On prescriptive ontologies – Part Two, Homo heroicas

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 28 December 2013 06:19.

Continuing my ramblings about motoring...

If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

I do not know the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche well, and have not read a single one of his published works from cover to cover for the best part of forty years. I do know there is a grand vision of human meaning and a narrow one of human freedom, and there is rampant purposivity as well as progressivism, and naturalism but also anti-Darwinism. There is anti-socialism, anti-militarism, anti-democratism, anti-statism in parts. There is much more than the vulgar moral framework of “god-killing” and “aristocratic radicalism”. For example, there is life affirmation. If someone asked me for an interpretation of the above quote, without telling me that it is from The Will to Power, I would say that it is about emotion in human presence and its positive perspective on the lost life that went before. Read in that way, the first and last thoughts, especially, are possessed of the same sublimity and make the same tangential approach to Truth as any metaphysical fragment in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. It is hard to believe that someone could write in that way without knowing everything. And yet, for most thinking nationalists he might as well have never conceived of more than the “higher man” and the teleology of greatness, the life lived for glory, the life of Homo heroicas.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Bowden enunciating what amounts to the default or, a least, dominant nationalist credo:

Now, what does Nietzsche believe? He believes that strength is moral glory. That courage is the highest form of morality. That life is hierarchical. That everything’s elitist. There’s a hierarchy in each individual. And a hierarchy in every group of individuals. There’s a hierarchy between groups of individuals. Inequality is what right-wing ideas really mean.

… Nietzsche believes that we test ourselves here now in relation to what’s going on before us. And the more primordial we are, the more we live in accordance with what we might become, the more we link with those concepts which are eternal and that exist outside us.

… Nietzsche’s philosophy isn’t for everybody. It’s too harsh and too forbidding for many people. But it is a way of thinking which is reflexive and absolute. It’s a way of thinking which is primordial and extraordinarily Western. It’s a way of thinking that enables people to be religious, in the sense of the sacredness of life, but also to be open to fact, and to evidence, and to science. It combines those things that lead to glory. And express themselves through tenderness and ferocity.

… Greatness is in the mind and in the fist. The glory of our tribe is not behind us. We can be great again.

Nietzsche himself called nationalism “small politics”. He had no use for the mass of ordinary people. He saw them not as a positive cause in themselves but as weak, resentful and reactive half-men upon whose being events and ideas and the will of others work out their destiny. Their slavishness began in their own submissive morality which made them incapable of action and creation … and of oppressing others. For Nietzsche, human worth is vested solely in a cultural and spiritual elite licensed by their self-authored moral code to behave as they will (which behaviour is necessarily “noble”, apparently). This elitism cleaves totally from Plato’s in that this class of higher men owe nothing to the mass of people – not example, not wise government in their name, not material progress, not liberation, not education and enlightenment, nothing. Any benefits which accrue for the masses out of actions of the higher men are incidental. Actively seeking to do good for the masses means accepting their resentments and moral judgements, and becoming like them.

Nietzsche was no more interested in Europe’s nations than he was in their peoples. He was a pan-European idealist. There is no reason to suppose that he would have found a globalist expansion problematic in principle. Of course, he never envisaged a world in which the living spaces of (non-Jewish) white peoples and only (non-Jewish) white peoples are being given over to racial and ethnic aliens. But his natural sympathy would likely have lain with the class of British-American and Zionist political, financial, and corporate elites whose creative act it is. For him, the radically free aristocrat is so invested with philosophical virtue, there is nothing left for kinship, common interest, love, belonging, and the people’s survival itself.

20th Century nationalism in the form of the fascisms endeavoured to resolve this dichotomy just enough to make it serviceable without extinguishing its philosophical fire. National Socialism, for example, adopted the Judaic model, shifting the definition of the master to the Herrenrasse, and the slave to the racial and sub-racial out-group. Thus defined and suitably equipped with police powers, tanks, guns, and labour camps, the heroes of the Schutzstaffel could model the radically free aristocrat all over occupied Europe and in the east.

