On Sibelius and Heidegger

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 22 June 2017 09:02.

Sibelius in his study at Ainola, the house he named after his wife.

Heidegger and his hut in Todtnauberg, Black Forest.

A long time ago, when I was a young man trying then, as now, to figure it all out, I happened to hear a broadcast of a piece of music which changed my musical awareness completely, putting my youthful enthusiasm for prog into context and introducing me to the practise of actually thinking about the sound I was hearing, and the ideas in it, rather than just consuming its vitality whole, like a delicious fruit. That piece of music was the 7th Symphony in C Major by the Finnish composer and nationalist Jean Sibelius:

A performance by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted in1966 by Lorin Maazel – one Jewish conductor who continued to perform works by Sibelius despite attacks from the proponents of atonality. I prefer the classicism and close attention to detail of the Colin Davis/Boston Symphony Orchestra recording from 1975, which I owned at the time, and which got everything about right, to my ear. But that’s not on YouTube, I regret to say.

The 7th Symphony is a gift to any philosophically-minded person, comprising, as it does, an intimate, poetic journey of a life from birth to death concentrated in a single movement of some 20 to 22 minutes duration. For what was essentially an orchestral shake down of the piece in 1924 Sibelius described it as a symphonic fantasy. But, musically, it was always a life-commentary of unsurpassed seriousness, and no fantasy at all. The motifs of the music are the motifs of your and my life. While there is a nod to a three-movement structure in the build-ups to the thrice-repeated, climactic teloi on the horns, the unbroken singularity of the subject matter required a matching compositional logic. Accordingly, the thematic elements and changing tempi flow uninterrupted and ever onward, truth on truth, to an appointment with the horns of crushing weight and finality, before the strings pick up again for the transition to an insistent, indeed strengthening B major, somehow going on, even now as darkness closes in. That total fidelity to the light is Heidegger’s not-yet, the plea of existence itself, finishing (maybe, or maybe not, as religious hope) in a perfect cadence on C major. And then that, too, at the peak of its agony of knowing, is cut down by the final wave of the baton.

This sense of life’s tenacity lost to finitude extends into the silence which follows, as if Sibelius composed that too. In contrast, the familiar soundscapes of a bare, grey Sibelian rock and freezing Sibelian forests, which once gestured to the eternal – for they were always too sheer for simple melancholy - now seem self-indulgent. There is no tone poetry for this.

Sibelius was not always possessed of such a refined existential sense. He broached the subject of death symphonically much earlier and much more figuratively, when he began sketching the 2nd movement of his 2nd Symphony in D major, while staying at Rapallo in Italy during the winter of 1901. The wiki notes to the symphony record that he wrote:

“Don Juan. I was sitting in the dark in my castle when a stranger entered. I asked who he could be again and again — but there was no answer. I tried to make him laugh but he remained silent. At last the stranger began to sing — then Don Juan knew who it was. It was death.”[12] On the same piece of paper, he wrote the bassoon theme for the first part of the second movement, out of which a pizzicatoed string “walking bass” stems.

Fortunately, such conventional, stagey thinking was no longer in evidence when, a little over a dozen years later, he began conceiving what would become the 7th Symphony. It was a torturous process lasting ten years in all, during which he struggled with depression and alcoholism. “People do not understand what it cost me,” he said later. Even so, other major pieces flowed out of him. His 5th Symphony in E-flat major and his musicologically enigmatic 6th in D minor were both begun after the 7th but published in 1919 and 1923 respectively. The now re-titled 7th was finally published in 1925. Of major works only the elemental Tapiola was published later, in 1926. Some sketches were written for an 8th Symphony, which may have included a choral movement à la Beethoven’s 9th. A copyist transcribed twenty-three pages of the score, which were tried out orchestrally. But the composing was difficult, and eventually it ceased as Sibelius gave way to his personal demons.

Today, the silence spanning the three decades to his death early in 1957, at the age of 91, is regarded as the most profound in the history of Western music. The truth is that Sibelius could not, rather than would not, create. It is thought that he burnt the sketches for the 8th symphony. His wife Aino reported that, “In the nineteen-forties there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the ‘Karelia Suite’ were destroyed. I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out, and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw onto the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood.”

