Robert David Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, recently wrote in The New York Sun, Johnson’s policies stemmed more from personal concerns – his friendship with leading Zionists, his belief that America had a moral obligation to bolster Israeli security and his conception of Israel as a frontier land much like his home state of Texas. His personal concerns led him to intervene when he felt that the State or Defense departments had insufficiently appreciated Israel’s diplomatic or military needs.”

President Johnson firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction. In a historical context, the American emergency airlift to Israel in 1973, the constant diplomatic support, the economic and military assistance and the strategic bonds between the two countries can all be credited to the seeds planted by LBJ.

ADDITONAL NOTE:
Lyndon Johnson’s maternal ancestors, the Huffmans, apparently migrated to Frederick, Maryland from Germany sometime in the mid-eighteenth century.  Later they moved to Bourbon, Kentucky and eventually settled in Texas in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

According to Jewish law, if a person’s mother is Jewish, then that person is automatically Jewish, regardless of the father’s ethnicity or religion.  The facts indicate that both of Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandparents, on the maternal side, were Jewish.

These were the grandparents of Lyndon’s mother, Rebecca Baines. Their names were John S. Huffman and Mary Elizabeth Perrin.  John Huffman’s mother was Suzanne Ament, a common Jewish name. Perrin is also a common Jewish name.

Huffman and Perrin had a daughter, Ruth Ament Huffman, who married Joseph Baines and together they had a daughter, Rebekah Baines, Lyndon Johnson’s mother. The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson’s family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish.

by Morris Smith

This being a Jewish newspaper, they are not going to talk about L.B.J.‘s part in the failed false-flag operation against The U.S. Liberty and cover-up; however, their boasting confirms the basis of Jonson’s motivations, from pro-Israeli foreign policy to his desire to be the President remembered domestically for “The Great Society”: seeing through 1) “The Civil Rights Act of 1964” - spearheaded by Katzenbach, it prohibited freedom of and from association, freedom of racial and other discrimination in public facilities and private businesses. 2) “The Immigration & Naturalization Act of 1965” - spearhead by Cellar and Javitz and fronted by Teddy Kennedy, it overturned quotas and racial guidelines to American immigration. 3) The implementation of “The Rumsford Fair Housing Act” - a decree ruled through Jewish Court judges, stipulating that one cannot discriminate against any citizen who wished to buy or rent property.

Wiki: The Rumsford Fair Housing Act Legislation was the culmination of a civil rights campaign against housing discrimination in the US and was approved, at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson, only one week after the assassination of M.L.King.

Golda Meir             /          Lyndon B. Johnson

Golda Meir             /          Lyndon B. Johnson

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:10 | #

Daniel,

It is still about communication by my definition of the term (which is not based on mere transmission, but interaction).

Even if you shift the definition of the term to something behavioural rather merely verbal … even if you shift it to the wiki definition of “verbal and nonverbal communication as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings”, still you are working with phenonema on the surface of life.  There is a permanent truth beneath – the reality of Man - which puts what people say and do in the context of their will and being, and puts that will and that being in the context of their consciousness, thereby making explicit the human condition as well as its potential … our ordinary, flawed state of being as well as what one could profitably call our normal and “heightened” but all too rare state of being.

It is also a social unit, or group, by my definition

A people is connected in the same way that a family is, and is no more a social group than a family is.  For nationalists, the point of interest is precisely how the biological connection exceeds the social … how, for example, the biological connection is precisely what gives form and meaning to human existence.  The whole history of Homo sapiens is the history of this connection, and everywhere outside the liberal West, even in Islamic theocracies, the political norm is cognisant of it.

Rendering it as a sub-heading under the general heading of “the social” cannot be sustained when it cleaves open and completely re-defines “the social”.  Indeed, “the social” enters upon collapse without it - something that should, after Robert D Putnam’s Bowling Alone, have become obvious even in the marxist playground of the humanities.

Further, while you speak of socialisation and unionisation, nationalists, particularly white nationalists, speak of awakening.  The difference is worth consideration.  The latter pre-supposes an existential condition of racial awareness and self-preference which is contingent on the biological connection but, owing to the conditions under which European Man labours in all his living spaces in the West today, is nullified and awaits re-discovery.  It isn’t a unionisation process.  The union is the biological connection.

Yes, you will contend that there is, amid all this, a Strasserite “”leftist” process that roughly corresponds in its treatment of the masses to the old left treatment of them in the European past.  But it would dwell downstream of the moment of awakening, and would really apply to party politics in a specific economic circumstance.  We are certainly not in that place today.

Why, then, start down the path to universalism which is the social focus?  Is it any more than an ideological necessity for communication theory?  Are you putting your own specialism before the search for the human truth which we, as thinking nationalists, are so well disposed to pursue?

you prefer to focus on its biological underpinnings and corresponding behavior ... Probably a bit too deterministic and that would be the concern.

It is not too simplistic to say that when we speak of authenticity we are, in fact, speaking of Nature in human being revealing itself through an attentional turn to a (more) conscious episode.  The authentic is the natural, or the natural mediated as minimally as possible by the socially acquired personality.  The socially acquired personality, meanwhile, is the hearth of inauthenticity.

The manifestation of racial-national being came about in part through the reassuring verification of naturalism, biological and otherwise, which you focus on, but also, initially through its social (leftist) accountability - which came unhinged after the night of the long knives.

Further to what I have already said, we must sort out our axialities before we can properly assign positional language to one or another part of the nationalist oeuvre.  What was the relation of strasserism to revolutionary conservatism, and of both to Volkishness?  Indeed, what place, if any, do the Strasser’s anti-capitalism, egalitarianism, and anti-Americanism have, and how do they stand in relation to the traditionalism and anti-egalitarianism, say, of the Evolian analysis?  Where does Italian fascism and its non-racial and corporatist outlook fit, and how does it relate to Evola?  Or to National Socialism?  Or Judaism, come to that?  Or to the Nietzschean life of glory that remains so popular among older nationalists?  Where does plain tribalism and ethnic nationalism stand?  How do these relate to Identitarianism, in its emerging form in Europe?  How about the oddities of race realism and scientific racism?  How, amid all this, do we incorporate individualism and fellow-feeling?  Because they are both characteristics of Mind, and neither one can be favoured at the expense of the other.  How do we handle progressivism and conservatism?  Or existentialism and palingenesis?

It is many years since MR examined this question.  It is still perfectly unresolved.  But until it is, I think you may be jumping the gun.

It would have been good if they could have maintained that social aspect, instead of seeing themselves in sheerly “naturalistic terms”, in either/or terms of competition, expansion-at others expense-or-die, conquest and rule over the undermen; that instead they could enjoy the fact that they did well for themselves and others in trade; that they could enjoy encouraging and fostering that same sense of satisfaction in other racial nations to take pride and enjoyment in their different ways and the things they do well.

… But that seems to be the problem with Hitler’s philosophy, it went a bit too low into the biological if not physical level.

Nietzsche and Judaism.  The master race, aryan supremacism, lebensraum, the Thousand Year Reich, and the Fuhrer Principle. This was the real heart of Hitlerian National Socialism.  None of that is remotely naturalistic, and neither was social darwinism, in so much as it can be said to have applied to NS.  It was a mis-reading of Nature, nothing more.

I am puzzled by the use of the term “biological level”.  What other level is there, in truth?  We are not religionists.  You of all people would not waste your breath appealing to a higher plane of fastidiously spiritual thought from which the too too sordid details of biology are thankfully excised.  The exact opposite, actually.  We are indiscriminate.  We claim everything that is of our kind, from the most sublime genius to the dullard and the criminal, because their forefathers fought and bled for us too, and they are us and we are them.  We do not sow conflict and division but coherence and unity.  That is the meaning of “the social” in nationalism, isn’t it?

It is the problem altogether with striving after reassuring axioms of nature: i.e. they bypass the agentive complexity of our human nature, which is granted agency particularly in praxis (social construction) and hermeneutics.

In reply I will quote from my longest and dullest but also most complete offering for the ontological project, thus:

Now, if standing on the sacred edge of the transit, within “what is”, constitutes the ne plus ultra of the individual’s perception and experience, a general re-orientation towards it … a discrimination for its truth, in the midden of nihilism, de-moralisation, anomie, and self-estrangement which, in our time, greatly shape personality (Heidegger would have said negate the European being), mirrors that at the communal level.  Within its (obviously truncated) practical range, this is still the turn to light and to our earthy, ineffable, already known, always present truth, as well as a radical politics of European people’s health of mind, freedom, unity, interest and collective will.  Under its revolutionary influence, the thought-world would become ideologically unsecured and, so, open and receptive.  The systemic revolution would begin here.  Liberalism’s two unreconciled and, ultimately, unanswerable driving questions, “What do I want” and “Is this fair”, would lose their currency.  The conflict and confusion of identity which, historically, have always been generated by Jewish thinking about the destiny of the gentile, and which are inherent to both wings of the liberal project, could have no point of purchase.  Ditto the pathological failure to recognise value in our kind even to the point of chronic ethno-masochism.  Ditto the related cultic, left-liberal fawning over non-whites.  Jewish thought itself, with its imaging of the raceless, compliant gentile in the end days, would lose all its formative capacity.

