The purpose of this series of essays is to explore the function and effect of a politics of ethnicity, should it prove possible to bring one to the public life of this land.  Properly speaking, within the layout that is in creation at this site, such exploration has to follow on from the work on The Structure Project, ie, on ethnic nationalism’s principles, parts, and processes, and its episteme.  But that, too, is a new venture not much added to at this point.  So it is cheating a bit to categorise work today under the “The Politics Project”.  But we’re going to do it because, well, I want to!  All of the work on this project will be reflective and propositional in kind, and will concern itself principally with the metapolitics of our lived life.  It will not, therefore, venture on to the ground of political argument or activism as such.

1. STOLEN FIRE, TECHNOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE

“Sometimes his genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart. But mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously” ― Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770-1843, the early-Romantic era German poet whose influence upon Heidegger was so strong. 

Some weeks ago Fróði Midjord and Morgoth livestreamed a wide-ranging discussion on many of the issues which presently concern nationalists.  There was much germane and thoughtful comment, as one would expect.  But one sentiment peaked my interest.  It concerned a sentence offered by Martin Heidegger to Der Spiegel on the occasion in 1966 of the last interview he ever gave.  Publishing the interview was held over at his request until after his death in 1976.  That sentence - “Only a god can still save us” - has, unsurprisingly, assumed the status of a final testimony.  Its resignation to the darkness, along with the temptation to the religious to take it as literally as possible, hacks away at the will, as does all defeatism, and runs in the face of the very spirit of creativity which has, in no small part, led us to our present pass.  I want to challenge that resignation, which I will do in the next instalment.  In this one, though, I will just set out my understanding of “the problem”.

At the outset, and for the clarification of any religious literalists who may read this, neither Fróði nor Morgoth (who, by the way, both agreed with Heidegger’s sentiment) are prone to such literalism.  Obviously, it is not the death of the gods which thinking nationalists abhor but the spiral of disconnection, nihilism and degradation which has come after.  A whole (it would seem) indispensable and vivifying life of the spirit, a whole world of connecting traditions and order, a way of thinking about self and kin, has been swept away, condemning us, so it is said, to a death spiral of our own.  Observations to that effect arrived in our culture within sixty years of the start of the Industrial Revolution, and seventy years before Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spoke on the matter.  For example, Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus.

By 1966 the Western half of Heidegger’s Germany was in the full flowering of its Wirtschaftswunder, the post-war economic miracle.  Not only National Socialism’s deeds and dreams but the romantic soul of 18th and 19th century Germany had long since been bombed and burned and carried away in wheelbarrows to the outskirts by the women of the rubble.  What modernity threw up in its place was a Germany of growing civic pride in featureless economic utilitarianism.  In its reflexive, driven focus on a redemption by work and consumption it was as sickly and distancing from the essential as was the worst night-life of Weimar Berlin.  Something American and Jewish had eaten away at the things of the patriotic heart, and substituted the paper-thin public value of loyalty to the corporation.  Perhaps that is what happens in modernity to a people for whom the past is cut off, and may not be visited except with shame, even a patently manufactured shame.  Some miracle, anyway.

This, then, was Heidegger’s Germany at the time of his final pronouncement on the modern and, too, on his grand historiographical revolution, launched with such adventure four decades earlier.  One could be forgiven for thinking that it shows.  The full quote from which those famous words are taken actually reads:

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavours. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

Just for the record, we should note that Heidegger’s testament to the absent god is made not from faith but in hope and preparation, and some playfulness.  His reference to a god carefully avoids any association with the Christian eschatology.  He is not discussing the return of religion.  He is not departing from his long and steadfast opposition to reducing Being to a divine being.  In the manner of the old European mythologies, then, this god of whom he speaks is to be understood as a personified concept.  Students of those mythologies have been exchanging principal for principle for centuries, one notable example of which is Prometheus and his stolen technological fire.

At this point, before we proceed further, I should also register the very modern caveat that, as Heidegger knew very well but, obviously, could not state the fact for public consumption, the “He” of this personified concept is, in fact, a “She”.