There is no shortage of composers who, during this period of history, strove after the new in one form or another, prime among them Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Gershwin, Richard Strauss. It seems that creativity absolutely had to be assertive in the historiographical sense ... had to break the bounds and point to some new plane of Zarathustran existence hitherto missed by everybody. Sibelius was not at all immune to thinking afresh about orchestration. He was no hidebound reactionary. But existence just would not let go of his mind long enough for him to give himself over to the limits of scale of social thinking or to the revolutionary dynamics which infused and satisfied his musical contemporaries. It wasn’t that he ever sat down and said, “So now I will present these victims of fashion with the very earth of our being.” It is just an unavoidable consequence of existential concern that by its fidelity to the solid and present it offends against all those who look for human meaning somewhere else, not infrequently to what does not and cannot exist at all.

In this truthful endeavour Sibelius was not alone. Martin Heidegger began writing what, arguably, would be the most influential philosophical work of the 20th century in 1923, when he became an associate professor in Marburg. It was four years before he was ready to publish. His aim in Being and Time was no less than to re-found Western thinking on the meaning of the being of human being, to correct what he saw as an historiographical error of vast import, reaching back to the Greeks.

The very nature of Being and Time, with its novel conceptual language and its entirely deliberate challenge to attend and not just read, renders its interpretation particularly open to personalisation by the reader (which is hardly avoidable anyway). But it presumes for the solid in us, for the singular and the foundational, all of which is, by its truth, the truth of each of us and, so, knowable to each. For it needs to be said to every nationalist approaching Heidegger with doubts about his value to our politics, that while we necessarily exist and perceive as individuals nevertheless we only do so nature to nature. Ours is a being disclosed not only in its being with other beings, but in its ownself’s relationship of kind … of a given, distinct pattern or line; and, further, a being which is most at one, most beautious and fitted when it is … in … kind.

These essential distinctions install Heidegger into our foundational thinking as nationalists with a force and propriety that I, for one, believe to have been missing. Certainly, Being and Time does not synthesise so directly, and with good reason. For, without these new distinctions, we are left with a problem of generalising insights into the life and experience of the individual to the life and experience of the group. It is a problem which is more than one of scale. Relation must be specified and, more than that, qualified, or one ends up like Greg Johnson implying meanings taken from Heidegger’s vaunted Swabianism and Germanism to justify our nationalist ends, which is simply not good enough.

It is also true that Sibelius left us with the same problem. He was the incomparable example of an artist whose output straddled, on the one hand, a nationalism that was now turbulent with struggle, now pacific with fealty:

… together with a profound love of the land:

… and, on the other, this intimate focus on the personal drama of life and death. I doubt if it ever occurred to him to even attempt to draw together these separate foci. But then it doubtless never occurred to him that his people and his race could ever arrive at the point of obliteration which awaits us a few generations hence today.

That aside, there are Heideggerian observations one might easily ascribe to Sibelius. Sorge … concern … interest runs rather obviously through his earlier more nationalist output, nowhere more so than in the love and belonging, even reverence, of the Finlandia hymn. But it is also configured quite literally in the 7th Symphony as the long and vicissitudinous journey to C major. There is nothing from first to last that is not care-ing.

Further, as I have already intimated, there is a refinement in accessibility of Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode ... “being towards death” in life. In Being and Time Heidegger is at pains to establish the distinction between the physiological or biological, medical concept of exitus with that of the ending of the possibility of “being-there”. But Sibelius brings death to Heidegger’s condition of “not-yet”, and shows its habitual, essential assertiveness of life even at the point of physical extinction. Sibelius’s final C major of the 7th IS the pure, concentrated voice of “being-there”. Its singularity and constancy – a driving, life-long note of resistance – constitutes an agonistic beseeching of life’s fate in death. That this is the ownmost characteristic of “being-there” is, I hold, the principal purport of the piece.