It is also worth noting here that the turn to our truth alone, and not the utterances of some Nietzschean charismatic on a podium, could ever beget the noble and great in the communal life.  Nobility and greatness cannot be prescribed.  They are not directly available to the ambition.  Attempts to grasp them with both hands inevitably turn instead to a confected self-aggrandisement that, ultimately, deceives.  Properly speaking, they are judgements of history which may or may not be attendant upon our truth.  My strong belief is that they would be.  But that would be entirely incidental.  The active politics, the real force at work here, would be a self-expressive, existential freedom and rootedness which, by their emergent, factually hard nature, perpetually imbue the moment, breaking with all pathology to recreate the thought-world and re-found the personality.  Or, at least, that is the theory.  That is what I understand to be the minimum that is necessary, and also something near, or near enough, to the realisation of Heidegger’s own political intent for human Being.

That is what I understand to be agency in world-making of an historically sustaining kind – as well, of course, as one sustaining our kind.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 13:57 | #

GW, I’ll address one thing at a time in your comment. This first, where you say:

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:10 | #

Daniel,

  It is still about communication by my definition of the term (which is not based on mere transmission, but interaction).

Even if you shift the definition of the term to something behavioural rather merely verbal … even if you shift it to the wiki definition of “verbal and nonverbal communication as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings”, still you are working with phenonema on the surface of life.  There is a permanent truth beneath – the reality of Man - which puts what people say and do in the context of their will and being, and puts that will and that being in the context of their consciousness, thereby making explicit the human condition as well as its potential … our ordinary, flawed state of being as well as what one could profitably call our normal and “heightened” but all too rare state of being.

No, I am not dealing with a surface phenomenon in my definition of communication. And, the communication perspective is geared precisely so that it may comprehend and provide for that aspect of agency. In fact, that is the reason to not allow the idiotic right wing reactionaries to continue to flout the hermeneutic, social constructionist, post modernist project proper.

Posted by Koch Brothers on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:00 | #

On the other side of the aisle from Saban and “The Democracy Alliance” is the Koch brothers and “Americans for Prosperity.”

“In the 1970s they did not like the direction America was headed. They disliked the anti-war movement, the consumer movement that Ralph Nader had started; that to them seemed anti-business; and they strongly disliked the anti-environmental movement too, that was imposing fines and new rules on major corporations some of which this group of billionaires ran.”

Background on the Koch Brothers: they became magnates by building oil refineries - Patriarch Fred Koch starting in The U.S., but also in fact building refineries for both Hitler and Stalin - while not denouncing the Axis governments, their alarm at The Soviet Union came to be expressed in a life-long anti-communist commitment -  at first with the John Birch Society and strong difference to anti-Vietnam war protests, then an increasingly adversarial position against taxation and governmental regulation, particularly environmental regulation. He had 4 sons who followed in his path, culminating in notoriety as major campaign funders from a libertarian / capitalist perspective.

“Americans for Prosperity”, the network funding group the Koch Brothers have gathered around them, comprised of 400-450 of the wealthiest capitalists, providing a budget of 889 million dollars for this 2016 election cycle (said in this report to be more than the Republican party for this cycle). Fundraising meetings are highly secretive. Non-profit groups are used as covers to avoid tax and to obfuscate direct contributions of donors. 18 billionaires are counted in the Koch camp. Donations are given in increments of $5 million.

NPR, ‘Hidden History’ Of Koch Brothers’, 20 Jan, 2016: http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2016/01/20160119_fa_01.mp3

* Kumiko offers the criticism that while the democrats make-out the Koch brothers to be predominant players in funding, they are relatively weak when compared to some of the major oil companies - which will get their way if there is a conflict of interests between them and the likes of the Koch bros. group.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 19:22 | #

But Daniel what ordinarily passes between men ... what issues from the personality, whether it is by speech or by other gestures, and however it is routed (not rooted) in the psyche ... cannot but be a surface product.  All our life is such, in the ordinary way of things. That is the human weakness ... the original human sin, actually.  The personality does not trade in nature and, therefore, not in authentic self-expression, therefore not in freedom in being.  It is fatally plastic, and does not know itself.  There is simply no way around this very hard fact of human life, except to seek the means by which the body of the people is enculturated in a lighted and benign philosophical space, and so ordinarily discriminates for self and self’s good.

Posted by Sheldon Adelson on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 19:28 | #

Pardon the source, but it is not the only one to note not only Sheldon Adelson’s backing of Republicans, but also his overlaps with the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

In late April, some 700 conservative luminaries, including presidential contenders, donors, fundraisers and former President George W. Bush, gathered at the Venetian casino and resort in Las Vegas for the Republican Jewish Coalition’s spring meeting, where Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul and GOP megadonor, was holding court.

Among the assembled allies, well-wishers and supplicants who put in appearances was Tim Phillips, the head of Americans for Prosperity, the political centerpiece of the sprawling fundraising and advocacy network spearheaded by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Posted by Unit of Analysis vs. Unit of Observation on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 20:37 | #

GW, I’ll come back to your comment number 11 in a moment, am still moving through the second question in your comment number 8:

I said: It (race) is also a social unit (we are concerned with), or group, by my definition.

You said:

A people is connected in the same way that a family is, and is no more a social group than a family is.  For nationalists, the point of interest is precisely how the biological connection exceeds the social …

That would rather be the objective of one seeking the most scientifically deterministic and operationally verifiable warrant of racial reality. It would be a scientists’ objective and can come in handy as a strong, perhaps very strong, argument on behalf of nationalism, but it is not necessarily the point of interest of nationalism. The point of nationalism is to harmonize the known biological system (your point of interest, particularly as it is manifest through individual psyches) of the nation with its socio-political means of homeostasis.

how, for example, the biological connection is precisely what gives form and meaning to human existence.  The whole history of Homo sapiens is the history of this connection, and everywhere outside the liberal West, even in Islamic theocracies, the political norm is cognisant of it.

I suppose that the liberal individualism that has gone into runaway (to extreme self estrangement as you call it) by a mix of Cartesian rational blindness and Jewish language games, i.e., their coercion to hyperbolic liberalism of our high-trust, ‘moral in-group assessment” (as opposed to biological in-group assessment) has disrupted those biological points where self correction of our pattern would begin to kick-in - but I am never trying to deny that biological function*, I seek rather to encourage and institutionalize its legitimacy - which is a shared social understanding of a rule which is in harmony with natural law.

* E.g., that is part of the reason why I continue to make a display of indignity in regard to mudsharks.

Rendering it as a sub-heading under the general heading of “the social” cannot be sustained when it cleaves open and completely re-defines “the social”.  Indeed, “the social” enters upon collapse without it - something that should, after Robert D Putnam’s Bowling Alone, have become obvious even in the marxist playground of the humanities.

I suppose that you are the one who is being facile in saying that I am merely attributing socialness to these things while you try to persuade me and the whole rest of the social world that their assessment doesn’t matter.

But before engaging a brush-up course with literature that I am not altogether familiar with to begin-with, let me state that I am not merely applying the word “social” to human interactive phenomenon, but in usuing it to describe it, interpret it, which ever you prefer, I am looking at human interaction critically as social as well as biological, first of all in order to call attention not only to the isness (weaker though it may be for Whites) but the oughtness of looking at these phenomenon in that way - a reminder more necessary for Whites as to our social indebtedness - as we are prone though long standing custom and even evolution to some extent, to blind ourselves and forget that among our rationale.

Further, while you speak of socialisation and unionisation, nationalists, particularly white nationalists, speak of awakening.  The difference is worth consideration.  The latter pre-supposes an existential condition of racial awareness and self-preference which is contingent on the biological connection but, owing to the conditions under which European Man labours in all his living spaces in the West today, is nullified and awaits re-discovery.

I don’t feel the need to contest that.

It isn’t a unionisation process.  The union is the biological connection.

That probably goes along with the anti-Cartesian program as well - but runs the risk of going static on the empirical end of Cartesiansim if remaining blind to process after an episodic attention to the form of connection.

Yes, you will contend that there is, amid all this, a Strasserite “”leftist” process that roughly corresponds in its treatment of the masses to the old left treatment of them in the European past.  But it would dwell downstream of the moment of awakening

I am not here to defend Stasser, but inasmuch as you might say that social accountability did not resonate with people and inspire pride and joy in their people as a part of the process of that racial awareness - I would tend to doubt it. It would inspire me.