Naming the absent goddess

Heidegger’s words above invite a couple of initial observations.

a) In the same year as the Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger published a lengthy essay made from his lecture notes of that time and titled, The end of philosophy and the task of thinking.  It is a philosopher’s reflection on what leads on from philosophy’s incapacity to redeem human being from the age of its undoing.  He distinguishes philosophy from purposive thinking, positing the conclusion of the former as a guide and participant in world-making, and assigning to the latter an on-going, post-metaphysical engagement with a range of questions (we might call them meta-questions) about elements such as rationality, proof, principle and justification.  The essay closes with another question, the final philosophical question, on the ongoing task of thinking itself:

Does the name for the task of thinking then read instead of Being and Time: Opening and Presence?  But where does the opening come from and how is it given? What speaks in the “It gives”?  The task of thinking would then be the surrender of previous thinking to the determination of the matter of thinking.

Obviously, these are questions meant for professional thinkers, not the journalists of Der Spiegel, and probably not laymen like me.  But, anyway, on the matter of opening and presence:

The central section of the Ontological Transit, which is my interpretation of the esoteric pathway of “Opening and Presence”

... and on “the determination of the matter of thinking”, which determination I take to be represented by the esoteric ↔ exoteric distinction, I might have some small thing to say in the second instalment of this essay.

b) Clearly, in this case the personified concept is the power which resolves the modernist crisis of voided meaning in the lived life.  But it is not meaning itself.  It is not even the human truth, shared or otherwise, from which meaning springs.  The personified concept is the deliverer of that truth, which literalises as the feminine spirit of human self-ownership and authenticity.  Her name is Alethea, which translates in ancient Greek as Ἀλήθεια, the spirit of truth, truthfulness and sincerity.  Heidegger has us assigning to her the power of appearing, or unconcealing.  In respect to ideas but not to identity and human being, we could go further still, and assign to her the power of isἐπιφάνεια (epipháneia), which means the appearing of hidden truths.  I would argue that her place of concealment is that point of slippage labelled Lost Intent in the Transit.  Her place of unconcealment is where Intent is (re-) found.  She is there at the fulcrum.  She is, however, a creature of happenstance.  Without our act of finding her she can be elusive, to quote Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
‘Tis since thou are fled away.

Everything depends on which way the goddess happens to be facing, be it towards negation and decline or towards affirmation and ascent.  As we shall see in the next instalment of this essay, it is that happenstance which most confounds our thinking and our will.

Not really technology, more sociobiology

Homo sapiens is not naturally a native of the cold-climate northern hemisphere and must invent his way to life in it, which means he must create a survivable environment from what is otherwise a non-survivable one.  That can only have begun with the most simple of things.  A suitably modest example from four years after Heidegger’s remarks is NASA’s ad hoc solution to the CO2 build-up onboard the Apollo 13 lunar landing module during its return flight to earth.  In double-quick time ground engineers found a way to adapt the CO2 filter from the command module to the otherwise incompatible system in the LEM.  It was done from whatever else happened to be lying around in a tin-can 150,000 miles from earth plus, of course, the indomitable European spirit of invention.  It’s a five-minute lash-up.  It saved three lives.  It brings back to us what technology is for: not advancing blindly for advancement’s sake but for simple survival ... for the life-cause.

The tied-on C02 scrubber from the Apollo 13 mission: the spirit of Western invention, not covered over by technological brilliancy but revealed in its core function of enabling and preserving life.

This example, by the way, reflects nothing on the talents of the other two great, cold-climate northern hemisphere races, or to claim that Eurasians (Russians, for the greater part) or East Asian engineers could not operate under such crushing pressure and produce a like solution.  Cognitively speaking, all three races are Promethean stealers of the creative fire of the gods.  But it is Europeans who have created and created and created, venturing ever onward by their sublime genius in every detail however small, of every field of human endeavour however specialised.  The eastern Slavs have duly followed, and the Chinese have stolen and copied.  The Japanese, with their six extra points of IQ at the mean, have often copied and improved.  But the East Asian IQ, although in Japan it is averagely high, is also distributed narrowly across the population.  Not much idiocy, perhaps.  But, then, not much genius, either (instead, much competence, diligence, cooperation, a certain introversion, organisation, order and conformity).

