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The nature of the beast In political thought, perhaps the most basic, formative and necessary intellectual task is to adequately define that which one opposes or seeks to change. This is especially true for us, devotees of an inchoate and wholly natural politic; and true for us, too, given that there is such a variety of opinion about what it is, exactly, nationalism is fighting. An adequate definition of that lends coherence to our cause, and refines our purpose. I thought it might be interesting and revealing to invite such definitions from readers. Here are a couple from an email conversation between Graham Lister and me last February, which I happened across this evening. I can’t speak for the care which Graham devoted to his. Maybe he wrote it on the hoof. Maybe not. But I recall thinking quite hard about mine, which follows, and which, when I read it today, I must say seems a little formal and lacking in bite. Anyhow, to get the ball rolling, here is Graham’s:
And here was the definition of the foundational “problem”, as I see it, which I wrote in response:
Comments:2
Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:16 | # It is also quite correct to say that reciprocity is radically universal and empathetic. Christianity is the product of reciprocity, a trait bereft in primeval man. Certainly reciprocity “commends equal treatment, universal respect and fraternity”. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. Where is it then that this liberal modernity begins to “eat” itself? Your kin? Village? The Channel? Men of other “white"nations? All sentient beings?
It is the great conundrum that the approbation given to love of strangers in your own nation will become ‘more tender and widely diffused’ the more often it is practiced. 3
Posted by Bill on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:42 | # Nature of the Beast or the intelligence of the beast? It seems to me the architects of our misfortune exceed us by several factors in the intelligence stakes, they’ve wiped the floor with us and are continuing to do so, with freedom of hindrance I’d say. How does one deal with that? 4
Posted by Silver on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:49 | #
Ambiguous, not artificial. I’d say almost everyone is race-centric with respect to the ease with which they extend sympathies, regardless of what they may say. If you’re white, it’s one thing to say you luuuurve black people but quite another thing to actually practice it. You may succeed with an individual black, but you have to go through the same trying process every time you encounter someone new. My guess would be most people give up and retreat into hypocrisy. 5
Posted by Bill on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:55 | # Doing the rounds this morning over at CC, Alex Kurtagic is asking the same question as GW (sort of). Why All that Theory? http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/12/why-all-that-theory/ Go compare, I’ll be asking questions later. 6
Posted by daniels. on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 11:51 | # /. What conservatives and right-wingers, including Kurtagic, in this piece, seem to refuse to note is that it is not inequality that we are advocating, but our people. Do you really care if a Black or an Arab is better than your son, or your daughter, at something (except perhaps for instrumental purposes, in an emergency)? Or is your concern for the qualities that your son or daughter have? If we are addressing the Nature of The Beast therefore, let it be understood that the fundamental matter is not the righteousness of inequality; but of assessing incommensurable paradigms to gauge our qualitative distinction, defense and pro-action. The very discussion of equality and inequality presumes the universalistic comparison we are supposed to be rejecting. We will alienate even our own with this snob appeal to our wonderful inequality – going on about how the notion of equality is the central demon. Qualitative incommensurability is the issue, qualitative sameness or difference and symbiosis as opposed the quantities of equality, inequality. We will continue to get our clocks cleaned until this is understood. 7
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:01 | # That Kurtagić essay was decent-ish. http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/12/why-all-that-theory/ An interesting essay with some insights. But I wonder if the author has came across the notion of the ‘egalitarian plateau’ as the West’s ‘deepest’ normative assumption and various critiques of this idea that demonstrate it can produce perverse outcomes even from within its own liberal perspective? It’s too simple-minded to say “equality bad, inequality good”. A key question is: equality of what among whom? And the flip side: inequality of what for whom? There is a lot of evidence that allowing economic inequality to be maximally instantiated radically undermines the ‘ties that bind’ or more formally the personal and political foundations of intra-group solidarity and cohesion (or even more formally forms of Aristotelian philia). People might not like that but it does look to be true. As for ‘theory-less’ liberalism well it’s more the ‘a-political’ politics of liberalism. Bernard Crick discussed this extremely well in his little book “In Defence of Politics” (see his chapter on liberalism). 8
Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:02 | # Important insights, too much verbiage (with a dose of proofreading badly needed) ... Plus all said long ago. Aristotle on justice: likes should be treated alike, unalikes, unalike. Burke on the State: its duty to carry forth a people through time, that each generation is steward of the next, the purpose for which is only God’s to know. Chesterton: the democracy of the dead Christianity certainly ‘ploughed the fields’ for liberalism, but it is radically anti-liberal, if correctly understood. The essence of modern liberalism is a belief in I guess what persons here would call “ontological equality”, which in turn leads to an ongoing emphasis on ‘perfecting’ society by a process of constantly expanding and deepening both formal/legal and substantive/material equality. Hence modern liberalism’s fanatic concern with antidiscriminationism. Liberals really believe that all people either are equal, could be equal, or should be equalized to the extent currently possible, with a core self-identification of the liberal society being its commitment to future states of ever greater equalization. We may thus call liberalism, with Dr. Lister, “maximally inflationary”. And because perfect equality can never be realized in this world, however, liberalism might also be characterized as ‘ontologically restless’. Liberalism by its nature is driven to undermine the conditions of its own existence. In simplest form, as noted, this is because radical egalitarianism seems to be an intrawhite racial trait (ie, not all whites are liberals, but only whites in large numbers seem to be liberals), but one which cannot by its inner logic deny expanding the ‘circle of equality’ to encompass those who, in fact, possess a different (racial) nature, one not enamored of the moral claims of egalitarianism. Europe has been internally ‘conquered’ by liberalism, with the result that it is being externally conquered by Islam. I do question, however, this conflation of libertarian vs egalitarianism individualism. (so my 2 cents - Lister@1 is a meaty comment deserving of extended analysis; I think its major points, however, can be summarized in plainer language; but I am busy now and today; I hope this promising thread is continued) 9