, and would really apply to party politics in a specific economic circumstance.  We are certainly not in that place today.

We are not in that place yet in terms of political organization, but that is because the right and the insistence upon “the right or no such thing as left and right” proscribes social organization.

Thus, where we are at today is trying to achieve a consensus of identities, more accurately cooperative identities.

Why, then, start down the path to universalism which is the social focus?

I don’t see how I am starting down the path of universalism. It is the denunciation of the social unit of analysis and the important differences made in its observations, in favor instead for eternal truths, which is rather on that slippery slope.

Is it any more than an ideological necessity for communication theory?

While communication theory takes interaction as its unit of analysis, it claims the same turf as other disciplines, whether philosophy, psychology, sociology, or political science.

“Turf”, that is to say, in regard to unit of observation:

It can take the individual as its unit of observation - similar as psychology, which you are inclined to do in service of alignment to organic fitness; or it can take the group as its unit of observation - similar as sociology, which I take in corrective service of group racial defense.

Though really, I would hope to harmonize both. I imagine that you would too.

Are you putting your own specialism before the search for the human truth which we, as thinking nationalists, are so well disposed to pursue?

Quite sure. To take a page again from your psychological perspective, you are projecting - putting your preferred unit of observation - the psychological unit and its truth, before and to the exclusion of social group systemic patterns. You don’t have to do that, and should not do that when we are not only being attacked psychologically (we are that, and you should continue to identify normal psychology) but also and even more fundamentally as a group, a biological and social group - i.e., as a race, under the rubric of anti-racism.

Posted by Authentic calibration/range of functional autonomy on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 23:12 | #

Moving on with GW’s comment #8 still…

I said:  you prefer to focus on its biological underpinnings and corresponding behavior ... Probably a bit too deterministic and that would be the concern.

GW responds:

It is not too simplistic to say that when we speak of authenticity we are, in fact, speaking of Nature in human being revealing itself through an attentional turn to a (more) conscious episode.

Natural yes, and that is quite well said. However, one sees, and I believe quite correctly, in existential literature, that “authenticity” also carries a large human-social component wherein it, authenticity, corresponds with agency and a range of functional autonomy - not very strict and rigidly determined linearity, but rather naturally calibrative range.

The authentic is the natural, or the natural mediated as minimally as possible by the socially acquired personality. The socially acquired personality, meanwhile, is the hearth of inauthenticity.

Social narrative does allow one to take leave of the authentic, but an eye toward healthy and unhealthy social patterns is also necessary to calibrate-authenticity - authentic range of functional autonomy of the individual and group.

At the other extreme, a sheer and brute biologically narrow focus, dog eat dog, survival of the individual fittest, would not be looked upon as authentic in any human way by existential philosophy - and quite rightly it would not look upon that as authentic.

I had said: The manifestation of racial-national being came about in part through the reassuring verification of naturalism, biological and otherwise, which you focus on, but also, initially through its social (leftist) accountability - which came unhinged after the night of the long knives.

Further to what I have already said, we must sort out our axialities

That concern would seem to, and hopefully it does, correspond to what I am saying about social to individual calibration and authentic range of functional autonomy for both.

before we can properly assign positional language to one or another part of the nationalist oeuvre. What was the relation of strasserism to revolutionary conservatism, and of both to Volkishness?

Well, as Jez Turner discussed with me - I’ll cite him, because you said that he agreed with you that “NS” Germany captured a spirit of racial solidarity that you admire - some form of national socialism is only common sense if you care about your people and nation.

To answer your question beyond the intuitive level I’d have to do something to which I have an aversion, i.e., to immerse myself in N.S. literature, particularly Strasserism; that is not to try to defend that I am right to not have moved beyond hearsay in that regard, but to be honest. From what I have heard and the bits I’ve read, some was quite well thought out and from what I gather, some of it seems less than great, less than authentic, as you might say.

Indeed, what place, if any, do the Strasser’s anti-capitalism,

Well the place of anti-captialism, of course, is where it destroys human ecological homeostasis - of the racial unit, among other social units - but also where it destroys common habitat and sustenance thereof/

egalitarianism

I don’t know why the right never listen to me about this. I am correct. The matter is not equality but qualitative difference, incommensurability and difference that makes a difference

, and anti-Americanism have,

While I commend and am frequently on the anti-American critical bandwagon myself, for good reason - The Constitution is Caresian, nevertheless…

America was well motivated in a way,  Jeffersonian Epicureanism has some aspects which should be revived, inasmuch as Adams advocated the relative autonomy and cultural differences of states, that was a good idea.. it was also a good idea in response to hard and soft tyrannies of Europe to give the little and ordinary guys a chance against aristocratic elites and ignorant, impervious snobs and bullies. Objectivist puritans, crass sellouts and YKW have buried these projects in mud.

and how do they stand in relation to the traditionalism and anti-egalitarianism, say, of the Evolian analysis? Where does Italian fascism and its non-racial and corporatist outlook fit, and how does it relate to Evola?  Or to National Socialism?

My postmodern discussion begins to talk of ways of handling benign and positive tradition in relation to modernity. I’ve already talked about “anti-egalitarianism”, I am satisfied that that is a horribly mistaken paradigm - whether for or against egalitarianism.

Kumiko can maybe have a fruitful discussion about Evola at this point. What she has discussed of him with me, sounded pretty interesting, though I quickly turn off with any discussion of “spirit"and dismissiveness in regard to the biology of race.

  Or Judaism, come to that?

Some of the best answers to that that I have seen have come by way of yourself.

However, I will say this, again - yes, the Jews are looking to defend themselves as a group and are making a study of ways to do that.

But should we then, like obedient and idiotic right wing reactionaries say, “oh no, we can’t think about how to defend ourselves as a group, because that is what Jews do!”

That would be very stupid, but also very typical of the right.

Or to the Nietzschean life of glory that remains so popular among older nationalists?

There are things that I take from Nietzsche but you know that I am not big on him. He is a girl’s philosopher. That is, his philosophy appeals to crass females because it panders to their wish to maintain the anti-social power of their biological position by inciting genetic competition with a fawning gaze toward the “winning male”, the alpha male, the over-man.

Only a faggot or the crassest puerile female can suppress the gag reflex at this toxicity.

Where does plain tribalism and ethnic nationalism stand?

For me, they are valid subdivisions, though the “tribal” thing, it seems, will be confronted with the need to be involved with what amounts to ethnonationalism if it is to deal with other powers.

How do these relate to Identitarianism, in its emerging form in Europe?

I don’t really know, but so far that English stuff seems a little better, but too mixed up with Hitler.

Where it is not of the Vichy taint, the French stuff seems mixed up with Jewish bum steers - strict anti-Jihadism and “generation” stuff - its all the fault of 68, its a generation’s fault, not the fault of Jews and philosophical screw-ups

How about the oddities of race realism and scientific racism?

As I have said many times, these are right-wing reactions, seeking unassailable warrant against Jewish rhetoric and language games. When Jews get our people to react heavily into this stuff they are succeeding, because it makes us “right wingers” in a bad way. It makes us anti-social elitists and it scares people, including ours, quite rightly, because in desperately seeking this unassailable warrant beyond social reflection to say “that’s the way it is”  you go into the realm of non-social accountability.

 

Posted by Mind is a four letter word on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 23:37 | #

Answering GW’s comment 8, continued:

How, amid all this, do we incorporate individualism and fellow-feeling?

I imagine by a continental sense appropriated by Wittgenstein and brought before the British Analytic Court: viz. by taking note of internal relation. That would include the internal relation of individuals to the social. Next by noting that these internal relations have a rule-ness about them, some harder and some more negotiable, but all socially intelligible because of their internal relation.

Because they are both characteristics of Mind, and neither one can be favoured at the expense of the other.

You are coming closer to my position in discussing the mutual dependence of individual and social upon one another, and it is good for my sake, as I may tend to overlook the social’s dependence upon the individual. However, “mind” tends to have static monadic connotations where even consciousness does not; and I favor agency and perhaps something like units of observation over consciousness even - as I do not believe in denigrating the unconscious as apart from mind, nor the body, nor the social, nor the rest of nature and interaction.

How do we handle progressivism and conservatism?

With White Post Modernity, a White Left and their tools.

Or existentialism and palingenesis?

Same

Posted by Parmenides/Heraclitus - Process/Form on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:52 | #

GW says: It is many years since MR examined this question.  It is still perfectly unresolved.  But until it is, I think you may be jumping the gun

I don’t think I’m jumping the gun and I believe we’ve arrived at a conclusion that Heidegger might recommend, as I would suspect, something like a hermeneutic process back and forth between from and process, but respecting both.

It was actually you and a commentator calling himself Oldfather who clarified this for me - I had a mistaken remembrance of Heideggers’ Introduction to Metaphysics book and his Identity and Difference book.