It contrasts and connects to the D major of the finale of the 5th Symphony, which is also arrived at (indeed, twice) after a period of perturbation and uncertainty. Likewise, that leads us in to the famously uplifting and life-affirming, swooping horn motif in triple time, taken - as every Sibelius buff knows - from the calls of a flight of sixteen swans which the composer once observed above his house in the countryside north of Helsinki.

From an existentialist standpoint, the 5th is Sibelius’s broadest symphonic study, taking as its subject not, I would say, any aspect of the casual human existence, and not human being as such, but the consonance of all that subsists in Nature, including Man, and all that is of Nature in Man – also a constant in our existence.

Sibelius’s 5th Symphony performed by from the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the authentic Sibelian Vladimir Ashkenazi.

But there is also a third common element, a third prompt in the life of absence. It can be heard first, I think, in the finale of the 2nd Symphony, holding fast in a sea of vicissitude and rising out of resolution to stand yet more resolute and in the light. It is a moment of self-realisation and possession ... cognitively speaking, an authentic and authenticising event:

Sibelius’s 2nd Symphony performed beautifully by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

The 2nd Symphony, although popularly linked with the struggle against rule by Tsarist Russia, and dubbed “the Symphony of Independence”, was described by Sibelius as “a confession of the soul”. So perhaps he did achieve a synthesis of sorts.

There was a further commonality between Sibelius and Heidegger, although not one inherent to Sibelius’s musical oeuvre. But, it, too, has a certain eternal quality, and it was the enmity of the inimitable Semitic critic Theodore Adorno:

In a certain respect, his is the only ‘subversive’ music today. Yet not in a sense of destroying the undesirable status quo, but rather that of the Calibanian destruction of all the musical results of control over nature, which humanity bought dearly enough through the use of the tempered scale. If Sibelius is good, then the musical criteria that have been applied from Bach to Schoenberg – the wealth of relationships, articulation, unity within diversity, plurality within the singular - are invalid. All of that is betrayed by Sibelius to a nature that is not even nature, but rather the shabby photograph of the parental home.”

That racist schtick was written in 1938 in Adorno’s column “Besprechung” of the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. The journal was published, inevitably, by the Institut für Sozialforschung. He also described Sibelius as no better than a “scribbler” who is “at the level of amateurs who are afraid to take lessons in composition”. A decade and a half later at a Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music he was still at it, citing Sibelius as a “dangerous example”.

Adorno was not alone in his perfectly vicious desire to assure us Europeans that our expressions of national feeling are treif. On the occasion of Sibelius’s 90th birthday the pianist and composer René Leibowitz took the opportunity to deliver himself of the ungracious opinion, “Sibelius, the worst composer in the world.” Leibowitz was an influential proponent of Schoenberg’s lifeless atonality and the Second Viennese School which functioned as a cultural amplifier.

Sibelius’s crime was not simply to be revered by Finns as a national hero (he was, for example, commissioned to write a fifth symphony by the Finnish government in honour of his 50th birthday, which had been declared a national holiday). Neither was his crime to be loved, too, in Britain and America for the glories of his music. It was to be an exponent of, and contributor to, a broad cultural philosophy of the European mind. It was to direct the eyes and ears of those audiences not over Gustav Mahler’s bridge to Schoenberg’s junk but to an affirming and whole musical and cultural life. It was to model an emotionally conservative but intellectually modern musical counter-revolution which European audiences actually embraced (except in Germany, thanks to Adorno), and thereby to expose the sterility and emptiness of the Jewish revolutionary project of atonality.

A renewed artistic and cultural flowering is as much nationalism’s true and diverse work as political, economic, and social renewal; for all are part of a sovereign and free European life. We are blessed to have Jean Sibelius, as well as the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and too, I think, Richard Strauss, among others, to guide us. But of these Sibelius is the greatest.

Tags: Music, The Ontology Project

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 11:24 | #

His aim in Being and Time was no less than to re-found Western thinking on the meaning of the being of human being, to correct what he saw as an historiographical error of vast import, reaching back to the Greeks.

