Counter-Currents
4,862 words
Ronald Beiner
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018
Ronald Beiner is a Canadian Jewish political theorist who teaches at the University of Toronto. I’ve been reading his work since the early 1990s, starting with What’s the Matter with Liberalism?[1] I have always admired Beiner’s clear and lively writing and his ability to see straight through jargon and cant to hone in on the flaws of the positions he examines. He is also refreshingly free of Left-wing sectarianism and willing to engage with political theorists of the Right, like Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus, although I was delighted that a theorist of his caliber had decided to write a book on the contemporary far Right, I was also worried that he might, after a typically open and searching engagement with our outlook, discover some fatal flaw.
But it turns out that an honest confrontation with our movement is a bridge too far. Beiner does not even wish to engage with our ideas, much less critique them. Instead, he uses the rise of the Right simply as lurid packaging to sell his publisher a book that focuses on Nietzsche and Heidegger. (The cover is of the torchlight march at Unite the Right, which is supposed to look sinister.)
Beiner’s target is not the Right, but the Left, specifically those who think that Nietzsche and Heidegger can be profitably appropriated for Left-wing causes. To combat this view, he mounts a persuasive case that Nietzsche and Heidegger are deeply anti-liberal thinkers. Thus, although Dangerous Minds is sensationalist and dismissive in its treatment of our movement, it is nevertheless extremely useful to us. If anyone wants to understand why Nietzsche and Heidegger are so useful to the New Right, Beiner gives a clear and engaging account in a bit more than 100 pages.
Since Beiner wants to cast our movement in the worst possible light, he naturally begins with Hailgate:
In the fateful fall of 2016, a far-right ideologue named Richard B. Spencer stirred up some fame for himself by exclaiming in a conference packed with his followers not far from the White House: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” On the face of it, this mad proclamation would appear to have nothing in common with the glorious tradition of Western philosophy. (p. 1)
But think again.
Beiner then quotes Spencer denouncing “fucking middle class” values and proclaiming “I love empire, I love power, I love achievement.” We even learn from a Jewish female reporter that Spencer will sometimes “get a boner” from reading about Napoleon. (Another triumph of press engagement.)
This is Nietzsche’s work, declares Beiner.
Beiner goes on to call Spencer a “lunatic ideologue” (p. 11) and an advocate of “virulently antiliberal, antidemocratic radicalism” (p. 12). He blames it all on a graduate seminar on Nietzsche that Spencer took at the University of Chicago. This is laying it on a bit thick, since Spencer is not offering a system of ideas. He’s just dropping Nietzsche’s name to impress middlebrow journalists. Perhaps sensing this, Beiner turns his attention to a prolific author of essays and books, Alexander Dugin. Beiner easily establishes the Nietzschean and Heideggerian pedigree of Dugin’s dangerous ideas.
Naturally, at this point, I was wondering if I was next, so I flipped to the back of the book to see if my name appeared in the index. But there is no index. (This from a serious academic publisher?) So I continued to read. By the end, I was a bit relieved, and maybe a bit miffed, to receive no mention at all in Dangerous Minds. Nor is Counter-Currents mentioned by name, although it is referred to on page 12 as “One of the typically odious far-right websites” and on page 150 as “Another far-right outfit of the same ilk” as Arktos. In the first case, Beiner refers to James O’Meara’s review of Jason Jorjani’s Prometheus and Atlas, but he does not name O’Meara or give the URL of the review.[2] (Jorjani is, however, singled out for abuse as a “crackpot philosopher.”) In the second case, Beiner provides the URL of my Heidegger commemoration but does not cite the author or title.[3] Beiner is known as a Left-wing admirer of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. These glaring oversights might lead those of a Straussian bent to think that Beiner regards Counter-Currents, James O’Meara, me, and perhaps Collin Cleary,[4] who is also noticeably omitted, to be of central importance. But of course he has plausible deniability.
Beiner zeroes in on equality as the essential issue that divides the Left and the Right:
A view of society where all individuals are fundamentally equal or a view of society where people can live meaningful lives only under the banner of fundamental hierarchy: this is an either/or, not a moral-political choice that can be submitted to compromise or splitting the difference. . . . [O]ne either sees egalitarianism as essential to the proper acknowledgement of universal human dignity, or one sees it as the destruction of what’s most human because it’s incompatible with human nobility rightly understood. (p. 8)
This is basically correct, but I have two caveats.