I had thought, along the lines of what has become something of a philosophical orthodoxy, that Heidegger was saying that Western philosophy took a wrong turn when Plato went in the direction of Parmenides and the forms as opposed to Heraclitus and process.

In fact, it seems that Heidegger was saying that both were necessary to negotiate. That makes sense.

Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 16:21 | #

I believe Heidegger argued that Heraclitus and Parmenides were saying the same thing. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger critiques Nietzsche’s interpretation of the traditional polarization of Parmenides and Heraclitus. He believed this polarization was misguided.

And you added, in correct observation and defense of form, I believe:

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:07 | #

Oldfather,

I presume Heidegger’s meaning viz-a-vis Parmenides and the Pre-Socratics is that philosophical enquiry concerns the explanation of natural phenomena without recourse to religious faith.  This was the emphasis from Thales onward, and the emphasis in Heidegger’s approach to ontology.

Hence in Identity and Difference we read:

  The claim of identity speaks from the Being of beings.  However, where the Being of beings appears most early and most authentically in Western thought - with Parmenides - there speaks ... that which is identical, in a way that is almost too powerful.

  ... “For the same perceving (thinking) as well as being.”

  Different things, thinking and Being, are here thought of as the Same.  What does this say?  It says something wholly different from what we know otherwise as the doctrine of metaphysics, which states that identity belongs to Being.  Parmenides says: Being belongs to an identity.

And so forth.  I believe we are all saying the same thing according to our respective starting positions.

That is to say, the form is not inauthentic, but necessary.

Posted by strictly biological + human added capacity on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 12:01 | #

Answering GW’s comment # 8 continued:

DanielS: It would have been good if they could have maintained that social aspect, instead of seeing themselves in sheerly “naturalistic terms”, in either/or terms of competition, expansion-at others expense-or-die, conquest and rule over the undermen; that instead they could enjoy the fact that they did well for themselves and others in trade; that they could enjoy encouraging and fostering that same sense of satisfaction in other racial nations to take pride and enjoyment in their different ways and the things they do well.

  … But that seems to be the problem with Hitler’s philosophy, it went a bit too low into the biological if not physical level.

GW: Nietzsche and Judaism.  The master race, aryan supremacism, lebensraum, the Thousand Year Reich, and the Fuhrer Principle. This was the real heart of Hitlerian National Socialism.  None of that is remotely naturalistic, and neither was social darwinism, in so much as it can be said to have applied to NS.  It was a mis-reading of Nature, nothing more.

DanielS: I can agree to those ingredients being present in Nazi Germany, also that they misread nature, but particularly as it applies to human-social nature.

That is, they were moving not only too far away from the human biological creatura, into non-human biology, but probably even toward a physics model of determinism.

GW: I am puzzled by the use of the term “biological level”.  What other level is there, in truth?

DanielS: Complex social interactive and processing capacities of broader truths which are facilitated in comprehension through language and concept. There is still the mammalian, biological concern for relationships, which we are deeply concerned for, but the human added capacities must be taken into account - since our capacity for learning to learn and to think about thinking, can be corrupted or broadened and facilitated with agency as and among open, interactive systems.

GW: We are not religionists.  You of all people would not waste your breath appealing to a higher plane of fastidiously spiritual thought from which the too too sordid details of biology are thankfully excised.  The exact opposite, actually.  We are indiscriminate.  We claim everything that is of our kind, from the most sublime genius to the dullard and the criminal, because their forefathers fought and bled for us too, and they are us and we are them.  We do not sow conflict and division but coherence and unity.  That is the meaning of “the social” in nationalism, isn’t it?

DanielS: I can agree with that too. I never deny nor try to separate myself from the biological level, but must call attention to the fact that humans have added capacity upon that biological level which must be observed, particularly if we are concerned with matters of understanding the particular authenticities of our nature.

Posted by "If" on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 12:43 | #

In concluding response to GW’s comment # 8:

DanielS: It is the problem altogether with striving after reassuring axioms of nature: i.e. they bypass the agentive complexity of our human nature, which is granted agency particularly in praxis (social construction) and hermeneutics.

GW: In reply I will quote from my longest and dullest but also most complete offering for the ontological project, thus:

  Now, if standing on the sacred edge of the transit, within “what is”, constitutes the ne plus ultra of the individual’s perception and experience, a general re-orientation towards it … a discrimination for its truth, in the midden of nihilism, de-moralisation, anomie, and self-estrangement which, in our time, greatly shape personality (Heidegger would have said negate the European being), mirrors that at the communal level.  Within its (obviously truncated) practical range, this is still the turn to light and to our earthy, ineffable, already known, always present truth, as well as a radical politics of European people’s health of mind, freedom, unity, interest and collective will.  Under its revolutionary influence, the thought-world would become ideologically unsecured and, so, open and receptive.  The systemic revolution would begin here.  Liberalism’s two unreconciled and, ultimately, unanswerable driving questions, “What do I want” and “Is this fair”, would lose their currency.  The conflict and confusion of identity which, historically, have always been generated by Jewish thinking about the destiny of the gentile, and which are inherent to both wings of the liberal project, could have no point of purchase.  Ditto the pathological failure to recognise value in our kind even to the point of chronic ethno-masochism.  Ditto the related cultic, left-liberal fawning over non-whites.  Jewish thought itself, with its imaging of the raceless, compliant gentile in the end days, would lose all its formative capacity.

  It is also worth noting here that the turn to our truth alone, and not the utterances of some Nietzschean charismatic on a podium, could ever beget the noble and great in the communal life.  Nobility and greatness cannot be prescribed.  They are not directly available to the ambition.  Attempts to grasp them with both hands inevitably turn instead to a confected self-aggrandisement that, ultimately, deceives.  Properly speaking, they are judgements of history which may or may not be attendant upon our truth.  My strong belief is that they would be.  But that would be entirely incidental.  The active politics, the real force at work here, would be a self-expressive, existential freedom and rootedness which, by their emergent, factually hard nature, perpetually imbue the moment, breaking with all pathology to recreate the thought-world and re-found the personality.  Or, at least, that is the theory.  That is what I understand to be the minimum that is necessary, and also something near, or near enough, to the realisation of Heidegger’s own political intent for human Being.

That is what I understand to be agency in world-making of an historically sustaining kind – as well, of course, as one sustaining our kind.

DanielS: These are definitely interesting ideas that you are setting out here, GW, and people really should ruminate over them seriously. However, I cannot resist the Laconic response to your premise:

GW: Now, if standing on the sacred edge of the transit, within “what is”, constitutes the ne plus ultra of the individual’s perception and experience, a general re-orientation towards it

DanielS: “If”

Posted by herd rhetoric on Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:01 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 20 Jan 2016 19:22 | #

But Daniel what ordinarily passes between men ... what issues from the personality, whether it is by speech or by other gestures, and however it is routed (not rooted) in the psyche ... cannot but be a surface product.

“A surface product.” I’m not sure why it cannot be an expression of something deeper - e.g., deeper patterns and rules: I would tend to believe that it can be. I would readily concede that the interactive realm - absent correction of scientific rigor, operational verifiability or proprioception of the kind you justifiably endorse - can give free rein to counter productive speculation, imagination and deviation from healthy and fit patterns. But relative isolation will suffer as well - for lack of socially corrective and normalizing feedback.

All our life is such, in the ordinary way of things. That is the human weakness ... the original human sin, actually.  The personality does not trade in nature and, therefore, not in authentic self-expression, therefore not in freedom in being.  It is fatally plastic, and does not know itself.  There is simply no way around this very hard fact of human life, except to seek the means by which the body of the people is enculturated in a lighted and benign philosophical space, and so ordinarily discriminates for self and self’s good.

It seems that by “personality” you are talking from the psychological perspective about a lineal extension of the biological self. Though I haven’t spent any time thinking in terms of personality, turning attention to it now, it would seem that it can correspond more or less as an expression of one’s nature - but that as opposed to grunts, bird calls or sheer reliance on pheromones, we appropriate from the social realm language games so as to be intelligible and make our way: we might make honest, dishonest, good or bad choices, we might have a charming personality or be lame in how we come across as a result of the language language games we adopt, cultivate or fail to cultivate, shape and craft to our nature in order to complete ourselves in public representation.

You are more concerned with accurate correspondence to nature and want as little decorum or other distraction as possible. That’s fine with me. With all the problems that we are up against, I don’t know why people would need additional entertainment.

The fact remains that we are to some extent in a rhetorical world. Even academic, scientific papers are “argumentative” essays. Persuasion is of course a softer form. It seems you want to be less contaminated by manichean motives - and that is understandable. That wish, of itself, is an expression of our European nature. You want to persuade by means of example, or by manifestation, as it were.