In fairness, any strict expression of the Nietzschean ideal must channel a violent energy because, in Nietzsche, human relations are just too antagonised, the ordinary man too traduced. This state of affairs flows directly from the very foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, whereby he invests Nature with the agency excised from the corpse of the once omnipotent deity, and re-presents it as a life-force driving growth and expression of all kinds, and coursing through the instincts of Man. Further, all living organisms are not merely electrified with and brought into being by it. Existence is not enough for Nietzsche. Its essential interest, its destiny, is dominion. It is, therefore, a will to such, and the cause of all Man’s restless and conflicted dreams and struggle.

This is not Nature’s truth, of course. Nietzsche seems never to have read Darwin at source. He certainly did not apply evolutionary theory to his own thinking, or his entire thesis would have had to be extrapolated from resource competition and mate competition. The fundamental element would have been lost to survival and the transmission of traits for fitness. Propositionally, the will to power would have been subservient to the inherent interests of life and continuity, and the truth of human presence.

In the latter regard, there is an intriguing interpretation of what Nietzsche has done in his eagerness to declare the death of God and liberation from His moral commands. With uncanny precision, he has imitated the things of the ontological transit and extemporised them in his moral drama. Nietzschean morality operates as a proxy for consciousness. The master and the slave are somewhat florid proxies for human presence and absence. The moral decision (sometimes called reason) which characterises the master is a proxy for the agency which characterises presence. The moral determinism which explains slavery is a proxy for the mechanicity which operates in the condition of absence (or ordinary waking consciousness). Likewise, the master’s moral disdain for the slave is a proxy for the present man’s emergence from the dulling immersion and fracture of the other life. Nietzsche’s warning that the master who internalises slave morality through concern for the slave’s condition is a proxy for the inevitable return to that life - a return which commences precisely with re-immersion in the objects of its attention.

By this schematic shift Nietzsche effectively makes the ordinary man responsible for the nature and quality of consciousness when, in fact, the nature and quality of ordinary waking consciousness is responsible for the lived life of men – all of them, aristocrats and commoners alike. One is bound to ask, therefore, what human value uncaring elitism and assumed nobility actually serves, even for the elites. In The Will to Power Nietzsche provides an objective answer:

The destiny of humanity depends upon the attainment of the highest type.

A group laying claim to be “the highest type” arises in every society. In tribal societies and in traditional rural communities the elites arise simply and naturally, and with general consent, as the village elders. But in societies organised around some confected principle – democracy or honour, say - this simplicity falls away, and elements of cronyism, corruption, and parasitism set in. So in monarchical societies we find that the elites are the barony. In religious societies the elites are the priesthood. In militaristic societies the elites are the officer corps. In police states the elites are the secret police. In capitalist societies the elites are the bankers. In Nietzschean-inspired nationalism the elites are the Schutzstaffel. In a future Noahide world the elites are the Jews.

Village elders excepted, the reality of elitism is invariably one of the “denial of life” and “disintegration and decay” - nihilism really - which Nietzsche seeks to remedy. I return to that opening quote; ‘If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient …’ If you took Homo heroicas and multiplied his heroism, his glorious culture and spirituality, and the degree of his noble superiority over the lumpen proles a thousand-fold, yet you would not have a tenth of one inch advance in the genetic interests of the people. Inequality is not what “right-wing” ideas are about. The affirmations of consciousness are what right-wing ideas are truly about. Had that been understood in the nationalist past, the Schutzstaffel would have been teachers, not soldiers. Were it understood today, thinking nationalists would know that heroism cannot be prescribed, but lies in the people like water in the rocks, just like intelligence and ethnocentrism. And they would know too that not “the destiny of humanity” but the freedom to be and the freedom in being are what truly gild the lived life and lead men to self-knowledge, good instincts, good choices, and to destin ineluctably for their people, each and every one of them.

Tags: Political Philosophy, The Ontology Project, White Nationalism

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Sat, 28 Dec 2013 09:49 | #

I’m not sure how inventive or worthwhile this comment will be, but I appreciate the view of “the right” taken by GW in this post as it corresponds with the idea of “the right” that I have taken - which is that it is as an illusion, that is to say, illusory as permanence independent of natural and social pattern. However, GW is adding here that it is at the same time very real as a moment of vivifying presence and instructive truth in guidance of agency. Therefore, while it cannot be possessed it can be repeated, taught and learned at least by some who may thereby avoid being swallowed in determinism as that typically represents a convenient excuse for the masses (also, as GW points out. I.e., it is not only the right that uses this excuse as I have previously noted they do). “The right” in this view, are thereby those coming into the the responsibility of a moment where operational verification and agentive choice is possible to guide the essential ecological pattern as it should be.

