Introduction

This is the first of three planned new essays - none of them very lengthy or (I hope) too obscure.  This one is the very first I have offered at this site for some time.  Together with the Sibelius essay I posted getting on for two years ago now it marks an end point to my work on foundation and the perspectives for ethnic nationalism that it affords.  The objective in this essay is to revisit and clarify the earlier work, to philosophise it rather more formally, and fit it to the task of moving forward.

The second essay in this trio, which I have not yet written, will deal with a foundational epistemology, specifically the dynamic scheme I called the Ontological Transit, which I hold to be the ground of our perception of the essential.  After that visit I hope to be able to offer – probably wholly unwisely and almost certainly not originally - a (very) tentative gesture towards a theory for the central problem of all philosophy of Mind, that problem being how our subjective experience arises from the electro-chemical activity of the brain. 

Thus, for example, for ethnic nationalists that includes how we beings of Nature and of the material universe witness the flood of mind-mediated information (qualia), know and value self and relation, being and the freedom in being, and truth, good and love, and know these to be vivifying and our experience of them as real, in their way, if not as solid as the hardest of reality we can perceive; and, therefore, as necessitous and essential for the political ordering of society.

A nationalist, therefore, is seeking not merely a technical (or ontical) description for the mind’s rendering of this thing we call reality.  He’s hunting for a basis in human truth, a natural, qualitative order which cleaves the political, as it does all things, and sets down the cause of the people’s life and life-interests in the light, above and beyond the generalities and vicissitudes of the day.

And we begin that hunt, naturally enough, in the beginning.

The founding vita

What does foundation mean?  Well, for me it certainly does not mean the mystic’s a priori ground or plane of pure being from which we mere human beings, sunk in our ordinariness, are famously exiled, and to which return is a moment of rapturous union with the All.  Minus the manipulation of brain chemistry it is never more than theory, and an anti-evolutionary theory at that; and is too often proposed with a religious certainty inevitably unappealing to a materialist.

Also, notwithstanding my materialism (and naturalism) and despite what follows, neither am I interested in the empirical evidence for the parental possibilities of oceanic ribonucleic acid.  As everyone knows, how life came about has not yet been explained scientifically, and may never be.  But in truth, the ontical sense of it will only ever be an account in quanta anyway; which cannot suffice for us.  For it cannot contain or model the human vitality we, as philosophical enquirers, seek to understand, interpret, intellectualise, and re-present in answer to the great question of how to live.

For the same reason I am not attracted to the dry philosophical practise of determining over-arching systems of ontological categories or classes into which the knotted skein of being might be teased – even those like quanta and qualia I am inevitably using myself!  There are two hundred and seventy of them in Hegel’s categorisation, all of three in various others!  It’s work on a cadaver, like rendering down speech into dictionary definitions, or the grand enterprise of a business concern into the annual accounts.

No, I am looking for the living ontological history, to be got from the stuff of existence as an artist draws the human truth of his model.  Methodologically, perhaps that would be an intellectual art, resistant to formalisation, therefore probably unteachable, therefore, probably not academically respectable.  But academia cannot model the politics of the blood any more than science can.  It has been missing something.  Or if it ever found a trace under its scalpel, it killed it all over again on the mortuary slab.  Let us avoid that.

So, by “foundation” I mean origin as a creative event which is self-perpetuating and, thus, functions as the universal primal order of life.  As befits mere beings of flesh and blood (and modernity, of course), let us address this admittedly large, not to say godlike subject in fleshy microcosm.  Accordingly and always mindful of our own extreme transience, we might hunt for the foundational in the occurrence, after perhaps a billion or ten or twenty billion infinitesimally brief cellular sparks in a mechanical universe (governed ceaselessly and absolutely by Time and Entropy but also by Happenstance in the sense of random events, processes, and interruptions) of an anomalous event of integration such that there was, this once, a founding vita, however spare, however primitive.

Obviously, we do not speak here of anything recognisably “personal”, or anything at all beyond a bare sequence of information in auto-catalysis.  But within that first, faint trace of a separation from the disintegrating lay a trace, fainter still, of the essence for continuity, interposing itself in the universal fabric, elaborating itself in whatever way will secure the light.  By elaborating, the whole may change and even divide and by dividing increase; and then, from changing and dividing and increasing, perform the saving trick of giving up phenotype to disintegration, yes, but withholding genotype for continuity.