First, I think equality and liberty are genuine political values. But they are not the most important values. Individual self-actualization and the pursuit of the common good are more important than individual liberty, for instance. And justice is more important than equality, since justice requires unequal people receive unequal treatment. But even here, justice demands that unequal status and rewards be proportionate to unequal merit. By this Aristotelian view of justice, however, most forms of contemporary social and political inequality are grossly unjust.
This is why I oppose people on the Right who praise “hierarchy” as such. Not all hierarchies are just. Thus one can defend the principle of hierarchy without embracing ideas like hereditary monarchy, aristocracy, and caste, much less slavery. These are at best merely imperfect historical illustrations of the principle of hierarchy, not blueprints for the future.
Second, the notion of “universal human dignity” is simply an article of faith, like Stoic and Christian ideas of providence and liberal ideas of progress. Progress and providence are our trump cards against ultimate misfortune. They allow us to keep believing that things will work out in the end. “Dignity” is really a trump card against dehumanization: It is the assertion that no matter how botched, degraded, and corrupt a human being is, he is still a human being; he still possesses some intrinsic worth that he can use, as a measure of last resort, to gain some consideration from the rest of us. But when aliens land and discover that human beings are delicious, appeals to the universal dignity of rational beings are not going to save us. True nobility requires that we face reality and dispense with such moralistic illusions.
But that does not mean that we dispense with empathy for others. I have zero patience for people on the Right who defend slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. They are guilty of another form of providential wishful thinking, for they apparently feel themselves invulnerable to the sufferings they would cheerfully inflict on others. It does not occur to them that others could do the same to them. But nobility requires thinking and living without such illusions. You might be high and mighty today, but you are not bulletproof (which is really all Hobbes meant by equality). Empathy allows us to imagine ourselves in the positions of others. Fortune can elevate or lower us into the positions of others. And if none of us are immune to fortune, then we should create a political system in which we could morally bear to trade places with anyone, a society in which all social stations are fundamentally just. This leads to the sort of live-and-let-live ethos that is at the core of ethnonationalism as I define it.
This is why I don’t regard Alexander Dugin and Richard Spencer as contributing anything to White Nationalism, which is the advocacy of ethnic self-determination for all white peoples. Instead, they are simply apologists for Russian imperial revanchism. Spencer regards ethnonationalism as “petty,” siding with the UK against Scottish independence, the EU against Brexit, and Spain against Catalan independence. But although he opposes the UK leaving the EU, he opposes Ukraine joining it. He praises the EU as a transnational, imperial organization—but not NATO. Clearly, he is more interested in shilling for Russian geopolitical interests than in setting forth a coherent moral and political framework for white survival. I can’t blame Beiner for focusing on Dugin and Spencer, however, because they embrace all of Nietzsche’s most lurid and questionable ideas as well as his good ones.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here
Beiner on Nietzsche
According to Beiner’s chapter on “Reading Nietzsche in an Age of Resurgent Fascism,” the “one central, animating Nietzschean idea” is: “Western civilization is going down the toilet because of too much emphasis on truth and rationality and too much emphasis on equal human dignity” (p. 24). This passage also illustrates the vulgar and often hysterical tone of Beiner’s polemic. Dangerous Minds has a rambling, informal, often autobiographical style that makes it read like an extended blog post. Beiner also peppers his prose with exclamation points, sometimes four or five to the page, to drive his points home. I began to worry that he would soon resort to emoticons.
Nietzsche offers two arguments against liberalism. First, liberalism destroys the meaning of life. Second, liberalism destroys human nobility.
For Nietzsche, a meaningful life requires a normative culture as the context or “horizon” in which each individual is immersed and formed. In short, a meaningful life is rooted in ethnic identity, although Nietzsche does not put it in these terms, as he was deeply alienated from and ambivalent about his own German identity. A normative culture provides an encompassing worldview and a hierarchy of values. These need not be “true” in any metaphysical sense in order to provide foundations for a meaningful life, hence the danger of modernity’s high valuation of truth and rationality. These horizons are always plural (there are many different cultures), and they are closed (they generate differences between insiders and outsiders, us and them; thus they are “political” in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the word).