Yet, we do not seek, as a policy, to kill people who are not in that moment (as they may, in fact, be a necessary part of the overall relations and ecological process) but we do separate from them and allow them to die rather than assimilate their ways if they will not be edified as to the truth of our pattern which we uphold; and as they persist in transgression.

“Inequality is not what “right-wing” ideas are about. The affirmations of consciousness are what right-wing ideas are truly about.”

This corresponds to how I like to think about the right-wing, that is, it is an illusion of permanent, well, if not superiority, then permanent transcendence of the patterns of nature and social connection. But here as GW wonderfully describes it is a vivifying moment experienced and instructive to the ways of truth and agency, potentially instructive, as well, to the populous (the broad social pattern encompassed by a necessary semi-fiction at the other end of consciousness, the classification of “the left”). Therefore, potentially instructive to those worthwhile people who may be tragically caught in the darkness of the pattern.

Thus, it is not something to quantify from the ecological system, but to serve as systemic orientation. It does not excuse and allow for reconstruction with determinist explanations the ignoble behavior of the masses, but sees the moment of elucidating agency, the presence by which we may responsibly guide (our) ecological patterns

Posted by Bill on Sat, 28 Dec 2013 11:49 | #

To most ordinary folk liberalism in its present form is brand new, straight off the political assembly line, folk to begin with treated it as a curiosity or even as a joke.

Political correctness in its earlier guise caused great mirth among the British public. One Daily Mail columnist has built a whole celebrity persona around the perceived ridicule of political correctness. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad’ went the mantra.

This was barely ten years ago in Britain, and now those same folk who used to crease with laughter, do so so no more, they feel the noose of liberal intolerance tightening around their neck and are viewing their future with great trepidation.

Jonathan Bowden espouses this state of affairs is due to lack of belief in anything, (or people believe in nothing) but I feel he never explained to ordinary folk audiences as to why and who was responsible for anything. If you don’t know the reason why in politics, then you’re never going to know who is responsible. I always felt that Jonathan Bowden knew only too well what his boundaries of permissive discourse were, and this proved very restricting in spreading the message.

Of course he talked about this phenomena in this very speech, politically correct liberalism has no need for razor wire fences and gulags to persuade the masses to toe the correctly perceived path.

Does JB’S recipe for nationalist salvation have credence? The answer to that question could run into 100’s of comments, for myself, it sounds too simplistic, as JB’s ideas take no account of what something New Ager’s define as today’s expanded human consciousness.

Expanded human consciousness. Does it exist? Has evolution in the form of liberalism engineered a new improved enlightened man?

Does anyone think like me, that Jonathan Bowden’s demise was all a bit ‘erm, - strange?

Posted by Desmond Jones on Mon, 30 Dec 2013 08:28 | #

An intelligent fellow once wrote that Nature both cleaves and conflicts. And since humans are part of that natural order we may safely assume the same role for human groups. Therefore even elitism must fall on some continuum between self-interest and altruism. How do we evaluate the efforts of the Knights Templar, the alleged model for the SS? Calling elitism exclusively uncaring is like an accountant with a single ledger entry…all debits no credits.

It is also disputed, within the gene-centric view of evolution, that ‘groups’ arise fully formed. It appears more likely that accomplished individuals seek to further their interests by cleaving to others of like interest in order to form a group. Laws are formed determining behavior with the hope of achieving a goal not necessarily in conflict with group genetic interests. And thus acts of heroism, re-enforced by affirmation, may advance genetic interest even though short lived. And yes simplicity does fall away because, fundamentally, acquired traits are not inherited.

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:02 | #

Age of Treason Radio
Yockey on Culture and Race – Part 5
Audio 19 August 2014

Darwin_Ape

ge-of-treason.com/2014/08/19/yockey-on-culture-and-race-part-5/

“A hallmark of Yockey’s world-view is his anthropomorphization of concepts and abstractions. He spoke of them as if they were Greek Titans, with thoughts and goals of their own, distinct and set in opposition to one another.

At the root of it all Yockey saw two titanic ideas. From Imperium, page 115:

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men.