Everything that comes after (so, nervosity, oxygenation, the sensing of heat, light, movement and of quora, the incorporation of energy sources, sensitisation to environmental change, the giving and receiving of chemical signals, the bias towards strong signals, etc … all the way to complex forms of sapience) is elaboration forced by the disintegrating action of the mechanical universe.  Stasis is not an existent reality.  For one of the sides to this drama … the side of life … there is never a possibility of rest or final victory.  Always, Time and Entropy drag this life back towards discontinuity and disintegration, and the cold state of mechanics.  Always life’s essential, voracious appetite for continuity, born of that initial happenstance, impels it forward and proves itself, within its own confines and by its perfect integrity, as equal as equal can be to the vast forces without.

Looking sideways at it, so to speak, and doing the ontology, one is necessarily sifting through and time-ordering the organism’s always elaborating grip on being.  I would reiterate that we do not speak here of the organism’s biochemical structure and interaction – an agglomeration of things dead in themselves.  We speak of its life-essence emerging unseen from difference elaborating as ever greater difference; and from confine, therefore, and the reflex, impulsion and movement which elaboration entails; and in what, broadly speaking, Martin Heidegger called sorge (care or concern), Frank Salter called interest, and we might call the sole imperative of the will to continuity; and, thereby, in the qualities of ownership and instinct which imbue that will; and in the procreativity which it imbues, and in the discrimination and opportunism which arrive with the light-seeker, sapience; and thence increase, inter-dependency, and belonging; and, ineluctably, death but also, triumphally, death’s deferment.  For all of this characterises the essential struggle, and all of this stands in absolute opposition to that cold state of mechanics which the ontological investigation of the universe logically must uncover.

The profound order

By its sheer salience and novelty, all this vitality contests the metaphysician’s standard theory of a recondite and static, continuous plane or ground of existence by which the being of things living and things not living is if not caused certainly situated.  In the standard theory existence itself has no nature, indeed is prior to all nature.  It is one and its value is 1.  The existence of everything that is has the same value of 1, and the being of All has the value of 1.  There can only be this austere and unlit, singular, factic thereness of a thing, and of all things under the governments of Time, Entropy and Happenstance.  It is existence as absolute homogeny, existence as raw, imperishable precondition.

What deities have been imagined to precede and exceed it, equipped with all the magical baggage of design, are themselves only the designs of men who found the prevailing mechanicity an intolerable affront to love, meaning, purpose, and hope of life and hope in the sublime.  Their gods, their spirits, their mythos, their very faith need not detain us, for the ontological order we are unearthing is not the object of their discontent, but the fundamentals of their repudiation of it.  To be precise, and – again - from the beginning:

Integration necessarily has locality and therefore confines, for confinement alone gifts separateness from the prevailing All.  In separateness there is necessarily resistance to the claim of that which is separated from, which is a claim to absoluteness.  In resistance there is the tendency and leaning towards continuity; and in that leaning already lay the seeds, at least, of a “something” which is essentially different, and which preserves its difference only as long as it engages in a Manichean struggle with the blind and profane, homogenising forces without.  But that engagement limits homogeny’s realm and the priorness of existence is universal no more.  Within its own bold confines essence is now prior, for so long as essence differentiates itself existence is made contingent upon and a function of it. 

So now we have, for the purposes of this investigation, conferred upon the general existence its sign and character of the “austere and unlit, singular, factic thereness of a thing, and of all things”, and we have defined essence not only as that of a vita differentiated from those existent things, but also as the differentiating constant of that “which preserves its difference only as long as it engages in a Manichean struggle with the blind and profane, homogenising forces without.”  Further, we have given the disintegrating and homogenising action of those forces the ontological character of mechanicity.  Ineffably un-differentiating in themselves, they become themselves because essence is itself differentiating, for only in their relation of difference is their respective character unconcealed.

Because this mutual unconcealing is a gift solely of essence’s genesis in continuity, it demonstrates that by that alone light has entered the universe, and a sweet anarchy by which the absolute is made relative and the profound order is re-established: no longer a singular, unbroken, universal reign of forces but a landscape of confined multiplicity, of the particular, and of the qualitative; and more than that, of the constantly differentiating and refining into an ever more specific and elaborate multiplicity.  In other words, there is a value of 2, and there are values within 2.  Essence is, essences are.

So we have our foundation in the essential principle and, specifically, its origin and prior relation to existence: a solid, immutable operative order which not only underpins the organic existence but pervades its instincts, ordering, conditioning and permeating their dynamic creativity.  Thus is its effect in all living organisms, and in the human organism also, to which everything must belong with nothing added and nothing taken away.