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:23 | # But Graham this:
... is hopelessly shallow, and makes one wonder how well grounded in himself the writer is. It doesn’t help that his conclusion is that “The aim of liberalism was to “liberate” man from anything that is transcendent or external to him.” To be accurate, the aim of liberalism is to replace God the Creator with the creative man. Liberalism is secularised Christianity, and cannot be other since it emerged from the humanism of Catholic monastic intellectualism in the middle period of the Middle Ages. But with its slaughtering of the faith object comes a requirement to re-orient liberty as a belief system, and therefore faith - the surviving genetic impulse - as a servant of liberty. Thus, Man is catapulted into a notional understanding of himself and, because of that notionality, into an impossible and unwinnable war not against Kurtagic’s “transcendent” but what is given by Nature and by the moral and ethical forms of the time (in themselves, also expression of the natural). Whether the latter corresponds to K’s “external” I do not know. But the lack of detail suggests not. 10
Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:20 | # @GW For course, as always, your insights are perceptive. My rating of Kurtagic’s essay was a relative one after a quick skim-reading. Frankly, I have such low expectations for the products of cyber WNs that anything with moderately complex sentences and somewhat coherent argumentation is a shock - excluding the better parts of MR from that assessment obviously! But of course liberalism is, in part, an update of Protagoras of Abdera and his arrogant nonsense that “that man is the measure of all things”. Only that within liberal theory it’s the free-floating individual that must be the measure of all things and how dare anyone or anything suggest otherwise - why it’s a ‘natural’ and ‘sovereign’ ‘right’, yes? To suggest that one’s personal reasoning or preferences are not infallible is a deeply anti-‘free-market’ and hence anti-liberal thought. As both liberal theory and its expression in market ideology assumes that individuals will always make the best judgement for themselves - or at least over the long-term they will ‘correct’ their mistakes. Utter nonsense - it’s sometimes true but hardly an iron-law of human activity. And let’s not even discuss the ‘invisible backhand’. OK I’m attempting to put together something about the ‘cultural politics’ of plenty and consumerism - I think it will be relevant and hopefully insightful, but I’m also extremely busy with ‘real-life’ at the moment too so it might take a few weeks to get it into shape. BTW the site with Kurtagic’s essay blocked my very mild comment on it. Oh dear some very fragile egos are at work within the world of cyber WN it seems. No shock there either I guess. 11
Posted by Dude on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:15 | # You may find some of the comments in this article of interest to the headline piece: http://jockcoats.me/final_truth_critical_review_parekhs_cultural_particularity_liberal_democracy 12
Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:44 | # “Our exoteric slogan shall be ‘Identity precedes existence.’”—Gian Carlo Rota In more esoteric terms: The Fundierung relation throws a monkey-wrench into all ontology by demonstrating that nothing that exists matters; facticity is irrelevant. The identity, the function, the content is what matters and it does not even exist. In Rota’s pithy words: “Esoterically, the problem of existence is a folie.” 13
Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 19:43 | # That’s very nice Mr. Bowery. I guess Mr. Bowery would be unconcerned by his own non-existence? What a very silly boy. 14
Posted by James Bowery on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:21 | # I’m concerned about getting some semblance of coherence out of the “ontology” project here at MR If you think Heidegger is “silly” then don’t cite him as an authority lest your folie be exposed. “Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist. Angels are, but they do not exist. God is, but he does not exist.”—Heidegger “ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.” 15
Posted by Graham_Lister on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:52 | # Off topic but not that much. It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. It has been described as “a prophetic and violent masterpiece”. A few years ago Theodore Dalrymple wrote a brilliant essay examining the novel and the issues raised by it. A couple of paragraphs to give a flavour of Dalrymple’s efforts. “Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as lèse-majesté, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. . . And of Britain, at least, Burgess was certainly right. He extrapolated from what he saw in the prime manifestation of the emerging youth culture, pop music, to a future in which self-control had shrunk to vanishing, and he realized that the result could only be a Hobbesian world, in which personal and childish whim was the only authority to guide action. Like all prophets, he extrapolated to the nth degree; but a brief residence in a British slum should persuade anyone that he was not altogether wide of the mark.” Read the full version here: http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_oh_to_be.html A devastating critique of the folly of liberally derived ‘youth culture’ which is now the dominant cultural modality of our utterly juvenile and frivolous age. 16
Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:59 | # James, The importance of being as relation as against ground, ie of identity preceding essence, is that it assigns ontology to the natural and not to the supranatural. This is precisely our argument. It is an argument against faith-answers and against all acts of the imagination. Such as palingenesis. This is how the ontology project gains its coherence. You appear to agree with this without realising that you do so. 17
Posted by Sal on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 06:32 | #
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Posted by Bill on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 09:42 | # Charles Moore has written in this morning’s Telegraph a piece about being modern. What he is railing about is liberalism but the dreaded L word is never mentioned. I’ve long come to the conclusion the L word is a definite no-no and has been banned from use in the MSM. If Mooore even hinted negative connotation by using the L word it would be clear your desk time and hand in the car keys. I have read countless articles railing about the devastating effects of practicing liberalism and yet the L word is entirely absent, nary a mention. I’ll wager (I’m sticking my neck out here) the piece by Dalrymple cited by GL @ 16 the L word is nowhere to be seen either. What’s more, you won’t find it in any comments, it would be interesting to know if the L word automatically merits censorship. I thought I’d cover my ass on that wager I just made, I skim read Dalrymple’s piece and guess what …..who’da thunk it?