Yes, that would be true, however, when you say…

The very nature of Being and Time, with its novel conceptual language and its entirely deliberate challenge to attend and not just read, renders its interpretation particularly open to personalisation by the reader (which is hardly avoidable anyway). But it presumes for the solid in us, for the singular and the foundational, all of which is, by its truth, the truth of each of us and, so, knowable to each. For it needs to be said to every nationalist approaching Heidegger with doubts about his value to our politics, that while we necessarily exist and perceive as individuals nevertheless we only do so nature to nature. Ours is a being disclosed not only in its being with other beings, but in its ownself’s relationship of kind … of a certain, distinct pattern or line; and, further, a being which is most at one, most beautious and fitted when it is … in … kind.

These essential distinctions install Heidegger into our foundational thinking as nationalists with a force and propriety that I, for one, believe to have been missing. Certainly, Being and Time does not synthesise so directly, and with good reason. For, without these new distinctions, we are left with a problem of generalising insights into the life and experience of the individual to the life and experience of the group.

You are misunderstanding the fundamental error set forth by the Greeks that Aristotle began to correct and a correction that Heidegger sought to advance: which was to take philosophical inquiry away from Formalistic/Cartesian detachment in foundational theoria, which took us away from natural and authentic “sociological” concerns and perspective; and he sought to correct that epsitemological blunder by centering the perspective of our inquiry instead, properly in the realm of Praxis - which is not a psychological perspective, a merely individual perspective, or even a merely “natural perspective” -

Heidegger wanted to give a close reading of praxis, to be sure, its authentic expression - he understood where praxis could be taken by charlatans. To help people overcome the chicanery that might lead them to inauthenticity and destruction of the folk, it was also necessary to overcome the rigidity of the historical, epistemological blunder that is Cartesianism, as it left them blind to proper orientation (of “group” patterns for one key example, as Locke was blind to group classifications - conveniently, for the Aristocratic abuse of the concept - and even prescribed this blindness in individual rights) and left them susceptible, estranged. Thus, to bring them to their systemic senses, he observed that thinking was more like poetry than science - it is more an organic meandering than a rigid calculation in its onset and in the intelligent aspects of its process. I suspect that is why music helped you gain some insight into Heidgger; it makes perfect sense.

Now then, regarding your conviction that people should, as individuals, pursue their pure nature and that will guarantee our racial survival - “nature to nature” as you say, I don’t believe that Heidegger would say anything so foolish; and if he did, then that would be foolish advice. The pursuit of our individual natural interests argument by itself will not suffice - it could easily be argued by miscegenators and their proponents that they are resonating with patterns that were torn asunder not all that long ago in evolutionary terms. It can easily be taken advantage of by the machinations of our enemies and those antagonistic ...to facilitate those indifferent to our peoplehood, who would advance their “authentic nature” at the expense of our peoplehood. To have a peoplehood, to defend it, and to enculturate our nature so that it is not weaponized against us, requires not pure naturalist thinking (that won’t suffice), it requires an undertanding of the importance of taking our peoplehood into praxis, as opposed to the scientism of the natural fallacy.

GW, your aversion the group unit of analysis is a reactionary habit to Jewish Leftism and its imposition of liberal transgression of group interests as European peoples. That doesn’t make the group unit of analysis, or even sociology, “bad”, it means the concept was used against us and we should by response use these conceptual tools in our interests where these tools are necessary.

Close readings are more than welcome. Attention to individualism, fine. But when you say that Heidegger set-about to “re-found Western thinking on the meaning of the being of human being”, you’ve got it only a little bit right - he wanted to found philosophy on a human basis, but he was not setting about to found it rigidly in the scientism of individual psychology, but rather in the nature of praxis - humans in relation; this attention to praxis is necessary (as Aristotle observed) for our biologically interactive, agentive capacity as humans, a proper orientation, concerned mostly for ourselves and our human relations; and it is probably due to the potential for inauthenticity through that natural capacity that Heidegger focused attention - at that time correctly, as the group was still largely intact - on emergent being.

But we are now even more under attack in our peoplehood - as a race and as native nationalists - thus, the default position of that defense requires to be group interaction; it is abundantly clear that our nature, dumb of any historical and group systemic insight, will not serve very well to uphold our peoplehood nor will it well serve the ecology of peoples in the world.