I don’t have a problem so much with your inquiry as such - in pursuit of an ontology of profound biological identity, which not only distinguishes European people and their different kinds - so much as with the idea that there is no other requirement and no other method but arcane contention so that your laboratory, its control variable of individual psychology, not be contaminated with social issues as your inquiry is somehow conceived as mutually exclusive; or social inquiry mutually exclusive to your ontology project. Fixating on the end of individual psychology alone appears to be a reaction to Orwellian fears of communism, Jewish rhetoric and/ or a rigid fixation on the Platonic dialectic: rhetoric is just what sophists do, it has nothing to do with an honest means of truth.

I keep trying to get people to talk with me about what a correct balance of accountability would look like. It seems communism well overdid it and some western societies have not had nearly enough. It is a fascinating question to me, but we do not seem to have an intellectually engaging culture in WN as yet.

As opposed to discussing that, we’ll have Thorn coming here to tell me I’m terrible because I don’t believe in Jews and Jesus… or some guy telling me that I’m terrible because I don’t cherish the fuhrer…

Or perhaps we should have pure science and individuals in a world free of words…pure mood signs…a pair-wise duel if you don’t like it (wink).

Posted by Bowling alone on Fri, 22 Jan 2016 23:43 | #

GW, I take it by invoking “Bowling alone” that you are calling attention to the evidence that “diversity,” as in programs sponsoring the inclusion and integration of former racial out-groups, doesn’t work - it decreases social trust, social capital and political participation.

While we can agree wholeheartedly with that assessment and that it is not something that we want to do (attempt to include and integrate racial aliens), where we seem to disagree is in what to call that - you still want to call that “leftist;” but with regard to European and native European nationalist interests that is neo-liberal; and Judeo-Marxist inasmuch as Whites are cast in the role of elites to be overthrown by international proletarian. It in no way represents a union of our native interests. The attempt to include and integrate racial aliens with us is nothing that corresponds or can accurately be called White/Native European nationalist leftism.

And it is important to not continue to allow Jews to traffic in that confusion as much of what they have gotten away with hinges on that confusion and the disorganization that ensues.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:21 | #

Guessedworker on Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:10 wrote:

Further, while you speak of socialisation and unionisation, nationalists, particularly white nationalists, speak of awakening.  The difference is worth consideration.  The latter pre-supposes an existential condition of racial awareness and self-preference which is contingent on the biological connection but, owing to the conditions under which European Man labours in all his living spaces in the West today, is nullified and awaits re-discovery.  It isn’t a unionisation process.  The union is the biological connection.

Yes, you will contend that there is, amid all this, a Strasserite “leftist” process that roughly corresponds in its treatment of the masses to the old left treatment of them in the European past.  But it would dwell downstream of the moment of awakening, and would really apply to party politics in a specific economic circumstance.  We are certainly not in that place today.

I think it’s definitely true that the moment of awakening is the first step toward defending one’s own existence, because a person has to recognise their own existence before they can defend it. However, upon awakening, the next step is—I think—always to take actions to create the economic and social framework that can facilitate that defence, in accordance with the particular historical and geographical circumstances that they have found themselves in. Since humans beings have the freedom to act as they wish, but are constrained to act within circumstances which are not of their choosing.

In the case of Strasserism, Strasserism arose in the environment of a Bavaria whose people had not only experienced the destruction of the First World War, but also the economic crash of 1929, which was in large part caused by the uneven distribution of global wealth created by the uneven development of global capitalism. As a result, it was only to be expected, that the logical and coherent outcome of the German revolutionary experience would lead them to embrace both socialism and nationalism at the same time.

This logic still applies today, although on a more distant time scale, because all of the reasons for left-nationalism are still with us today.

Strasserism, particularly as manifested in the person of Ernst Roehm and the organisation of the SA, was the most authentically German response to the situation that they could have mustered. Why? Because the SA’s approach was to say that they had not yet completed the revolution because the nationalist revolution had not been appropriately supplemented by the socialist revolution which would economically codify the primary purpose of nationalism which was to set up structures which were most capable of defending the dominance of the ‘German’ geographical breeding group over its own civic space.

The reason that the Prussian industrialists and landowners, as well as the old conservative wing of the German Army were upset about what the SA were doing, was largely because of their own narrow class interests. And so began a lobbying and shadow-boxing session over the body of Adolf Hitler and the other iconic NSDAP figures, until the Night of the Long Knives where unfortunately the old conservatives were able to convince Hitler (or perhaps Hitler did much to convince himself too) that it was ‘better’ or ‘more savvy’ to compromise with these people than to complete the revolution.

The deformed state of affairs that emerged from that would never have been quite what it ought to have been.

Posted by DanielS on Sun, 24 Jan 2016 14:32 | #

GW, because you hit me with such a spate of monumental questions I felt the need to answer them - just adumbrating the answers before too long so that the questions did not languish indefinitely.  Because those questions were monumental, however, I took a break after setting out my answers. I came back to edit them for the interesting grammatical formations that I am prone to in an instance like that. The mistakes were annoying, but are mostly corrected now, if you or anyone else needs to have a look in reference.

Kumiko, your answer is very good, thanks. But I think that GW is not only concerned about the economic circumstances of Bavaria, Prussia and the nascent German state. He is interested in authentic manifestations and expressions of their peoplehood.

That could and I am sure would be partly, but only partly, answered in your discussion of the leftist aspects of national socialism as an expression of Germanness.

Posted by Being requires structure (form) on Wed, 10 Feb 2016 23:04 | #

GW, this passage that Johnson (quoting from Vasek) observes as proving that Heidegger was (very) influenced by Evola (probably confirming that he was influenced by Vico as well, as I’d suspected) also reinforces the idea that for Heidegger, “Being” requires structure, i.e. form.

Therefore, if a race is to have authenticity - being - it is must have a form as well..

The keyword of Martin Heidegger’s note is “race”; below that appears, in the handwriting of the philosopher, the following sentence: “Wenn eine Rasse die Berührung mit dem, was allein Beständigkeit hat und geben kann — mit der Welt des Seyns — verloren hat, dann sinken die von ihr gebildeten kollektiven Organismen, welches immer ihre Größe und Macht sei, schicksalhaft in die Welt der Zufälligkeit herab.” [“If a race had lost contact with what alone has and can give resistance — with the world of Beyng — then the collective organisms formed from it, whatever be their size and power, sink fatefully down into the world of contingency.”] The quotation is taken verbatim from the book Revolt Against the Modern World, which was first published in German in 1935; only the spelling of “Being” has been Heideggerized.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/02/notes-on-heidegger-and-evola/#more-61243

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:07 | #

Daniel,

I think this piece, which I wrote almost exactly six years ago, covers all the ground:

https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/heidegger_and_the_nazis_the_concrete_and_the_spirit

I must say, I was quite shocked when Greg made the assertion in our interview that Heidegger was a Nazi.  Greg seems to have an agenda to accommodate him within (what appears, at least, to be) his own foundationally spiritual racism.  That article of mine talks about the extreme, and possibly unique, adaptibility of Heidegger’s thinking in that respect.  Perhaps it is inevitable if one’s thinking about Heidegger’s ontology is not ontological itself.

Does being require form?  Well, being is not some metaphysical ground in which identity is somehow rooted.  Neither is identity the embodiment of being.  On the contrary, being is the action of identity (or subject, as you prefer, since, for all realistic intents, it must mean the conscious organism).  It is a process in Time, that is all.  I recall exchanging emails with you after the Johnson interview, and in at least one of them I raised the notion of the genesis of life, indeed the millions upon millions of independent geneses that must have sparked and died before connection and seriality and dependence entered, and the grand journey of Nature - form - commenced.  Where was being but at the point of light of each genesis, and in no other place, to be extinguished forever; to appear again but never to re-appear as before.  Being has no connectivity, no permanence.  It is the unique subjective.  It is mine and ours, but we cannot know one another’s being.

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 01:32 | #

I wouldn’t call Heidegger a “Nazi” simply because he saw National Socialism as a way to uphold a nation’s boundaries as opposed to capitalism and communism and other internationalisms.

I’m sure that Heidegger believed that NS, in its ideal - as national and as social - was the logical means. It upheld the structure, the being, the dasein of nationalism as it were.

I use “Nazi” as a term of derision for those who take those ideas to infer that what Hitler’s regime did, viz. imperialism and supremacism (anti-social - ism) was a reasonable interpretation (when in fact it was quite opposite of nationalism and socialism).

And so, I reserve the word Nazi for the regime’s transgression if not reversal of those terms and for those who would maintain that transgression if not reversal - because they do not deserve to be called national socialists as it is not an accurate description and they are not so benign.

Anyway, before addressing your comment, I’d like to say that I’m pleased to find my own understandings apparently confirmed as to how the philosophers were seeing problems and solutions for western man.