Clockwork Orange (I haven’t seen the film) looks to me to have been a a Hollywood product of the counter culture of the 60’s, youth didn’t revolt spontaneously they were egged on by the usual suspects right from the start. I remember the first rock’n'roll movie (Rock Around The Clock featuring Bill Haley and his Comets 1955) where teenage audience’s danced in the aisles ripping up the seats. The MSM made sure that this was the required behavior a such events. There was a whole raft of films of this genre with stars like James Dean and Marlon Brando. In Britain the Teddy Boys were spawned as were the Mods and Rockers, rioting youth at the seaside resorts. The end of WWII signaled the final go ahead to kick start the liberal offensive against Western civ. All with hindsight (and the internet) of course. 19
Posted by daniels. on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 10:43 | # /. It has been observed that modernity has pernicious, reflexively reconstructing performance requirements: For something to be celebrated as good, in a modernist sense, it must be new. However, the celebration has scarcely gotten underway when that something is no longer new and must give way to change on behalf of something new again. That this requirement would quickly exhaust resources, devour and destroy any time tested, healthy cultural practice in its path, as it might, is a logical consequence. Putting an end to this insatiable and unstable performance requirement of modernity is yet another reason for post modern performance requirements to be properly understood: they can reconstruct traditional practices where they are benign, important, healthy and useful. They can also make changes and innovate where necessary. Note that in my prior thread, deconstructing Maslow’s hierarchy neither represented a return to mere tradition nor a resuming of the modernist quest for what is entirely new - rather it is a proposal for a better management of the factors, reconstruction and innovation.
What momentum the hippies may have garnered from instigation probably stemmed from the fact that it closely matched their organic, life giving motives - that motive, to be, could accurately said to be conservative. 20
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 11:06 | # Bill, The relevance of the nationalist critique of liberalism to the social concern of our Jewish friend Theodore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels is not high. As a former prison psychologist his point of engagement with the modern condition is the metaphorical coal-face. Terms such as “liberal modernity” would feel very detached to him. He is, after all, concerned about the moral degradation of the underclass, while we are concerned to get a handle on a systemic or meta analysis, and to unlock change at that level. I don’t think Daniels would claim to be a liberal (in the European sense of the word) but a social conservative. For example, he uses the word “liberal” once in that City Journal piece:
Doubtless, gentile nationalism would trigger in him the usual convulsions, and I very much doubt whether the psychology of Jewish victimology is an area he wishes to explore. However, as a nationalist one could, in 2015, enter one of Her Majesty’s prisons and speak to the, if the EU gets its way, newly enfranchised inmates, at least the indigenous ones, and talk to them of the coming reclamation of this land and its ensuing reconstruction ... of a fresh start for all of us ... of the great responsibility for our people’s life, industry and prosperity it will thrust upon them, and of the unique and salvatory opportunity to establish a productive and good life it will offer. They, too, would be given England, and it would be demanded of them that they honour the gift. After such a speech I wonder how many would vote Labour, Tory, or LibDem. 21
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 18:52 | # GW: I should have used the word “rigor” rather than “coherence”. My complaint is lodged against the reckless way the word “ontology” is bandied about as though Heidegger never happened. An “ontology project” that strives to be Heidegger-literate doesn’t simply change one’s ontology, it changes ontology qua ontology. This change in the very nature of ontology, so that it avoids the folie of “existence” (the very essence of pre-Heidegger “ontology”) may be obvious to our resident philosophers—so obvious that it needn’t be stated. However is it not a primary task of the philosophical enterprise to state the “obvious” in a way that lends rigorous meaning to all our other thoughts? Has this difference between pre-Heidegger ontology qua ontology and post-Heidegger ontology qua ontology been rigorously investigated by anyone? 22
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:04 | # Anglo-American philosophy, that is the style of doing philosophy that has been dominant in British and American university philosphy departments and that emphasizes logic and verbal analysis, has traditionally dismissed Heidegger as being metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. It views Heidegger and Continental philosophy generally as being literature and not genuine, rigorous philosophy. Heidegger and Continental philosophy have tended to have more influence in English and other non-philosophy humanities departments in American and British universities. 23
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:16 | #
What is this difference? Heidegger believed that Western philosophy got started off on the wrong foot by being based on Plato. He believed the pre-Socratics had the right idea, and that we should return to the pre-Socratics. I’m not sure if it’s clear what exactly he meant by this however. 24
Posted by daniels on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:43 | # Heidegger believed that Western philosophy got started off on the wrong foot by being based on Plato. He believed the pre-Socratics had the right idea, and that we should return to the pre-Socratics. I’m not sure if it’s clear what exactly he meant by this however. I believe what he meant by this was that of the pre-Socratics, Permenides focused on form and Heraclitus focused more on Process. Plato followed the line of Permenides. According to Heidegger this was a mistake, and we should agree. That is why I have tried to focus on process - engaged process. 25
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:44 | # Oldfather, the reason I treat Gian-Carlo Rota as Rosetta Stone here is his foot-in-both-worlds of mathematics and phenomenology. I came at this from the standpoint of deep problems in computer language design: running head-long into Rota as a result of my career-long attempt to deal with time, abstraction and relation in other than the ad hoc manner now dooming the profession of computer programming to invasion by gibbering hoards from India. Quoting Rota on mathematical precision vs philosophical rigor out of the section “The Myth of Precision” of chapter “The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics Upon Philosophy” of part “II. Philosophy: A Minority View” of his last book “Indiscrete Thoughts”:
What I would like to add to Rota’s notion of “philosophical rigor” here is that it is as much the job of philosophy to traffic in “imprecision” as it is the job of science to traffic in measurement. 26
Posted by daniels. on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:02 | # Jim, post number 26, not bad. While I do believe that the rigor of biological investigations plays an extremely important role in philosophy, the ambiguity of topoi which handle praxis are also worthwhile. One of the utilities that I see in the quaternary system is that it is too complicated to reify and take into runaway - it forces practitioners to use practical judgement; yet, it should have enough meaning to guide action well enough. 27
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:21 | #
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. 28
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:40 | #
Do you mean that rather than restrict itself to rigorous logical analysis of statements, philosophy should be more speculative? Anglo-American philosophy tends to view philosophy’s role as subordinate to science and serving science by merely analyzing scientific statements. Do you mean that philosophy should serve science by being more speculative and by generating hypotheses for science to test? 29
Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:50 | # I’m only superficially familiar with Heidegger. One ought to be very knowledgable in the history of philosophy before attempting to make sense of him (or so I’ve been told). One of my professors, a much published Catholic philosopher, did say that it was very common for facile thinkers (often non-philosophers) to read into him what they wish, and to throw his name about to add a veneer of Deep Thoughts to their own writing. Perhaps one of the experts here might like to post a basic summary of Heidegger, where and why he thought Western metaphysics had gone wrong, what constitutes (in as plain a language as his admittedly opaque style permits) his ‘new ontology’, and why he is relevant at all to ordinary WPs who just want to end the diversitarian invasions of their homelands. 30
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:07 | # 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:
And so forth. I believe we are all saying the same thing according to our respective starting positions. 31
Posted by Leon Haller on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 22:32 | # Oldfather, IMO, 20th century Anglo-American philosophy is as desiccated as the modern Continental tradition is imprecise (and subject to gross verbal misuse and abuse for that reason: Derrida’s total asininity, and its inane repetition and ‘development’ by his epigones, is only the most flagrant example). I’m not familiar with Rota, but I think his point might be that philosophy aims at wisdom, whose essence is apprehending human reality clearly, but that such wisdom can never be reduced to mere logic or even empirical knowledge (though the latter can influence it). Personally, I think excessive (ie, impractical) philosophizing is a distraction for WPs. The idea that we need to overthrow the modern metaphysical worldview (which I do believe we need to do, incidentally, but not for, or primarily for, racial preservationist purposes) simply to keep undesirable nonwhites from colonizing our territories seems to me overblown, if not silly. The worldview that Heidegger and his WP acolytes find inadequate did not prevent the historically unprecedented territorial and demographic expansion of the European peoples, and our concurrent rise to global dominance. It is the postwar doubting and condemnation of that worldview that are at the root of our race’s present, rapidly deteriorating situation. If the white race and thus Western Civilization are to endure the proper focus of philosophical inquiry is ethics, not ontology. At present, the West has succumbed to a false ethic of antiracism, a weird and incoherent, but highly toxic, amalgam of radical individualism and collective ethnomasochism (“color-blindness” + White Guilt). Antiracism needs to be logically and ethically undermined, and race-realism and WP then reincorporated into the mainstream of the Western conservative tradition (the contemporary pursuit of a race-blind conservatism is risible and ridiculous). Formulating the ethical arguments for racial reclamation (which will almost certainly involve racial/military territorial (re)conquests) is not easy work, but it must be done. Whites are uniquely ethical beings, however much the neonazi contingent may dislike this fact, and WPs must work with our racial nature as it is. This philosophical task is involved enough, without further muddying the waters with extraneous (if inherently interesting) issues. 32
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:04 | # Leon, It is the truth which is in and of us which may deliver us from the present danger; not free market liberalism, not social conservatism, not lost traditions and mores, not a Catholic belief system or a Christian morality ... none of that. Beauty has departed from the European life, and freedom with it. Neither can be restored by magical thinking. They are effects, not causes. They come from the truth of us, and it is the truth of us, as it is present in the lived life, which has been misplaced over a very long period indeed, and which we now seek a way or ways to uncover. 33
Posted by James Bowery on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:13 | # I think I pretty well crystalized Rota’s position in my analogy: Just as measurement is the raw material of science—its “ground” if you will, so philosophy’s “ground” is in the ineffability of Being—ineffability giving rise to necessary imprecision in the expressions and even thoughts. Just as the rigor of science is to ruthlessly dethrone theory with measurement, so the rigor of philosophy is to ruthlessly dethrone mere expression and even mere thought with ineffable Being. 34
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:16 | #
Heidegger remarked that the Soviet Union and the US “are metaphysically the same.” Perhaps he might say today that the worldview which animated “the historically unprecedented territorial and demographic expansion of the European peoples” also animates “our race’s present, rapidly deteriorating situation.” 35
Posted by Oldfather on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:33 | #
This sounds sort of like Taoism.