Liberalism destroys meaning because it is cosmopolitan and egalitarian. Its cosmopolitanism opens horizons to other cultures and undermines attachment to one’s own culture. Its egalitarianism overthrows value hierarchies that make people feel bad about themselves. The result is the collapse of rootedness and meaning and the emergence of nihilism. This is why Nietzsche “regards old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberalism—to say nothing of radicalized twentieth- and twenty-first century versions—as rendering culture per se impossible” (p. 34).
Beiner doesn’t offer a very clear account of why Nietzsche thinks liberalism undermines human nobility. The short answer is that it is simply the political application of the slave revolt in morals, in which the aristocratic virtues of the ancients were transmuted into Christian and eventually liberal vices, and the vices of the enslaved and downtrodden were transmuted into virtues.
But what makes us noble in the first place? Like Hegel, Nietzsche believes that human nobility shows itself by triumphing over the fear of death and loss and doing beautiful and good things in spite of them. Thus, human nobility is essentially connected with facing up to the tragic character of human life and finding the strength to carry on.
Liberalism, like Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity, is anti-tragic because it is based on faith in providence, the idea that the universe is ruled by and directed toward the good—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Providence denies the ultimate reality of loss, finitude, and evil, blinding us to the tragic dimension of life and replacing it with the stoner mantra that “It’s all good.” It is a delusion of ultimate metaphysical invulnerability to evil and loss.
Modern liberals replace faith in providence with faith in progress, which they believe will result in the perfection of mankind and the amelioration of human suffering and evils. It is a false vision of the world that smothers the possibility of human nobility. Although Beiner has the chutzpah to suggest that maybe Nietzscheans can ennoble themselves by enduring life in the “iron cage” of modernity and learning to love the Last Man (p. 116). (Why not ennoble oneself even more by living with head-lice as well?)
The plurality of horizons also means the possibility of existential conflict and the necessity of choosing and taking responsibility for one’s choices. As Schmitt argued, however, the whole liberal ethos is to replace the government of responsible choosers—the sovereign—with the government of laws, rules, and anonymous bureaucrats.
Beiner doesn’t delve too deeply into Nietzsche’s views of nobility because he wants to dismiss them based on Nietzsche’s praise of slavery, caste, war, and cruelty, which did accompany the emergence of aristocratic values. Furthermore, the leisure that gave rise to science and high culture was secured by the labor of slaves.
However, one can legitimately ask if we need to become barbarians again to bring about a rebirth of aristocratic values and high culture. For instance, the advocates of Social Credit—the preferred economic theory of interwar Anglophone fascists—envisioned a world in which nobility and creativity are unleashed once machines relieve us all of the necessity of work.[5]
But if we cannot renew civilization without starting over from scratch, then I would gladly hit the reset button rather than allow the world to decline endlessly into detritus. Thus, on Nietzschean and Heideggerian grounds, it makes sense to try to renew the world, because if one fails, that failure might contribute to the civilizational reset that we need. Indeed, the more catastrophic the failure, the greater the chance of a fresh start. The only way we can’t win is if we don’t try.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s From Plato to Postmodernism here
Beiner on Heidegger
Beiner’s chapter on “Reading Heidegger in an Age of Resurgent Fascism” is less incisive than his account of Nietzsche, largely because he does not see how close Heidegger really is to Nietzsche. Beiner takes Heidegger’s question of Being at face value and finds it rather bizarre that Heidegger could think that modern civilization is going to hell because of forgetting about Being. But for Heidegger, Being = meaning, and the modern oblivion of Being is basically what Nietzsche meant by the collapse of closed normative horizons and the rise of nihilism. Indeed, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein simply refers to man as a being situated within and defined by horizons of meaning. The occlusion of these horizons by the false individualism and cosmopolitanism of modernity leads to nihilism, a life deprived of meaning.
Heidegger thought National Socialism could bring about the spiritual renewal of the German people—and presumably any other nation that tried it—by rejecting cosmopolitanism and individualism and reaffirming the rootedness, community, and the closed horizon of the nation. He rejected National Socialism when he came to see it as just another form of modern technological nihilism. Nietzsche, of course, rejected German nationalism, but Heidegger’s thinking was truer to the implications of Nietzsche’s thinking about the closed cultural horizons that grant meaning.