Heidegger was a hermeneuticist. He would no longer be stuck forever in the group unit of analysis than I would. He would give close readings and encourage them to be sure, as I would; close readings provide crucial corrections. But so does broad orientation on patterns. He would also take a broad, “sociological” perspective where that emerged relevant, e.g., when he said, “we are stuck between the pincers” (of The United States and Russia). You can say he was talking about authenticity, yes, but he was talking in the interest of the authentic group systemic process which would sustain his nation and its authentic peoplehood.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 13:06 | #

Intellectuals performing their hermeneutic dances over texts or whatever are all very fine, but that is not the same as peoples living a free life. You make the mistake - almost religiously, I would say - of confusing revolutionary method with revolutionary end. The revolutionary end is the free life which must be, and the free life which must be is the life which emerges from foundation, when all unnaturalness is lifted away. It is not, in itself, arrived at by intellectuals dancing. There is not much that need be taught free peoples about their own act of living. The dance, therefore, is restricted to the what and how of the lifting.

Speaking for myself, I am content to examine the structure of the free people (which I take to be an issue of identity, Mind, and consciousness). For some reason this makes you feel personally neglected, when it should be obvious that at this point I am neglecting all or most of the “lifting” element.

So for example, in the Spectator today Rod Liddle has a scorching article about the multicult in London and the deceits of those who act as apologists for it:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/if-youre-not-tired-of-london-youre-tired-of-life/#

It is as good a take-down as I have seen from anyone in the mainstream media. But, of course, it doesn’t propose change as such, because that’s too challenging for a journo. That’s work for a thinking nationalist. That’s where you come in. What’s the problem?

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 16:46 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:06 | #

Intellectuals performing their hermeneutic dances over texts or whatever are all very fine,

Unfortunately, I can’t be the least bit surprised that an ad hominum attack was forthcoming - “an intellectual dancer.”

But while we are being Heideggerian, he did say that “common sense was the refrain of the intellectually jealous” and “psychology is the science of revenge”... you go on..

but that is not the same as peoples living a free life.

Heidegger was not a Thatcherite. Even Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus set Thatcherism in motion would not see in this “freedom” quite the singular answer to our problems that you do - he would speak of “ways of life.”

Heidegger was not only concerned for authentic individualism, he was concerned for his people - when they were “caught between the pincers” (of America and Russia), he was speaking of the existential crisis, the death threat to his peoplehood.

You make the mistake - almost religiously, I would say - of confusing revolutionary method with revolutionary end.

Absolutely not. That is you being stuck in your Thatcherite perspective, a prescribed Jewish solution to reaction to “the (Jewish) lefties.”

Because you so desperately want to maintain the (very limited) utility of that perspective, you absurdly project upon me the same Red Leftist, “revolutionary” perspective - as if I have no regard for emergence, being and native nation - maintaining it - maintaining its systemic homeostasis, quite the opposite of the kind of “revolution” that you “almost religously” project upon me.

The revolutionary end is the free life which must be, and the free life which must be is the life which emerges from foundation, when all unnaturalness is lifted away.

We’ve answered this nonsense already. A child does not raise itself, by its sheer nature, learn history and systemic responsibility, etc, outside of a people and culture.

It is not, in itself, arrived at by intellectuals dancing.

This is not intellectual dancing. This correcting of epistemic premise is a serious matter. You’ve got it wrong and you distract from my corrections with your Thatcherite contentiousness.

There is not much that need be taught free peoples about their own act of living. The dance, therefore, is restricted to the what and how of the lifting.

Heremenutics is not a dance. Heidegger was not doing a dance. I am not doing a dance. I am surveying our situation, seeing our needs and taking to heart what we need to serve those needs.

Speaking for myself, I am content to examine the structure of the free people (which I take to be an issue of identity, Mind, and consciousness).

“The structure of a free people.” It seems Bowery is dominating you along with Hayek, that the idea that your freedom of itself is THE primary issue and all else will fall into place from there. Having painted yourself into a Thatcherite corner of ‘no such thing as society’, you’ve added pos hoc “the structure of” free peoples. As I imagine identity is to be added post hoc to emergent mind and consciousness.