Isn’t the problem then that we’ll just end up with indirect metaphors and poetry to try to express the ineffable and comprehend the world? This incidentally is what Taoism and Eastern philosophy are like. Although perhaps this isn’t really a problem now, since we have science and since so much of traditional philosophy has been misguided. 36
Posted by daniels on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:46 | # .. 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. Though I have read Introduction to Metaphysics, perhaps I did not remember correctly his discussion of Parmenides and Heraclitus and was indeed, recalling and reading Nietzsche’s account into it. It is also true that Heidegger could contradict himself, sometimes deliberately. I believe it may have even have been within that text that he says, “Nietzsche is the greatest philosopher.” ...in another place, “Socrates is the greatest philosopher.”
I recall his statement, “the language comes into Being in writing.” ...which would correspond with formalization, true. So, maybe from and process was not his chief complaint (it would be more mine, reading what I want into it). GW shows here, from another book that I read but don’t remember all that well (identity and difference) that he does indeed, speak favorably of Parmenides: ..and GW makes a good point that Heidegger would be pointing favorably to Parmenedes’ view that Being belongs to identity. It makes sense and corresponds with what I am trying to do with Class. But again, my experience of Heidegger is one that I would not be surprised to find him endorsing Heraclitus in another place. Maybe not. Though I have found Heidegger to be one of the more useful philosophers, it has not been my policy with regard to him to try to faithfully follow his ideas to the umpteenth degree, but rather to unfold them, take to heart what I find essential and give thanks. 37
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:51 | # James, A few pages on from that short quote from Identity and Difference is this passage:
And so forth. He goes on to state that in Western thought Being is considered “as the ground in which every being as such is grounded”. But, he argues, “Being itself, however, belongs to us; for only with us can Being be present as Being, that is, become present.” For the last two years or more I have presented this argument here. It is an argument against “ineffableness” and for experience, for Man’s capacity to think and destine. This is what I am asking everyone to understand and advance. If I have not made this obvious, or if there has been a lack of rigour in my request, well, I am not a philosopher or even an intellectual. I am just a dissident English bloke who can see that everything - everything, all culture, all faith, all thought - has failed our race, and we are down, now, to the very quick of the nail. We only have what belongs to us to fall back upon, and what belongs to us is known only in what is present. 38
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:49 | # GW: Did you miss my analogy’s correspondence of philosophy’s expression and thought to science’s theory? Theory is an essential aspect of science. Therefore, expression and thought are an essential aspect of philosophy. Man is an essentially philosophical being: As a philosophical being Man thinks and expresses. These thoughts and expressions are the Man-made ships that set sail from Man and then are dashed against the rocks of ineffable Being as a “constant shipwreck” of philosophy to quote Ortega y Gasset. This “constant shipwreck” is Man’s optima in the face of Being’s ineffability. For Man to abide in Being is to continually think, express (including act) and “shipwreck” against the ineffable—it is to abide in the Joy of Creation which essentially includes destruction. When you “...see that everything - everything, all culture, all faith, all thought - has failed our race, and we are down, now, to the very quick of the nail. We only have what belongs to us to fall back upon, and what belongs to us is known only in what is present.” are you not pointing to an exceptionally colossal shipwreck on the ineffable and simultaneously embarking on yet another voyage in the Joy of Creation including your own thought and expression? 39
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 01:18 | # James, That big little word “present” completely cuts across your dedication to ground. I urge you to consider what absence and presence actually signify in the relation to being, and how the latter makes Man an active principle in the world, and not the victim of the cosmos you would have him be. 40
Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 01:28 | # Just to say I’m really focused on non-MR things (aka real life) at the moment and generally fairly mentally exhausted by the time I get around to posting on MR but I just wanted to say that I concur with GW in that my ontological concerns arise primarily out of a physicalist perspective on the philosophy of science – hence are grounded in ‘the natural’ and are not in any way concerned with the supernatural, the esoteric blah blah blah. I think those ontological concerns can also be useful in the understanding of human realities – the political and social world. At some point I’ll try to give a much fuller account of my thoughts on these topics. On Dalrymple I personally quite enjoy reading him and he is not without insight about modern culture and manners. Personally I think the cult of youth (or youth culture and its nexus of associated values and attitudes) is very much a product of our wider malaise in our present phase of hyper-liberalism and its underlying cult of radical ‘individualism’ (see Adam Curtis and his film “The Century of the Self” for more its on Youtube). “A Clockwork Orange” is very much about the moral and societal degeneracy that inevitably flows from the dumping of any form of inter-generational cultural and moral economy (with a hierarchy in favour of our older and generally wiser heads) in favour of the ‘eternal present’ and the superficial whims and nihilistic hedonism of untutored ‘youth’. While Dalrymple is not a nationalist of any sort he has written about the lack of a ‘transcendent’ purpose or narrative as the background condition to our increasingly bleak cultural and moral landscape - especially in the UK. It may be home, but we must be honest and say contemporary Britain is probably the most culturally and morally degraded nation in Western Europe. Compare the typically stoical, modest and fundamentally decent Brits of the WWII generation (from every part and every social strata of the