Beiner is at his best in his reading of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” his post-war statement publicly inaugurating “the late Heidegger.” Beiner correctly discerns that Heidegger’s lament against the “homelessness” of modern man and his loss of Heimat (homeland) is an expression of the same fundamentally reactionary, anti-modern, anti-cosmopolitan, and pro-nationalist sentiments that led him to embrace National Socialism. Indeed, there’s good reason to think that Heidegger never changed his fundamental political philosophy at all. The only thing that changed was his evaluation of National Socialism and his adoption of a more oblique and esoteric way of speaking about politics under the repressive conditions of the Occupation and the Federal Republic. Carrying out Heidegger’s project of offering a case for a non-nihilistic, non-totalitarian form of ethnonationalism is the project of the New Right as I define it.
You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here
Heidegger & the Holocaust
Beiner, like many Jewish commentators, seems to feel that Heidegger owes him a personal apology for the Holocaust. We are told that Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust is unforgivable. But when we point out that Heidegger did say something about the Holocaust, namely that it was a sinister application of mechanized modern mass slaughter to human beings, we are told that this view is also unforgivable, since the Holocaust somehow transcends all attempts to classify and understand it. Which would seem to require that we say nothing about it at all, but we have already learned that this is unforgivable as well.
Beiner tells the story of Rudolf Bultmann’s visit to Heidegger after the war, when he told Heidegger, “Now you must like Augustine write your retractions [Retractiones] . . . in the final analysis for the truth of your thought.” Bultmann continues: “Heidegger’s face became a stony mask. He left without saying anything further” (p. 119).
Beiner treats this as outrageous. But Heidegger’s reaction is not hard to understand. He had nothing to retract. He felt that he had done nothing wrong. He was not responsible for the war or the Holocaust. They were none of his doing or his intention. They were part and parcel of the very nihilism that he opposed. The fact that the National Socialist regime went so terribly wrong did not refute Heidegger’s basic diagnosis of the problems of modern rootlessness and nihilism but rather proved how all-pervasive they were. Nor did anything the Nazis did refute the deep truth of ethnonationalism as the political corollary of spiritually awakening from the nightmare of liberal modernity. Thus Heidegger absolutely refused to say anything about the war or the Holocaust that could be interpreted as conceding that modern liberal democracy had somehow been proven true. Instead, he continued to make essentially the same arguments as he made before the war, but in more esoteric terms by focusing on rootlessness and technology.
Bultmann was telling Heidegger to lie, to retract beliefs he believed were true, and to do it in the name of “the truth of [his] thought” when in fact the only motive could be to win the approval of the victors. But that approval was something Heidegger decided to do without. Frankly, Bultmann was making an indecent proposal, and Heidegger’s stony silence was admirably restrained.
Beiner mentions that according to Gadamer, Heidegger “was so preoccupied by modernity’s forgetfulness of Being [rootlessness, nihilism] that even the Nazi genocide ‘appeared to him as something minimal compared to the future that awaits us’” (p. 107). Here’s another unforgivable statement breaching Heidegger’s unforgivable silence. But this unforgivable statement is, unfortunately, quite prophetic. For the consummation of global technological civilization, including the erasure of borders and the destruction of roots, will lead to a genocide far vaster and more complete than the Holocaust. I refer the reader to my chapters “White Extinction” and “White Genocide” in The White Nationalist Manifesto and especially my essay “Why the Holocaust Happened, and Why It Won’t Happen Again” in Toward a New Nationalism.[6]
You can buy Collin Cleary’sWhat is a Rune?, featuring extensive discussions of Heidegger, here
A New Age of Gods?
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger think that spiritual health requires unreflective belief in and commitment to a closed, normatively binding cultural horizon. Christianity, post-Socratic philosophy, and the Enlightenment, however, made self-reflection and universal truth into transcendent values. But as Nietzsche argued, this was a self-defeating move, for Christianity could not stand up to rational criticism. Reason soon escaped the control of the Church, which led to the downfall of Christianity (Nietzsche’s “death of God”), the erasure of the West’s horizon, and the rise of modern nihilism. It follows that the return to spiritual health requires the emergence of a new age of unreflective belief and commitment. Giambattista Vico called this an “Age of Gods,” the first age of a new historical cycle.