For some reason this makes you feel personally neglected,

No, it makes me realize that I am having to work around someone who doesn’t want to understand the issues at hand, how they have been mishandled and what are the correctives.

when it should be obvious that at this point I am neglecting all or most of the “lifting” element.

That’s because you seem to think a child will raise itself.

So for example, in the Spectator today Rod Liddle has a scorching article about the multicult in London and the deceits of those who act as apologists for it:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/if-youre-not-tired-of-london-youre-tired-of-life/#

It is as good a take-down as I have seen from anyone in the mainstream media. But, of course, it doesn’t propose change as such, because that’s too challenging for a journo. That’s work for a thinking nationalist. That’s where you come in. What’s the problem?

You so much want to see yourself as the uniquely profound philosopher in your Thatcherism, and me in some subservient role. You refuse to understand that what I am talking about is mostly more important (philosophically) than most of what you are talking about in the conclusions you infer of your “ontology project.”

So, the fundamental problem is that you want to place yourself uniquely at a philosophically epistemic level and you commit epistemic error; and you literally fight, invariably, the better the idea the more you will fight in knee jerk reaction, the profoundly necessary corrections to that epistemological blunder.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 22:06 | #

We’ve answered this nonsense already. A child does not raise itself, by its sheer nature, learn history and systemic responsibility, etc, outside of a people and culture.

As a rule I do not engage with your “representations” because I do not wish to, for collegiate reasons I have explained often enough. I understand that you prefer not to engage with the totality of the model I have presented. It’s much less complicated to deal with a Roussea-esque vision of Man, even if it does not actually exist.

I also understand that, ultimately, you have to defend your espousal of a unifying “white left” in opposition to an individualising “right wing” populated by Cartesians and Wittgensteinians. As well, of course, you have to defend the certain destiny of wise Aristotelians to boss everyone about. I can’t speak for the readiness of the masses on the continent to submit to their hermeneutic betters. But pulling a stunt like that in Britain would be a pretty sure way to cop a right hook from the working man. He doesn’t know he’s a Cartesian due for punishment under the new social rues, you see. He only knows he’s not going to be pushed around by anybody. What are you going to do about his unruly national character?

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 22:47 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 22 Jun 2017 23:06 | #

We’ve answered this nonsense already. A child does not raise itself, by its sheer nature, learn history and systemic responsibility, etc, outside of a people and culture.

As a rule I do not engage with your “representations” because I do not wish to, for collegiate reasons I have explained often enough.

That isn’t a representation. It is a fact. A child does not raise itself. I.e., a myopic focus on individual emergence does not give us a remotely complete picture.

I understand that you prefer not to engage with the totality of the model I have presented.

I prefer not to engage with an obsolete and inadequate understanding of philosophy.

It’s much less complicated to deal with a Roussea-esque vision of Man, even if it does not actually exist.

I am not promoting a Rouseau-esqe vision of man.

I also understand that, ultimately, you have to defend your espousal of a unifying “white left”

I don’t have to, I see it as eminently practical right now.

in opposition to an individualising “right wing” populated by Cartesians and Wittgensteinians.

This is your stereotype again, that “it is individualism that I am fundamentally opposed to” - Bowery probably told you to say that. But it is not individualism that I am opposed to, it is theoretical error that I am most fundamentally opposed to.

As well, of course, you have to defend the certain destiny of wise Aristotelians to boss everyone about.

I don’t have to defend Aristotle. I defend him where he is correct. And it is silly to say that I bring him to bear not for his wisdom and correct assessment of human requirement, but “to boss everyone about.”

I can’t speak for the readiness of the masses on the continent to submit to their hermeneutic betters. But pulling a stunt like that in Britain would be a pretty sure way to cop a right hook from the working man.

Here we go again. As if I am presenting myself as their better. As if they are not corrigible. They are, and that is why so many eventually adopted the garbage narratives that came from academia, of “anti-racism”, and why so many will adopt the (alternative hermeneutic narrative) of collaborative ethno nationalism…

He doesn’t know he’s a Cartesian due for punishment under the new social rues, you see.