Kingdom) with today’s average Brit. Decent people are a rapidly disappearing breed. Just visit the city centre of even a respectable ‘middle-class’ place such as York or Edinburgh on a weekend night and view the repulsive yobbos (of every class and of both genders) ‘enjoying’ themselves by drinking themselves into a alcoholic induced stupor (probably for many with some illegal chemical adding to the fun). All conducted within an ‘jolly’ atmosphere of menace and putative violence. And no it’s not just the young – I have increasingly noticed the middle-aged and even seniors in groups of unpleasant drunken mobs - the members of such mobs are often covered in tattoos (sorry ‘body art’) and piercing galore! Really just how low have we sunk? A regime of self-destructive thuggery and joyless hedonism with ugly ironmongery and aesthetically ghastly inkwork on top. OK back to the point. Now I can’t recall which specific essay it was but Dalrymple did write that such a ‘transcendent narrative’ can come from traditional religion (but like me he thinks it unlikely that many in Europe will ever return to it), alternatively from knowledge, engagement and appreciation of the great artistic, cultural, scientific etc., achievements of the West (again Dalrymple is probably correct in suggesting this will always be a somewhat minority pursuit - having said that it does not have to be quite so narrowly enjoyed as it presently is by any means), or from the history and continuity of the nation and finally from the nature and pleasures of a stable and broadly traditional family life. Now any serious nationalist, at least in my mind, links those two last elements together – the national community as ‘our story’, our extended kith and kin - both contemporaneously and extending into the past and hopefully into the future too; just as our own family life links our personal story into the river of time of the past, the present and the future. All that requires, at base, is a vigorous ethic of life and a remembrance of what truly matters in a well-lived and flourishing life – nothing ‘esoteric’ or stricto senso religious at all. OK I need some rest so catch you all later. P.S. I’m happy to confess I’m finding Heidegger rather difficult to totally get to grips with but I think that goes with the territory. And I’ve also been drawn into authors like Merleau-Ponty and his ontology of ‘the flesh of the world’ (or embodiment) and our ‘communing with’ (Merleau-Ponty’s phrase) the sensible qualities it encounters; the body as incarnated subjectivity in which the world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing process of ‘becoming’. OK I’ll stop now lol. 41
Posted by daniels on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 06:55 | # /. GW: Did you miss my analogy’s correspondence of philosophy’s expression and thought to science’s theory? Theory is an essential aspect of science. Therefore, expression and thought are an essential aspect of philosophy. Aristotle draws a distinction between the world of scientific rigor, which is conducted in pursuit and in terms of: episteme (foundational knowledge), (it is guided by) technology and derives theory on the one hand vs. matters of the social world which are concerned with social interaction (which is too complex for its interactive and agentive make-up to allow for practical application of absolute rigor; thus, its inquiry requires more a “feel”, and to be conducted in terms of: phronesis (negotiated, practical judgment) and praxis (practical hypotheses which have utility in the social world). While I take the radical step of placing all under the rubric of praxis, including science, even at that, there is no need to shrug-off scientific rigor, in particular for that which it actually handles effectively - biology, physics, mechanics and technology. We all rely heavily on the conduct and findings of science. It is just that I rather place greater significance on the social realm; and defend its requirements (its own kind of rigor, as Jim describes it), terms of its social utility to us, as Whites. Although it establishes the larger rubric for us as praxis in service of Whites, I firmly believe that hermeneutics properly deployed, would negotiate a process moving back and forth from scientific rigor and practical imagination (on our behalf, as Whites). I know that Heidegger spoke in terms of hermeneutics (I believe in Being and Time), but I don’t recall him going into it at length; and one of his students, Gadamer (Jewish), apparently popularized the idea - I didn’t like his book except for one useful phrase - “the prejudice against prejudice”, which I first saw there. 42
Posted by daniels on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:08 | # “the prejudice against prejudice”, of course, was meant to chide the enlightenment’s valuation of objectivity. 43
Posted by Bill on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 12:25 | # It’s not very often I visit Occidental Quarterly, I suspect it is simply because it is not bookmarked - maybe it should. Gregory Hood has a piece up about Ayn Rand entitled A Sense of Life, Ayn Rand and White Nationalism. Here’s an extract….
Worth a look. http://www.toqonline.com/blog/a-sense-of-life-ayn-rand/
45
Posted by Thorn on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:23 | # Bill @ 44 I couldn’t agree more with Ayn Rand and Gregory Hood there!!! Absent any preconceived notions, if any white person would actually read both Atlas Shrugged and The Bell Curve and NOT cause him or her to become a White Preservationist/White Patriot (or WN if you must), then I’d have to say that person is a mental defect. 46
Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:26 | # GW: Then let me return to the more fundamental question I put forth in my demand for more rigor from the ontology project, with some added rigor in the question. “What is an ontology without reference to existence and what is its particular relationship to identity, Being and beings in their presence and absence?” Secondarily there arises the question: “How does such an ontology deliver us from the nihilism of an ontology oriented toward existence?” 47
Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 17:02 | #
Dalrymple wants Europeans to focus on an imaginary point on the horizon, one of sufficient pleasantness, so as to anesthitize Europeans from the pain of their lamentable present. If Europeans become too conscious of their pain, he fears, there will be a backlash - a reflexive lashing out against the most proximate cause of that pain. But he does not know, and greatly fears, that it may not stop there. Itz coming.