The great question is: Can a new “Age of Gods” emerge within the context of our present civilization, or must the modern world perish utterly—completely liquidating the Western tradition of philosophy, science, and liberalism—so that mankind can truly believe, belong, and obey again? The new horizons and myths that we need, moreover, cannot be “chosen,” for adopting a belief system as a matter of choice is not an alternative to nihilism, it is just an expression of it. Genuine belief is not chosen. It chooses you. It does not belong to you. You belong to it.
Nietzsche believed that a new age of gods could be imposed by great philosopher-legislators who could create new myths and new tables of values. Under Nietzsche’s sway, Heidegger believed this as well, and it accounts for why he thought National Socialism could lead to a spiritual renewal of Germany. It was only later that Heidegger realized that National Socialism was not an alternative to nihilism but an expression of it.
It was at this point that Heidegger began his great confrontation with Nietzsche in the mid-1930s. According to Gadamer, Heidegger once said “Nietzsche ruined me.”[7] I think Nietzsche ruined Heidegger by offering him nihilism as a cure for nihilism. Nietzsche made Heidegger a Nazi. Heidegger overcame Nazism by overcoming Nietzsche.
In Heidegger’s later terminology, Nietzsche and National Socialism were both “humanistic,” premised on the idea that the human mind creates culture, whereas in fact culture creates the human mind. No genuine belief can be chosen. It has to seize us. This is one of the senses of Heidegger’s later concept of Ereignis, often translated “the event of appropriation”: The beginning of a new historical epoch seizes and enthralls us. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s later claim that “Only a god can save us now”—as opposed to a philosopher-dictator.
One could, however, read Nietzsche in a non-humanistic way, if one sees his rhapsodies about the Übermensch, the philosopher-legislator, and the coming century of global wars (yes, Nietzsche predicted that) not as a solution to modern nihilism, but as a way of intensifying it to the breaking point to accelerate the downfall of the modern world and inaugurate a new age of gods. (“That which is falling should also be pushed.”) If this is Nietzsche’s true view, then offering nihilism to cure nihilism is not a self-contradiction, it is just sound homeopathic medicine.
Beiner asks “are any of us really prepared to entertain the possibility of the comprehensive cancelling-out of modernity to which Heidegger in his radicalism seems committed?” (p. 105). Elsewhere he asks “. . . with what do we undertake to replace [liberal modernity]? A regime of warriors and priests? A return from Enlightenment to magic?” (p. 132). But Beiner is asking these questions from within liberal modernity, and of course from within that perspective, people are going to cling to liberalism simply out of fear. From Heidegger’s point of view, we will only have a solution when individuals can no longer pose such questions. Instead, the answers will be imposed upon us by historical forces outside our comprehension or control.
A Smug Criticism of Smugness
Beiner’s conclusion, “How to Do Theory in Politically Treacherous Times,” is, like the rest of his book, directed to Leftist academics. He makes a strong case against the smugness and complacency of contemporary political theorists, who think they can ignore the Right because we have been refuted by history: “For Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas, Nietzsche has been refuted by history and sociology. He hasn’t! He can only be refuted by a more compelling account of the human good” (p. 125). This is excellent advice, but it ill-accords with Beiner’s own supremely smug, question-begging, and dismissive tone throughout Dangerous Minds. Judging from what he does, as opposed to what he says, Beiner’s real aim is not to intellectually engage the Right, but to censor and suppress it. But if Beiner really does want to debate the philosophical foundations of the New Right, I’m game.
Should We Read Heidegger & Nietzsche?
If Nietzsche and Heidegger are so dangerous to liberal democracy, shouldn’t something be done to keep their books out of the hands of impressionable young men?
Beiner ends his discussion of Nietzsche by referring to Leo Strauss’s advice to Canadian conservative political philosopher George Grant, who was about to embark on a series of popular radio lectures on Nietzsche. Strauss viewed Nietzsche as a profoundly dangerous thinker and advised Grant not to talk about Nietzsche at all but simply refer to his “epigones” Freud and Weber. The only reason Beiner brings this up, of course, is to plant the idea that academics should drop Nietzsche from the canon. Beiner, however, strenuously denies that this is his intent in his Introduction:
Hopefully no reader of my book will draw from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche and Heidegger—that is, stop reading them. [Of course reading them does not necessarily entail teaching them, especially to undergraduates.] On the contrary, I think that we need to read them in ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life and hence what defines that view of life. But if one is handling intellectually radioactive materials, one has to be much less naïve about what one is dealing with. . . . We need to open our eyes, at once intellectually, morally, and politically, to just how dangerous they are. (p. 14)
But this seems disingenuous in light of Beiner’s repeated assertion that Nietzsche and Heidegger should have censored their own ideas insofar as they are dangerous to liberal modernity:
There is a kind of insane recklessness to Nietzsche—as if nothing he could write, no matter how irresponsible, no matter how inflammatory, could possibly do any harm. All that matters is raising the stakes, and there is no such thing as raising the stakes too high. (p. 63)
One has to ask: “To whom does Beiner think Nietzsche is being irresponsible? What could his thought possibly harm?” The answer, of course, is the modern liberal democratic world, the world that Nietzsche rejects, the world that Nietzsche crafted his doctrines to destroy.