Is it simply impossible for you to see and register what I say? Scroll down the comments, here, here, and here, and see that I have just put this false charge to rest, your charge, not the first time, about how my fundamental purpose of discussing “rules” is to control people rather than their being a neutral analytical device to understand problems and solutions.

He only knows he’s not going to be pushed around by anybody. What are you going to do about his unruly national character?

I am not interested in pushing him about. I commend his national character. What rules he does not abide is for the English to negotiate. I make broad suggestions aimed at increasing the choices and freedom of the ordinary nationalist, to keep them from being bullied by the powerful, in fact; and to try to provide resource to leverage his interests against the treacherous, those who betray him and his national interests.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 24 Jun 2017 09:20 | #

You are misunderstanding the fundamental error set forth by the Greeks that Aristotle began to correct and a correction that Heidegger sought to advance: which was to take philosophical inquiry away from Formalistic/Cartesian detachment in foundational theoria, which took us away from natural and authentic “sociological” concerns and perspective; and he sought to correct that epsitemological blunder by centering the perspective of our inquiry instead, properly in the realm of Praxis - which is not a psychological perspective, a merely individual perspective, or even a merely “natural perspective” -

I was going to leave this observation to stew, but on reflection I think it better to respond. I don’t need you to reply.

Sociology and communication are relatively minor, late-order issues. For the most part, “sociological concerns and perspectives” are analysis and critique. Such might lead to some disorganised gestures in the direction of the light. But we are dying of multiple causes, and that sort of solution is not enough; for it will never be giving of Life in the generative, world-making sense. In any case, we are scarcely impoverished for want of analysis and critique. All that’s been done, and every thinking nationalist can quote it, or parts of it. What we lack is a formative philosophy of foundation, from which the politicisation and agency of the natural life of our peoples may develop.

I would add that Identity is foundation. “I am ... we are, or We are” ... is the name of god. Nothing is prior but mechanics. The new politics of a European life are identitarian.

Posted by DanielS on Sat, 24 Jun 2017 13:17 | #

DanielS: You are misunderstanding the fundamental error set forth by the Greeks that Aristotle began to correct and a correction that Heidegger sought to advance: which was to take philosophical inquiry away from Formalistic/Cartesian detachment in foundational theoria, which took us away from natural and authentic “sociological” concerns and perspective; and he sought to correct that epsitemological blunder by centering the perspective of our inquiry instead, properly in the realm of Praxis - which is not a psychological perspective, a merely individual perspective, or even a merely “natural perspective” -

GW: I was going to leave this observation to stew, but on reflection I think it better to respond. I don’t need you to reply.

DanielS: You may not believe that you don’t need me to reply but a reply is necessary.

GW: Sociology and communication are relatively minor, late-order issues.

DanielS: Totally wrong on both counts.

First of all I put “sociological” in quotes to suggest that was effectively Aristotle’s realm of concern with praxis. It was certainly a realm of concern for Plato too.

As for communication, as the pervasive phenomenon that it is, beyond the transmission model of the Greeks in their rhetoric, its “discovery” is rather like “discovering” that we breath air. We live in communication, it is ubiquitous.

GW: For the most part, “sociological concerns and perspectives” are analysis and critique. Such might lead to some disorganised gestures in the direction of the light. But we are dying of multiple causes, and that sort of solution is not enough; for it will never be giving of Life in the generative, world-making sense.

DanielS: On the contrary, they provide orientation, orientation that is itself correctable - a hermeneutic that goes into a sociological perspective, where need be, is enough for that reason, because it will be continually funded by what is necessary.

Again, Heidegger being a hermeneuticist, me being a hermeneutcist, does not lock us into a particular perspective - it rather lends to ongoing correction. We gauge our “sociological” observations and bring them to bear, correcting them as need be, e.g., when we take up attention to emergence, as Heidegger does when he “lays bear the ground to allow being to ‘evince.”

Attention to emergence is a good thing, would be a good focus if it was part of a sufficient philosophy, a hermeneutic process.