Everything one needs for a good old fashioned pogrom. 48
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 09 Dec 2012 23:33 | # James,
How do you know that existence is ground? I think not, and on two counts. First, “the doctrine of metaphysics ... states that identity belongs to Being.” Or Being is “the ground in which every being as such is grounded”. Existence is not Being. It is close to Being, but it is not Being. You may consider it mete to “traffic in imprecision”. But just for my sake, would you be specific about what you mean by “existence” ... what its precise character is. Do you, for example, mean something nearer to “life” or “facticity” or “reality”, or perhaps, as the Sufis would say, “the found”? All these are particular, that is, they can be studied ontologically with different results, and I am not at all sure that this black hole into which an existentialist philosophy is apparently bound to disappear exists with any of them. I suspect it may be a product of imprecision. Second, the contention here, in any case, is that beings have Being. This Being is a defining characteristic, if you like, of a being and belongs to a being. Identity precedes Being - this is what Heidegger is saying in those brief passages I quoted. He is undoing the common presumption, which has prevailed since Plato, about Being as ground. Thus faith and imagination (and, I think, your existential nihilism) do not refer, but experience, thought, and, especially, presence do.
The whole gamut of states lay claim to identity. An ontology of identity might disciminate between and align these something like this, absence ← fracture ← ordinary waking consciousness ← mechanicity/attention → stillness → unity → presence I commented on Heidegger’s thoughts about this here:
An ontology of identity in an age of self-estrangement is, ultimately, a Weltanshauung of human freedom and creativity. CC would recognise it instantly as the energy he believes inhabits National Socialism but, of course, it is not National Socialism. It is not a seeking of the heroic in the endemic state of absence but a finding of the truth of self in, or closer to, the state of presence. 49
Posted by Oldfather on Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:32 | #
Wouldn’t Heidegger himself disagree with you? Didn’t he speak of “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism? 50
Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:55 | # Oldfather, Heidegger said different things as Rector at Freiburg and in the private company of friends after the war. Which view are we to take as authentically his? The one issued under the social duress of party suzereignty or under the social duress of the Allied victory? Is it not best to discard both and allow his work to speak for him? I think it probably is. 52
Posted by Bill on Tue, 11 Dec 2012 10:07 | # Over @ CC Greg Johnson has authored a piece and taken the plunge where MR has barely dipped its toes. G L would describe it as David Icke tin foil hat territory. Greg Johnson’s missive is presented in three parts, parts 1 & 2 are up, part 3 is pending at time of writing. At some time, sooner rather than later, this subject will have to be addressed here at MR. The title of the article is Metapolitics & Occult Warfare Part I. http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/12/metapolitics-and-occult-warfare-part-1/ 53
Posted by Bill on Tue, 11 Dec 2012 11:55 | # The sophistry of the Telegraph blogger. Damian Thompson. It could be construed if all those non-Christians were Christian he wouldn’t have a problem. 54
Posted by Thorn on Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:52 | # Being a realist, I’ve concluded there is NO WAY we can walk back either the economic mess we’re in, or reverse the effects that ongoing massive third-world immigration is wreaking. The only practical way forward (at least for us white Americanos) is to prepare for a massive violent civil upheaval. It’s coming no matter how the elites try to fix the mess they’ve created then forced on us. Here’s the very respected ex Navy SEAL, Matt Bracken, sounding the warning and giving advice on how to prepare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-KSdzDFxX4&feature=player_embedded 55
Posted by Wandrin on Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:21 | #
It should stop at reciprocity. If you keep extending the ring to include those who fully reciprocate then you maximize the synergy of the whole and your kin will benefit from that. Stopping at reciprocity is what was driving the beginings of racial science in the 20s and 30s. Can we extend the ring to these people? Will they reciprocate? This process was prevented by the lost battle against the blank slate theory on the one hand and then cemented by the ongoing media / education censorship of the truth: not all human groups or individuals are genetically able or genetically-culturally willing to reciprocate and so they can’t be allowed inside the ring. It’s effectively the same as a virus taking over our nervous system and cutting off all pain, disgust type responses so we keep self-harming without realizing it. 56
Posted by Bill on Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:06 | # Probing Liberalism.
This thread leads all over the place, for me, all interesting stuff. My usual caveat applies.
57
Posted by Zale on Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:42 | #
Reciprocity extends self to the other and thus the question appears rhetorical in that when there is a shift from kinship based reciprocity to non-kinship based reciprocity it (reciprocity) is universalized and therefore without limit (unless civilization is struck down) as Darwin suggests. 58
Posted by Thorn on Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:57 | # Elite Neo-Nazis ... Is Russia Today (RT) Part of the Controlled Media Matrix and the Imposition of Global Government? Thursday, December 13, 2012 – by Anthony Wile
read more>> 59
Posted by Bill on Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:04 | # A blatant copy and paste. VfR 18 December 2012.
