FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:01 am
Besides that you constantly spam Nazi texts, always attended with your totally unconvincing claims to be just a completely dispassionate outsider. You do endorse ethno-states and you will never say what level of force you are willing to use to make them happen.
There are a few reasons why I value the observations that you make and why I believe it valid, necessary and even responsible to respond to what you say — the accusations that you level against what I do. What I do is bring topics, often forbidden topics, out into the open so that they can be seen and examined through what we all tend to agree are our philosophical lenses. Supposedly, we are driven by an objective standpoint and conceive it possible to examine, for example, a heated issue with balanced objectivity. If there is one thing that stands out when reading the posts of the myriad opinionators here, especially the dominant ones, it is that philosophical objectivity is in fact a farce.
Allow me to clarify: I assert that it is vitally important to examine our present and what is going on in as objective a way as is possible. That is, to stand back from what is occurring and to achieve some *distance*. I might alter this assertion to say that we should be capable, and I believe it is beneficial for us, to interpose
various lenses between ourselves and what we see, and to
switch lenses to enable us to achieve different conclusive opinions. We might at some final point, if there is a final point, arrive at some meta-conclusion, some absolutist finality, but it seems to me that philosophy is not the medium amenable to
absolute conclusiveness.
I am aware of an important and essential issue: I could share ideas and perspectives here and *out there* in the world that would be understood to be so egregious as to warrant my banning. I do not really mean myself, I mean any one of us. I mean that in our present climate and the present dispensation that there really are entire sets of ideas, views, perspectives, orientations and certainly ideological postures that are so egregious, or have been said to be such, that really these ideas are forbidden and understood to be
thoughtcrime. “Unthinkable thought” is the phrase Chomsky uses when he describes some of the views and interpretations he works with and which are excluded from the public conversation.
If I had to explain my own *process* over the last decade (now a bit more) I would have to mention and explain how it is that it came about that I resolved to read what are, basically, forbidden texts. So it occurs to me that in the context of this thread — one of those hot topics that embroil our present — it would be interesting to trace out a trajectory. Really, only for the sake of *interesting discussion*.
It was Nietzsche’s
Genealogy of Morals that might be referenced as a strong influence in turning my head around. I do not say either for good or bad, or for good and evil necessarily. So I will only say that Nietzschean dynamite is capable of having very strong effects on how one understands morality and how one examines one’s own formation and the ideological solidities of one’s opinions, one’s perceptual platform, one’s set of defined and *certain* values.
So with that said allow me to mention Ronald Beiner’s 2018 book titled
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right. I bring up this title because this title became a recommended read by some notorious figures
on that Far Right or Dissident Right. I think it was reviewed on Greg Johnson’s Counter-Currents. They referenced it, and they referenced Beiner’s take that Nietzsche is really a dangerous mind and a dangerous figure when the Liberal Dispensation is examined through a
critical lens. But more than merely critical I would say
activist. I.e. those perspectives and that activism which operates with an agenda, with ends in view.
Beiner makes a case for ideological control over
the material. In fact he refused to be advisor on the PhD dissertation committee of Michael Millerman who was studying at a Canadian university. Because Millerman studied, and had an interest in, Right-tending political theory and theorists that are excluded from the acceptable canon. Here is one short talk by Millerman on
The Crisis of Modernity.
The point? Simply to say or to reaffirm what I said above: That we can access platforms, that we can put on different *lenses*, in order to further our (one hopes) objective philosophical project involving seeing and explaining.
to be just a completely dispassionate outsider
Who can be that? How could one arrive at that position? Is it possible? Or must one accept getting there
to a degree?
I want to mention one other thing because of Godelian’s comments. Note that I take Godelian to be just
one more *voice* of an emergent
vox populi seeking to present, to externalize, what seem like emoted ideas. (No offense I hope you understand). It is just these *ideas from the underground* that I make an effort to pay attention to. It is not a question of agreement or disagreement but rather
awareness.
The issue of a flaccid, indecisive, divided, ideological confused, *feminized* Europe (I could go on with qualifiers) is a big deal for those on the Dissident Right. Take Jonathan Bowden and his
grammar of self-intolerance. It is articulated with a sharp rhetorical blade. We must examine the *sentiment* that rises up in people, possibly in men exclusively, that articulates dissatisfaction, often extreme, with the *hyper-liberalism* of the present. It proposes a total reexamination of foundational ideas. This is simply a statement of fact.
Now here is the thing I wanted to mention about the issue of Christian flaccidity (if one accepts that critique) and impotence. I found it surprisingly interesting to read
The Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans by Professor Hans FK Günther. If I am not mistaken Günther was a big National Socialist influence, possibly a favorite. If I remember correctly I think his titles numbered among those on Hitler’s bookshelf (I might also mention that one of Hitler’s admired books was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin if a recent book I read of Hitler’s literary interests is accurate).
Now,
technically, anyone merely
touching a title admired by a Nazi is handling ideological radioactivity, no? Yet when I read the book — thoughtful, thorough, researched — I found it quite interesting but more than that: fair, relevant. The thesis of it can be linked to that of
The Genealogy of Morals insofar as it wants to put emphasis on understanding, valuing and comparing the tradition of cultural Christianity to that of the pagan underbody. But here I must mention that the Nazi regime was
enormously destructive of the European Christian traditions and was extremely oppressive to Catholicism.
Here, ideas (i.e. Günther’s) must be seen as both *dangerous* in Beiner’s sense but also as relevant or perhaps
pertinent is the word. Reading Günther’s book (and many other titles in a similar vein) did not turn me into a goose-stepping Neo-Nazi, but it definitely helped me to understand Indo-Europeanism ffrom a different, an important, angle. The curious next step was to examine the thesis of Richard Noll in
The Aryan Chist: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, that Jung, as a European pagan — and my how pagan he was! — represents in a significant sense a general European spirit that revises, reinterprets, remodels, and recasts Mediterranean Christianity into a
different religious modality. This new modality is part-and-parcel of a
huge intellectual shift of the early 20th century.
The purpose of these references? To point out, again, that everything in our present, all trends, all structures of ideas, all conclusive platforms, can be and should be examined
in detail. Here is what I think is a key: Nothing is quite what it seems. Or, to say it differently, nothing is exactly like what an opponent says it is. When you examine
yourself what theorists have thought and said, by first-hand reading of their materials, it is never quite what the enemies or the opponents say about it.
There is really a great deal (more) to be said if the elements I have brought out here are carefully considered and thought through. And I can assure you:
all of this has direct relevancy to what is going on today in Europe.