Europeans exhibit a wide distribution of intelligence, and it seems to be that width plus a high average which largely drive European creative capacity as a whole, of which technological invention is one part.  There will be additional factors.  Individuality is probably one.  Perhaps another is that objectivity which generates the second-order effects of questioning, challenging, venturing.  In any event, we can say that Europeans’ sociobiological traits ... permanent and unstoppable traits ... determine that the drive to advance control over our fate and our environment is likewise unstoppable.

On that basis, the problem of technology is not primarily a problem of inventions as such, or the overall form that invention has taken since the Industrial Revolution.  It is a problem of European creative over-run, and the feedback thereof.  It is a problem of an irrevocable sociobiological trait that, by its narrow but open-ended nature, is always and only exultant in its own blind onward rush.  It is too widely distributed - and too profitable to some - to know order or oversight or any possibility of restraint (or even care until its individual harms become too hard for the profit-makers to ignore).  But to its lasting harms to the inner qualities of the lived life, it remain blind and uncaring to this day.

The bitter irony of technology’s organic root sending forth shoots which strangle the organism itself is doubtless one reason why Heidegger spoke so darkly of it.  He declared it impermeable to philosophy and “all merely human meditations and endeavours”.  So the familiar realms of socio-political analysis, historiographical re-interpretation, original theory ... everything of calculative thinking is without purchase.  In Der Spiegel’s article he explained it thus:

I see the essence of technology in what I call the construct.  On first hearing easily misunderstood, this name points, if it is properly considered, back into the innermost history of metaphysics, which still determines our Dasein today.  The workings of the construct mean: human beings are caught, claimed, and challenged by a power that is revealed in the essence of technology.  The experience that humans are structured by something that they are not themselves, and that they cannot control themselves, is precisely the experience that may show them the possibility of the insight that humans are needed by Being.  The possibility of experience, of being needed, and of being prepared for these new possibilities is concealed in what makes up what is most modern technology’s own.  Thinking can do nothing more than to help humans to this insight, and philosophy is at an end.

So, let’s unpack that.  The statement is in two halves.  The first half speaks of something of the technological world-at-hand which is exciting and seductive but also systematising and, because it is these things, transformational.  It penetrates our life and mind from our very enworldment.  It is wholly immersive, rinsing away past faith and tradition, yes, but, eventually, everything salient from the primordial and the natural.  By immersing us in its zeitgeist, it incorporates us into its materialities such that, without its ongoing-ness, our modern personal lives are inconceivable and civilisation itself - its novel values, its economic form and demographic scale - unsustainable.  Become one with the ownmost potentiality ... the essence ... of the lived-life, it does not stop but vies constantly to become its whole potentiality, literally to makes itself our destiny, as we see now with the apparently irresistible march towards the Singularity of wired transhumanism.

The second half of Heidegger’s statement has a strange, apophatic quality.  It takes us so far, and then falls into silence; but, nonetheless, a silence which gestures.  As noted above, it is not a gesture towards religious belief and piety or, indeed, towards social custom and ancient traditions, because once disintegrated these things cannot be re-constructed by hand, so to speak.  They are emergent forms.  At their genesis they are trait-based correctives to our fallen cognitive state, and not, of course, to technology or liberal modernity or their particular effects which, as noted above, have proved so disintegrating to the lived life.

But neither is it a gesture to any very clear or concrete solution.  Rather, Heidegger tells us to look to our own experience of disintegration as the very mechanism which may, by some spiritual equivalent to biological homeostasis, then direct us to an epochian doorway.  We are, I suppose, to believe that this experience contains some surviving reference to the deep-historical human norm - a measure which can, Heidegger says, reveal Being’s (possibly salvatory) “need for humans”.  That need is contained in “what makes up what is most modern technology’s own”, and, that, of course, is its genesis in the European sociobiology.

Heidegger, it seems to me, is telling us that the same force which brought forth the technological ... the force of genetic survival and continuity ... also contains the possibility, with the aid of the goddess of truth, to re-order and renew it.  And this is as far as we can go with him.  We stand in our own essence like Huxley, naked before the doors of perception, popping the mescalin of preparation and poetry, and waiting for them to open.

In the second instalment of this essay we’ll try to grease the hinges and maybe give the reluctant doors a kick.