For now, I will post Johnson’s article up to the point where he talks about Dasein. The reason why I’d like for you to take note of that is because it not only confirms the non-Cartesian idea behind Dasein, but also the necessity of coming to terms with rhetoric.

I sometimes get the sense that as a result of the West’s Platonic tradition that you have come to see rhetoric as an enemy as opposed to a friend and necessary tool.

This is not a trivial point.

Not least of all because it is true, but also because we will continue to lose to Jews while they understand it and we do not.

Notes on Heidegger & Evola
Greg Johnson

Evidence has recently emerged that Martin Heidegger read Julius Evola. In an article entitled “Ein spirituelles Umsturzprogramm” (“A Spiritual Revolution Program”) published in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung, December 30, 2015, Thomas Vasek reports on an important document he discovered:

Julius Evola, the ultra-fascist Italian cultural philosopher, was eagerly read not only by Gottfried Benn, but also by Martin Heidegger as an unpublished note shows.

The keyword of Martin Heidegger’s note is “race”; below that appears, in the handwriting of the philosopher, the following sentence: “Wenn eine Rasse die Berührung mit dem, was allein Beständigkeit hat und geben kann — mit der Welt des Seyns — verloren hat, dann sinken die von ihr gebildeten kollektiven Organismen, welches immer ihre Größe und Macht sei, schicksalhaft in die Welt der Zufälligkeit herab.” [“If a race had lost contact with what alone has and can give resistance — with the world of Beyng — then the collective organisms formed from it, whatever be their size and power, sink fatefully down into the world of contingency.”] The quotation is taken verbatim from the book Revolt Against the Modern World, which was first published in German in 1935; only the spelling of “Being” has been Heideggerized.

The author of the work was the Italian cultural philosopher and esotericist Julius Evola (1898-1974) — a racist and anti-Semite who revered the SS as an elite order, developed a Fascist racial doctrine, and a wrote a Preface to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. After the war, the Italian fascists revered him. To this day he is considered a leading figure of the extreme Right across Europe. [. . .]

The as yet unpublished excerpt could give new direction to the ongoing Heidegger controversy. Evola’s name does not appear in Heidegger’s published writings, and Heidegger scholarship has taken little notice of him. Even the Italian philosopher Donatella di Cesare does not mentions Evola in her book Heidegger, the Jews, the Shoah (2015). Yet textual comparisons suggest that Heidegger had not only read Evola, as this note indicates, but was also influenced by his ideas from the mid-thirties on, from his critique of science and technology, his anti-humanism and rejection of Christianity, to his “spiritual” racism. If this thesis is correct, then perhaps one could view the late Heidegger as a radical fascist esotericist who hoped that rule by a spiritual elite would bring about the reappearance of the gods.

Of course this single note establishes only that Heidegger read one of Evola’s books, not that he read it “eagerly.” Nor does it indicate what Heidegger thought of Evola. But it is still an important discovery. It could lead nowhere. (It could be Heidegger’s sole reference to Evola.) Or it could be the tip of an iceberg. An Evola connection could end up throwing a great deal of light on Heidegger’s interests and associations. No matter what the outcome, Vasek’s discovery is the beginning of an important academic research project. Are there other references to Evola in the Heidegger papers? Did Heidegger read other works by Evola? Did he annotate Evola’s books? Did Heidegger correspond with or meet Evola? (Both thinkers visited one another’s homelands.)

I have long wondered if more mainstream thinkers of the Right like Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were aware of the Traditionalist school of Evola and René Guénon. This suspicion was based less on shared doctrines than on shared concerns. A philosopher’s concerns are, in effect, the questions he is trying to answer; his doctrines are his attempts to answer them. Heidegger and Schmitt shared their Right-wing politics and critical eye on modernity with Evola and Guénon. That alone was sufficient reason to read them, even if they arrived at very different conclusions. Thus I was pleased to learn from Mircea Eliade’s Portugal Journal that Schmitt said, “the most interesting man alive today is René Guénon” and that Eliade agreed, although his conviction sometimes wavered. (Eliade also met Evola, corresponded with him, and read his works.) And now we have positive evidence that Heidegger read Evola.

I am somewhat skeptical, however, of Vasek’s assertion that Heidegger was influenced by Evola from the mid-1930s on, specifically on such matters as science and technology, anti-humanism, the rejection of Christianity, and race and anti-Semitism. For one thing, Heidegger had rejected Christianity long before the 1930s. I eagerly anticipate Vasek’s “textual comparisons,” but my fear is that they will be superficial. For although both Heidegger and Evola shared a generally Right-wing political outlook and believed that technological modernity was the culmination of a long process of decline going back to antiquity, their ultimate philosophical premises were very different.

evola2Evola’s “world of Being” is essentially a Platonic realm of eternal, intelligible truth that stands in opposition to the “world of contingency,” which is intelligible only insofar as it reflects the world of Being. By contrast, Heidegger’s concept of “Beyng” (a rendering of his use of Seyn, the archaic spelling of the German Sein) refers to his concept of “Ereignis,” which is actually an unintelligible contingency that establishes different reigning interpretations of man and world.

Evola believed that history’s downward trajectory toward technological modernity and cultural decadence was a falling away from the world of Being into the world of contingency. Heidegger, however, regarded Evola’s essentially Platonic outlook as part of the decline itself, indeed as standing very close to its beginning.

For Heidegger, the Platonic distillation of Being as pure intelligibility and intellect as the capacity to intuit the intelligible is false because it is an abstraction that overlooks a more fundamental unity, a mutual belonging of historical man and meaningful worlds. For Heidegger, we are too close to things and to ourselves, too involved in them, to fully understand or control them. He believes that metaphysics posits both intelligible Being and a self-transparent intellect out of a drive for mastery. Thus the will to power that comes to fruition in global technological civilization is present at the very beginning of the metaphysical tradition.

Heidegger claims that we overlooked this fundamental unity because it, in effect, concealed itself. It is a historical event that cannot exist apart from man but nevertheless was not controlled by man either. The self-concealment of Beyng creates metaphysics. And metaphysics inaugurates the downward course of history, culminating in technological nihilism. Contra Evola, the beginning of decline is not a fall from metaphysics, but a fall into metaphysics.

In terms of the topic of Heidegger’s unpublished note, namely race, Evola’s objection to biological racism is that it is insufficiently metaphysical, overlooking “races of the soul” and “races of the spirit.” Heidegger, however, had a very different objection to biological race.

Throughout his philosophical career, Heidegger battled against false concepts of human nature. The common denominator of these false concepts is that they are universal. In the metaphysical tradition, the essence of man is what all men have in common. What reason tells us we all have in common is reason itself. Man is the rational animal.

The rational animal is not, however, a national animal. Because reason is one, humanity is one, so the human community should be one as well. Thus more particular attachments are illegitimate. If man is the rational animal, and reason grasps the universal, then reason is in effect a “view from nowhere” which can take us anywhere. The view from nowhere makes us citizens of everywhere. The rational animal is a citizen of the world; the cosmos is our polis; we have wings not roots.

Heidegger’s word for human nature, however, is Dasein, which means “being here/there.” Dasein is not a view from nowhere, but a view from somewhere. Dasein‘s outlook on the world is particular, not universal. It is particularized by space and time, and particularized by language and culture, which it shares with other Dasein in its community — but not with all of humanity. Heidegger is a philosopher of distinct identities, of the concrete, of the local, and of belonging, which is a mutual relationship: we belong to our world, and our world belongs to us. (The name of this concrete mutual belongingness is Ereignis.)

Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is inherently political. We are not the rational animal but the national animal, and nation is defined by a common history, language, culture, and destiny. The politics of Dasein is, therefore, ethnonationalism.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 06:41 | #

It is very apparent from this passage that Greg is in a formative phase of ordering his scholarship, orienting it to accommodate something of the most general Heideggerian outlook on Man, race, and history, and characterising it as political rather than psychological.  Thus that passage concludes:

Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is inherently political. We are not the rational animal but the national animal, and nation is defined by a common history, language, culture, and destiny. The politics of Dasein is, therefore, ethnonationalism.

Now, we can argue the meaning of Dasein, for Heidegger until we are blue in the face; and get nowhere.  You may never agree with me.  Greg, with his scholarly distance, almost certainly would not do so.  But for me, very plainly, it is subtle and psychological.  It is a thing: an object; not a subject.  It is not being as such but it is extremely close to it.  It is being there.  It is witness.  It is the condition or state of a consciousness (ideally, attentive) to, if I can be as precise as possible (for me, anyway), the momentary ... existent ... process.  This is not necessarily or only a beatific, cosmic sort of thing.  The key is that word attention.  Where the attention is, Dasein is; and for 99.9% of our ordinary waking lives that’s (completely unintentionally) in the state which Greg historicizes as contingency, and which I term absence in my ontological scheme.  (White Nationalists routinely use the term sleep to characterise a particular aspect of it in the West in our time.)