But the greatest opposition of all has not yet been named, the conflict which will take up all the others into itself. This is the battle of the Idea of the Unity of the West against the nationalism of the 19th century. Here stand opposed the ideas of Empire and petty-stateism, large-space thinking and political provincialism.

Yockey’s Ideas are not ideas, but have agency and causality. His intangible immaterial mystical philosophizing is “organic”, while man and his rationalism is “inorganic”.

Yockey’s twisting of the meanings of words goes beyond poetic license, beyond an honest attempt to describe the indescribable. He verges into mysticism, detached from reality and facts, and in some cases to the contrary.

Nationalism and racialism are related, connected, complementary. Not opposites.

As Northside commented previously:

Yockey exalts telos (ultimate purpose or state) in his cosmology, constructing his envisioned universe such that an “organic” causal life force (existential source or basis of existence) operates unilaterally upon the mean, “inorganic” stuff of observable experience, which he debases.

Do ideas drive men, or do men drive ideas? The truth, I think, is not one or the other but both. Yockey arrogated telos (and causality, agency) to Ideas, while denying it to people. But Yockey himself was a man driven by ideas, to promote his ideas.

What constitutes organic? The organic is the inorganic plus something else. Yockey might have described this something as Ideas. I say the something is consciousness, awareness, agency. Consciousness is what distinguishes human life from inhuman, not to mention non-life, the inorganic.

Returning to Yockey’s critique of Darwinism, page 69:

The human soul itself — known as the “brain” in the 19th century — is only a tool by which a certain type of monkey advanced himself to man ahead of his fellow-monkeys. Teleology again: man became man in order that he might be man.

Yockey, like many critics of Darwinism, was apparently disturbed by the fact that man and monkey are biologically related, distant cousins. Similar like apples and oranges, the difference is consciousness – communication, coordination, history, culture.

It is understandable that Englishmen were the primary “social Darwinists”. Instrumental in deciphering the mechanics of life, of evolution, they naturally envisioned themselves as the result, the pinnacle of the process. This is more anthropic principle than anthropomorphism.

As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts. Nor is it important to refute it as a picture of the world, since as such it no longer influences any but day-before-yesterday thinkers. However, as a picture of the facts, it is grotesque, from its first assumptions to its last conclusions.

Yockey’s argument is even more applicable to his own faith in Ideas. Darwinism is based on science, a system farther from faith and closer to fact than any other man has yet devised.

In the first place, there is no “Struggle for existence” in nature; this old Malthusian idea merely projected Capitalism on to the animal world. Such struggles for existence as do occur

are the exception; the rule in Nature is abundance. There are plenty of plants for the herbivores to eat, and there are plenty of herbivores for the carnivores to eat. Between the latter there can hardly be said to be “struggle,” since only the carnivore is spiritually equipped for war.

The capitalistic mentality, engaged in a competition to get rich, quite naturally pictured the animal-world also as engaged in an intensive economic contest. Both Malthusianism and Darwinism are thus capitalistic outlooks, in that they place economics in the center of Life, and regard it as the meaning of Life.

Yockey anthropomorphized capitalism, though it is defined and driven by men. It does not have an existence or will of its own. Such things are constrained and shaped by the same forces, the same reality as the life from which it springs.

The “struggle for existence” is only a conscious struggle in man, who naturally projects his own awareness onto the unaware. Yockey does it himself when he imagines carnivores “spiritually equipped for war”.

The competition in nature is over limited resources. The rule in nature is feast and famine. The rabbits boom, then the coyotes boom, then the rabbits crash, and then the coyotes crash. Darwinism is an observation of the rules of the reality of life. Not just how the environment shapes and molds life, but also how various forms of life shape each other. This involves not only competition/predation, but also cooperation/symbiosis.

Natural selection was the name given to the process by which the “unfit” died out to give place to the “fit.”

Fitness, in evolution, is not a moral or aesthetic value judgement. It is an objective metric: survival. Life fits its environment like clothes fit a body.

I suspect that Yockey’s lame arguments against Darwinism were based on by his misunderstanding and thus revulsion toward “survival of the fittest”. He was perhaps unwilling to face the fact that the jews have out-competed Whites, rule us, and are slowly killing us. The problem, as I see it, is not with Darwinism, or rationalism, or any philosophical clash, but the simple fact that Whites, relative to jews, are not conscious.”