… Post a comment:
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Posted by Graham_Lister on Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:45 | #
GW
I think those definitions are rather complimentary. Again I’m not sure on the precise role of Christianity in the rise of liberal modernity – but it’s part of the mix to be sure. After all Christianity is at its core a radically universalistic and emancipatory doctrine - however painful that might be for some to acknowledge.
My own thoughts are that the key process has been the complex interplay of three related phenomena all linked by a particular ‘modern’ model of rationality: the rise of science (and the ontological ground on which religion rested being pulled from behind its feet), the rise of bourgeois capitalism (and the ideological matrix of contract/jurisprudence that it requires) and the revolution in the conceptualisation of the self and the nature of society/authority etc., in what coalesced to become the Enlightenment.
Now it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge the enormous initial benefits - material and immaterial - from the release of such tremendous energies by liberal modernity, but the point is that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future outcomes. The trajectory, contra Whigs of every era, is not an unproblematic one of forever upwards towards the Elysian Fields – or at least the Panglossian neighbourhood in which they might be located. The system of liberal-modernity might be starting to ‘eat’ itself. Someone like Hedges begins to approach this territory in his “The Death of the Liberal Class”. But from nearly all non-liberal points within the ideological firmament I sense thoughtful people are concerned that the future of humanity as such – let alone specific groups - in the ‘global village’ as envisioned by liberals elites in our age of hyper-liberalism (including right-liberals of the Hayekian variety calling themselves ‘conservatives’), is in fact looking more like something painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
Returning to the main issue - to put it very simply indeed we changed, for various reasons, from being Aristotelian and became Cartesian. Of course there could be many a very long book examine the origins of modernity and its instrumental and expressive modalities – indeed I am attempting to read some of those long books such as “The Passage West” by Giacomo Marramao – not because I agree with the specifics of his politics (as such) but that he’s on interesting non-liberal ontological territory primarily by seriously engaging with figures such as Spengler, Junger, Schmitt and Heidegger.
Certainly two of Marramao’s key ideas are that we must abandon the classic Western pretension to universal norms of democracy and reason - or indeed the arrogance that European ways of being can and should be thought universal – no, no, no! There are many ways of being in the world, just pick up any introduction to anthropology. Of course some very basic near-universals exist in socio-cultural systems but there is far more heterogeneity (some of it incommensurate or nearly so) than homogeneity between such systems. To deny this and suggest our way of being is THE way of being for all people (reflected of course in such formulations as the ideological mythos of America and Americanism) is a grotesque act of hubris which left unchecked will destroy us. One cannot replace the population of Norway with Koreans and it still be Norway in any real sense. Not all things can actually be entered into a calculus of fungibility.
Marramao’s second notion is the need for a “universal politics of difference”. Of course it all depends on how one defines this. Liberalism is a universal politics of difference with regard to individuals as individuals – that all ‘secondary’ categorisation is illegitimate if such reduces the individual’s ability to exercise their powers and enjoy their individual rights etc. Within the broadly liberal sensibility the secondary categories are in not quite ‘unreal’ but they are epiphenomena and to be disregarded beyond forbidding discrimination against individuals on the basis of such possible classifications. This is of course a very flat, reductionist and deflationary socio-political ontology. Perhaps instead a ‘universal politics of difference’ is better understood within the context of a expansive and extended socio-political ontology – one that is grounded in the notion that reality itself - including the human part of reality – is differentiated, stratified and hierarchical in nature. Under a model of ontological stratification a ‘universal politics of difference’ can perhaps incorporate that notion social ‘wholes’ are just as real as individual ‘parts’, yet the wholes are also are distinct and ‘emergent’ phenomena in their own right, thus must be part of any legitimate account of political and socio-cultural life. Indeed not do does so does great harm and is a monstrous collective injustice.
But as I pointed out in my review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” injustice is phenomenon which unless recognised as such cannot be salient as a conceptual framework or ethical category for its victims and hence it will remain political inert. To act upon injustice one must first ‘see’ it. But again contra Hayek et al., notions of justice have to be expanded beyond the mere individual ‘part’ and understood in the context of an expanded socio-political ontology. A new political ethics that confronts the injustices of liberal modernity – which actually requires an politically intelligent synthesis of global and local outlooks to defeat the most toxic elements acting within the ‘system’ on an issue by issue basis. For example, the crazy financial regime/Ponzi scheme of an, at minimum, $700 trillion ‘free-market’ of derivatives etc., (which is essentially parasitic speculation - by another name - for the massive enrichment of a tiny global elite) is very hard to combat on a national basis alone. But it absolutely must be brought under control.
I suppose to sum up the key aspect of a new political ethics is that the collective subject we call ‘a people’ or ‘a nation’ can legitimately demand collective ownership of the geographic places where they live and the right to their own collective imaginative and cultural space (which to be authentically theirs has to pretty much maximally socio-culturally and ethno-linguistically homogeneous in nature). Something that liberal cosmopolitanism cannot possible agree to. Of course it’s much harder to have a culturally coherent and morally respectable argument for such homogeneity in fundamentally ‘hybrid zones’ such as almost all of the ‘New World’. But I think it’s perfectly reasonable, politically and morally, for say the Japanese to claim Japan as their own on the basis of their autochthonous status – equally this is true for the European peoples in Europe – if it’s not ‘ours’ then who the hell does it ‘belong’ too?
Sorry GW that’s all a bit rambling but it’s late and I’m tired! And btw apologies to Danny too on this front!