In other words, while Greg is attempting here to posit Heidegger in the grand sweep of nationalist historical critique ... to give him his place and, perhaps then, even to champion him and his ideas ... I am trying to purify nationalist thinking of such formative interests by gesturing towards the fundamentals of the ontology itself - what you would call “a close reading”.  Obviously, this is wildly unpopular!

I will just make one other brief comment on that passage I have lifted out of your quote.  It is important.

The grand politicality of the Heideggerian ontology is no more germaine than the religiousness of it.  Politics and (exoteric) religion, and culture too, are modes for taking thought, values, objectives and so forth out from one central place into the minds of men and women.  They have their day, but they are not where the Heideggerian revolution begins.  Rather, at all times the Heideggerian ontology has, as its concern, the concern of Dasein for being; that is, its qualitative attentiveness.  To effect historical change of this nature in the minds and, one would expect, lives of men and women ... peoples ... is to redeem them from the historical decline which, in their own ways, Evola and Heidegger identified; and to do it in the moment, now; without recourse to prescription of any kind.  For prescriptions, be they nationalist or traditionalist or religious, kill everything instantly and send us all back to hell - or, at least, in its direction.

The elusive mechanism that connects the psychology here to effects in the real world is identity.  Greg is wrong in his final sentence.  The politics, and everything else that pertains to Dasein, is not ethno-nationalism, with its broad contours and rough conclusions, but identitarianism.

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 14:41 | #

GW, I still haven’t addressed your comment # 24, but I need to address the subject matter of 26 first. So, first of all, I need to say that based on my reading of Heidegger, related study and life experience, I do agree with Greg in this statement:

Greg Johnson: Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is inherently political. We are not the rational animal but the national animal, and nation is defined by a common history, language, culture, and destiny. The politics of Dasein is, therefore, ethnonationalism.

Except that to make that more clear, he’d have to emphasize “midtdasein” (there being amidst the folk) as O’Meara had in conclusion.

In this passage, you say that Heidegger’s project is not concerned with the nation or the people but with the psychological:

GW: But for me, very plainly, it is subtle and psychological.  It is a thing: an object; not a subject.  It is not being as such but it is extremely close to it.  It is being there.  It is witness.  It is the condition or state of a consciousness (ideally, attentive) to, if I can be as precise as possible (for me, anyway), the momentary ... existent ... process.  This is not necessarily or only a beatific, cosmic sort of thing.  The key is that word attention. Where the attention is, Dasein is; and for 99.9% of our ordinary waking lives that’s (completely unintentionally) in the state which Greg historicizes as contingency, and which I term absence in my ontological scheme.

There is proximate truth in what you say. He will address these as problems and concerns indeed, but his orientation is not toward an ultimate aim in the proper psychological outlook, but rather a proper relation of knower to known.

The key to understanding Heidegger and all of western philosophy here is Aristotle (as opposed to Plato); an understanding which Heidegger certainly would have had in trying to correct errors in relation of the knower to known (even declining to call it an espistemological error as it would have traditionally been called as that would have been where the estrangement began - the quest for universal purity of thought and ideas); to instead carry forth the pursuit of knowledge and take it from its static monadic place in Platonic forms and Cartesian detachment (estrangement from social relation), and take its ultimate direction back into the knower’s means of knowing through Praxis - the social world - and the necessary delimitation of midtdasein (there being amidst the folk), to provide formal structure, i.e., Being (there being) to praxis as a concern amidst a folk - in that perspective, you can say that Heidegger, like you, is mostly concerned with the more speculative, metaphysical end of the process - recognizing its orientative necessity as well.

It is not that what you are saying is not true of Heidegger, that he was calling attention to a psychological perspective on authenticity, but the non-Caresian project is more than that. It is being thrown into a process and system of concerns. Heidegger was concerned not just with the proper psychology, but the place of the psychological perspective, concerned with the folk and the place of the folk, the place of Germany between “the pincers” of capitalism and communism as inauthentic ways; i.e., he certainly was concerned with politics - the broader context of Dasein that is Midtdasein (a term that Michael O’Meara called attention-to).

To focus only on the psychological perspective is to lose site of the hermeneutic process which is politically concerned with peoplehood indeed, the being of the folk.

Greg isn’t just imposing that on Heidegger. It is true.

What you say about psychology and ontology is largely true of Heidegger as well, and I hope that you can see that it is a part in a process of the broader correction of Western man’s relation of knower to known; accept that I paid a high price to know what I’ve known and thus have warrant to ask you to be satisfied that you have an important concern and do good work in attendance to a significant aspect of the Heideggarian project; but please understand that the psychological perspective is not all - come down from your anti-social perch where you understandably cling, white knuckle to one side of a process, in fixated vigil lest Jewish rhetoricians mess with one’s head - and share with us in this social and political project. I understand where you are coming from. Actually, I was much the same as you and yes, Heidegger is/was quite the same too in over emphasizing the end which is rigid and wary of the social involvement, very concerned that warranted assertability not continue to be trammeled in the hurly burly of the social and Jewish language games.

But on the other hand, one can err too far to the abstract objectivist end and be prone to manipulation there too with an absract psuedo social group ripe for bum steering: Since you mention the Identitarian example, I believe that tanstaafl probably has a point on the identitarian movement. I would add that identities more free floating in the metaphysical a la Evola, are more easily manipulated by the inauthentic Jewish rhetoric that he sees behind them and which you, as all WN, seek to avoid - i.e., identities are treated as valid which are ultimately anti-White (such as Generation Identitaire and their thing against “68ers” - almost certainly a Jewish concoction; as is Tommy Robinson and Pegida).

This blindness to Jewish ruses will continue so long as we take the anti-social identity, not only by identifying with the objectivist non structure of right-wingers but even by copping out of social accountability in the non structure, the non being of “neither right nor left.”

Inasmuch as tan would propose a “White winger instead”, I would consider that still an expression of right wingishness - In his case an attempt to cling to and conceal the anti-White social that is the inauthenticity of Hitler idolatry to White/European advocacy.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 11 Feb 2016 17:09 | #

Daniel,

Greg is calculatively historicising something called “Heidegger”, and is concerning himself and his readers with its place in the canon.  I am messing about up to my neck in being, and in its relation to the active subject, which I take to be the only practical application of “Heidegger”.  It is perfectly plain, not least by his division of thinking, that so did Heidegger.  His claim, btw, was that it was by thinking essentially in his cabin in the fastness of the Black Forest, that he actually generated Being & Time.  He did the practik!

Now, B&T was written as pure ontology, not for practik as he made very clear, because his authorial or intellectual purpose - not the same as his philosophical purpose - was to re-found the Western Canon to address the epistemological turn that Western thought had taken at least with Kant, which he regarded as an error.  So there is a perfectly legitimate question which Greg and others can answer, if they think it is worthwhile.  If they want to assert that “Heidegger” is political, or indeed Aristotelian, it matters not.  The practik remains perfectly untouched.  Being is not Aristotelian, and it is not political, nor is it anything but being, and addressing it for, ultimately, a political audience does not happen merely by making assertions of that nature.

In my very clumsy way, I am attempting to reach a practical application.  I do believe that this work would be recognised as such by Hiedegger himself, no doubt disapprovingly in many aspects (one being that he intensely disliked psychology); and it would be recognised by any intellectually competent exponent of Eastern and Middle-Eastern spiritual practise or philosophy.  I don’t think there is another person in English-speaking nationalism who is attempting this.  O’Meara came nowhere near it.  Equally, Greg shows no sign of doing so, or even talking about the possibility of doing so.  I don’t think either of them has a line into it, actually.  Obviously, you have concluded that the canon already holds rich layers of theorising upon which nationalism in one form or another can draw, and there is no logical necessity for such a tendentious, perhaps pretentious project.  You have made various criticisms of the heavy emphasis I place in my scribbles here upon consciousness of self and the lack thereof (for want of a better expression).  But you have not yet criticised it ontologically.

Of course there are other ways to go.  Any number of thinking nationalists can fashion any number of projects from the philosophical goods which populate the canon.  Why is this one in any way significant?  Well, because if the whole political-philosophical picture is “who-what-why”, yet I find that there is a mechanical relationship between the “who” and the “what-why” which is formative, even deterministic.  But ... the “I” in “I will” must ordinarily remain tethered to the current age and subject to the hostile historical and human forces acting, be it intentionally or blindly, within it.  Where is the agency for willed change?  So my concern in respect to politics, and to human action generally, is precisely that, in so far as is possible, the existential condition of freedom from the formative aspects Time and Place must attend the self before the power to re-make the world can be claimed and used.