GW: In any case, we are scarcely impoverished for want of analysis and critique. All that’s been done, and every thinking nationalist can quote it, or parts of it. What we lack is a formative philosophy of foundation, from which the politicisation and agency of the natural life of our peoples may develop. I would add that Identity is foundation. “I am ... we are, or We are” ... is the name of god. Nothing is prior but mechanics. The new politics of a European life are identitarian.

DanielS: I’m going to have to disabuse you of your philosophical amateurism, which I will do in a few days. For the time being, I recommend to the audience to have a look at my articles, GW is giving a bum steer in treating them as if they are trivia.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 24 Jun 2017 14:38 | #

Attention to emergence is a good thing, would be a good focus if it was part of a sufficient philosophy, a hermeneutic process.

This displays an inability to comprehend the difference between a life process and if not a dead thing exactly, certainly something rendered only ideational by the intervention of intellect. Emergence from the identity of a living organism occurs via the consciousness. Human presence, for example, is not an idea. It is not an abstract concept. It is a state. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, is the academic discipline of interpretation. It never leaves the thinking faculty. It never extends to the life of the common man. It has, therefore, no point of contact with the life process - and we are talking about that contact. Nationalism must do so, for it is the politics of life interests, and its only relevance for our people is its capacity to advance ours.

You are lost to the world of academics. I, on the other hand, am writing about Sibelius. You want to adumbrate over interpretations. I want to raise the consciousness of my people. Which of us truly understands that path for nationalist philosophy and politics which may lead to life?

Posted by DanielS on Sat, 24 Jun 2017 14:59 | #

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 24 Jun 2017 15:38 | #

DanielS: Attention to emergence is a good thing, would be a good focus if it was part of a sufficient philosophy, a hermeneutic process.

GW: This displays an inability to comprehend the difference between a life process and if not a dead thing exactly, certainly something rendered only ideational by the intervention of intellect.

DanielS: Bullshit. It shows that I’m not absurdly skeptical. There’s no reason to doubt that there are European peoples of different kinds in biological systems, with recognizable and distinct ways; there is plenty of evidence, no reason to doubt it, no especial need for more proof - though more can always help - it is a co-evolutionary feedback loop.

GW: Emergence from the identity of a living organism occurs via the consciousness.

DanielS: No it doesn’t, it emerges in co-evolutionary interaction.

GW: Human presence, for example, is not an idea. It is not an abstract concept.

DanielS: I didn’t say it was. That would be Cartesian if I did.

GW: It is a state. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, is the academic discipline of interpretation. It never leaves the thinking faculty. It never extends to the life of the common man.

DanielS: You absolutely don’t know what you are talking about and that is because you can’t take leave of your absurd skepticism.

GW: It has, therefore, no point of contact with the life process - and we are talking about that contact.

DanielS: You are full of shit.

GW: Nationalism must do so, for it is the politics of life interests, and its only relevance for our people is its capacity to advance ours.

DanielS: This stupidist goddamn shit. Of course it makes contact with life process - in fact, it is part and parcel of it unlike your dull, clunky and obsolete ontology project.

GW: You are lost to the world of academics.

DanielS: No, you are lost in your jealous projection that ideas that haven’t come from your grandiose ontology project are “academic”, and that these ideas are all “bad” ... and as if Heidegger wasn’t an “academic.”

GW: I, on the other hand, am writing about Sibelius. You want to adumbrate over interpretations. I want to raise the consciousness of my people. Which of us truly understands that path for nationalist philosophy and politics which may lead to life?

DanielS: It takes different kinds, but your misplaced competitiveness is obstructing some better ideas for ethno-nationalists. As I said, in a few days, I will sort it out (clean the Augean stables ...now if we could just stop you from dumping horseshit).

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 01 Sep 2017 11:50 | #

Most educated people know that the Augean Stables contained no equine ordure. There were cows, doubtless a few bulls. Please re - accuse GW of bullshit. Now that is something you know heaps about.

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 01 Sep 2017 11:59 | #

Go worship Hitler unquestioningly, Al, that is all you know.

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