The foundation of everything in the life of Man, and the font of change, is the free existent self.  Does being require form?  No, the being of a free man, and by extension of a free people (because the latter is an accretion or sum of the former) requires of itself to re-make the world in its own god-like image; and that alone will bring the dawn of a new and authentically European life and a new European age.  It is a better project than addressing the epistemological error.

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 12 Feb 2016 17:27 | #

Being is not Aristotelian and it is not political, nor is it anything but being, and addressing it for, ultimately, a political audience does not happen merely by making assertions of that nature

Heidegger’s framework in analysing Being as it would be authentic was based on Aristotle’s tri-partition (Theoria, Praxis, Poesis), wherein he sought to take the inauthentic relation (the non Being) of knower to known from the Cartesian detachment and examine it as it is thrown into the world of praxis - the being of which praxis is midtdasein - the historical circumstances of his time and place were such that the being of the folk (in his case German) was caught between the inauthnticities (Cartesian, universal, “the pincers”) of The Soviet Union and The U.S.A. 

Among interesting indications that he was using Aristotle’s framework to analyze Being as it would be corrected for a non-Cartesian relation of knower to known, thereby extending Aristotle’s project of looking at its changeable and organic nature in praxis that he begun to emphasis more in Nichomachean Ethics, was where Heidegger says that what we call “thinking” is more like poetry than science. That is, it is more like poesis than it is like scientific method in pursuit of theoria.

Posted by McCartheyism on Sun, 13 Mar 2016 14:50 | #

Posted by Marchin', Lootin', Killin' on Sun, 12 May 2019 08:59 | #

A Phone Call for Mayhem:
How JFK Caused the 1960s Race Riots
Morris V. de Camp, at Counter Currents:

Steven Levingston
Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights
New York: Hachette, 2017

To borrow from the wit of Edward Gibbon:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the white race in North America was most foolish and short sighted regarding managing the non-white races in their midst, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the second term of Eisenhower to the accession of Nixon.

The man at the center of this span is President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Kennedy was a wealthy son of privilege. His family played the “poor, oppressed Irish” bit to the hilt in their carefully marketed backstory,[1] but the Kennedys were hardly socially alienated or oppressed. JFK’s grandfather Patrick Joseph Kennedy was one of the delegates at the Democratic Party Convention who nominated President Grover Cleveland in 1888, and JFK’s maternal grandfather was Boston Mayor and Massachusetts Congressman John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. JFK grew up rubbing shoulders with Massachusetts’s WASP elite and attended elite schools.

JFK’s family was so rich that although Kennedy grew up in the 1930s, he didn’t know about the Great Depression until after he was taught about it in history class. As President, Kennedy surrounded himself with other Northeastern progressives. Many of them, like Sargent Shriver and Assistant Attorney General Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach, were descended from prominent men in the American Revolution. All of them laid the foundations for an ongoing Negro revolution in the United States, as well as a black African/Third World capture of the Democratic Party as represented by the likes of the Somali Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. (good liberals always give the man the full title) was from a racial minority, but he was in the top social rung of that minority. His father was a minister in a large black church. King got a Ph.D. in theology at Boston University, although it has since come to light that his doctoral work was plagiarized. Like Kennedy, King was also not beaten down or oppressed, but supported throughout his career by highly talented, highly sympathetic whites and Jews who covered for any mistakes he made.

How and why JFK and his team got involved with King and the “Civil Rights” Movement deserves study from the perspective of a Rightist white advocate. One book that sheds light on the man and his time – or at least attempts to shed light – is Steven Levingston’s Kennedy and King.

Reading between the lines

This book is something of a puff piece supporting a liberal Jew’s view of the “Civil Rights” revolution. The first 70 or so pages of the book contains sticky-sweet phrases like, “King’s rise to stardom had seemed meteoric, but his path through the racial thicket of America, like that of many blacks, had been one of fear and anguish – navigated by courage.”[2]

The thesis of the book is that King appealed – like Jiminy Cricket, but more Christ-like – to JFK’s conscience to get the various “Civil Rights” laws moving. Because of the artificial sweetener, this reviewer read the book from a detached, between-the-lines perspective. And the first thing that one sees is why Negro race riots and disorder began while Kennedy was president, progressively got worse, and then ended with Nixon’s election.

A single phone call by Kennedy set the fuse for a decade’s worth of black mayhem.

Before that call, though, one must look at the nature of the politics of the 1960 election. On the surface, the American political system was split at the time in a way that Oliver Cromwell and King Charles I would have understood. As a rule of thumb, the Republicans were Yankee Protestants in the North (Cromwell’s folks), and the Democrats were Southerners and Catholics, especially Irish Catholics (King Charles’ supporters). Black voters were usually Republicans, but the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal had peeled off many of them. In 1960, the black vote was up for grabs – and it mattered. If just enough blacks in the Northern cities went for Kennedy, states like Michigan or Illinois would flip into JFK’s column.

Levingston doesn’t go into the details of how the “Civil Rights” Movement developed prior to the 1960s. In fact, very few historians do. “Civil Rights” (i.e., black racial agitation) related to desegregation had become a serious movement by the early 1930s. King’s father had been involved in desegregation efforts as early as 1942. And newspapers carried opinion columns by the desegregationist activist and baseball star Jackie Robinson.

As a result of this activism and metapolitical efforts, “civil rights” became one of the main issues of the 1960 US Presidential Election, and Kinghad become one of the main leaders of the “Civil Rights” Movement after leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s. However, he failed to properly register his car with Georgia’s Department of Motor Vehicles, and was put on parole for the violation. After he was arrested while agitating, his parole was suspended and he was put in jail. The media went berserk, and the presidential candidates had to scramble for vote-getting and vote-keeping responses. The Nixon campaign didn’t comment on the situation at all. And after a series of angry arguments among his staff, Kennedy finally made a call to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, expressing concern. The call was carefully calculated to appease blacks and liberals, but also not to enrage the South. It worked, but Kennedy then had a debt of sorts to King and his movement. Black agitators called in this semi-debt to the fullest. And later in the decade, entire cities would burn.

The “Freedom Riders” crisis (May 1961)

King and the other leads of the “Civil Rights” Movement realized they now had a lever that could move the White House during the “Freedom Riders” crisis of May 1961. A group of Jews and blacks (I believe most of the “whites” involved were, in fact, Jewish) rode on some chartered buses to desegregate bus stops in the Deep South.[3] They wished to raise awareness of violations of Morgan v. Virginia and other court rulings, which ruled that bus stops couldn’t be segregated.[4]

The Freedom Riders stunt got a great deal of media coverage. Angry Southerners attacked the Freedom Riders, and a bus was burned. For white advocates, it was bad optics. The Kennedy administration had to step away from dealing with the Cold War to consult with King and local officials to calm matters.

King’s antics in the smaller cities of the Deep South (June 1961-August 1962)

After the Freedom Riders stunt petered out, King continued agitating across the South. He and his followers would descend upon small cities in Georgia or elsewhere and create a crisis. The tricks they used were not all that different from those of the other Green Marchers – which is to say, officially they were “non-violent,” but they would deliberately violate local laws, prompting a police and government response. The media would frame the affair as one of the police behaving badly. One of the tactics of these “non-violent” protesters was to get as many people arrested as possible to fill up the jails, causing a further crisis for the local government.

Whites reacted. Soon, there was a wave of Negro church burnings and other forms of white counter-agitation. Levingston doesn’t dive into the details of each individual church burning; many were undoubtedly insurance frauds or hate-hoaxes, but they did prompt much concern from the Kennedy administration. King:

. . . kept the pressure on the president. In a telegram to the White House, he raised the possibility of John Kennedy’s worst fear in the civil rights battle: blacks erupting into violence. Noting the attacks in the South, King said: “If Negroes are tempted to turn to retaliatory violence, we shall see a dark night of rioting all over the South.” King promised to discourage blacks from resorting to extreme measures, but he warned, “I fear my counsel will fall on deaf ears if the Federal Government does not take decisive action.”[5]

This veiled threat should have been followed up with a public return telegram explaining that the President would arrest King for rebellion and subversion if rioting broke out, but Kennedy instead half-heartedly intervened in favor of the “Civil Rights” demonstrators through back-channel calls to mayors, state governors, sheriffs, and others. As a result, Kennedy ceded moral authority to the blacks.

To put it in terms Carl von Clausewitz would approve, race riots are an extension of politics through other means. After Kennedy made his call to Coretta Scott King, black agitators knew that if they wished to get something out of the White House, all they had to do was create, or threaten to create, a riot. As long as there was someone in the White House who owed – or thought he owed – blacks a political debt, the temptation was always there for more and more black rioting.

Posted by Blonde in the Belly of the Beast on Fri, 12 Jul 2019 06:32 | #

Which Way, Westerners?

Articulates very well the Robert Putnam, ‘Bowling Alone’ argument against integrative multiculturalism. Unfortunately, she blames it on THE Left, but we know what that’s about by now..