Beiner is even more blatant in his advocacy of self-censorship in Heidegger’s case:
Near the end of his life, Heidegger decided to include the Black Notebooks (including explicitly racist passages conjuring up a diabolical conspiracy on the part of “World Judaism” [sic: World Jewry]) in the official Collected Works, whereas any reasonably sane person would have burned them, or at least burned the most incriminating passages. It’s as if he either were trying to spur a revival of fascist ideology or intended to confess to the world just how grievously stained he had been by that ideology. All of this is thoroughly damning. (pp. 113–14)
Again, one must ask: “Sane by whose standards? Incriminating to whom? Damning by whose standards?” The answer, of course, is: modern liberal democrats. But Heidegger thought these people were intellectually benighted and morally corrupt. So why should he censor his thought to conform to their sensibilities? To hell with them. He was addressing himself to freer minds, to a better world, to generations yet to come.
At the beginning of his Heidegger chapter, Beiner also writes:
The question I’m raising in this chapter is whether, finding ourselves now in a political landscape where the possibility increasingly looms of Heidegger as a potential resource for the far right, it might be best for left Heideggerianism (a paradox to begin with) to close up shop. (p. 67)
Since virtually everyone teaching Heidegger in academia today is a Leftist, this basically amounts to removing Heidegger from the canon. Beiner’s talk of looming possibilities and potential resources is off the mark, for Heidegger already is a resource and inspiration for the New Right, and he knows this. (Frankly, I hope Left-wing Heideggerians close up shop soon. It would be an ideal opportunity to launch the Heidegger Graduate School.[8])
It is absurd to wish that Nietzsche and Heidegger had censored their ideas to remove their challenges to the system they despised and wished to destroy. If liberals want to stop these ideas from influencing policy, they need to refute them. Demanding censorship is simply an admission that one cannot refute ideas rationally and thus must repress them. Asking one’s opponents to engage in self-censorship takes some brass. If liberals can’t refute anti-liberals like Nietzsche and Heidegger, they are just going to have to screw up their resolve and do their own dirty work. This is hardly a stretch, sadly, since the suppression of dissent is second nature to modern academics. It’s really all they have left.
Indeed, if wishing aloud that Nietzsche and Heidegger had censored themselves has any practical meaning today, it is as a suggestion that political theorists and philosophers censor themselves and their syllabi, i.e., remove Nietzsche and Heidegger from the canon.
If Beiner is really arguing that Leftists should stop teaching Nietzsche and Heidegger, he apparently did not anticipate what would happen if his book fell into the hands of Rightist readers like me. For Dangerous Minds, despite its obnoxious rhetoric and smug dismissal of our movement, is a very helpful introduction to Nietzsche and Heidegger as anti-liberal thinkers. Thus I recommend it highly. And if I have anything to say about it, this book will help create a whole lot more dangerous minds, a whole new generation of Right-wing Nietzscheans and Heideggerians.
If you want to support Counter-Currents, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.
Don’t forget to sign up for the twice-monthly email Counter-Currents Newsletter for exclusive content, offers, and news.
Notes
[1] Ronald Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
[2] James J. O’Meara, “Jason Jorjani’s Prometheus & Atlas,” Counter-Currents, September 26, 2016.
[3] Greg Johnson, “Remembering Martin Heidegger: September 30, 1889–May 26, 1976,” Counter-Currents, September 30, 2017.
[4] Collin Cleary, “Heidegger: An Introduction for Anti-Modernists,” Parts 1–4, Counter-Currents, June 4–7, 2012.
[5] See Greg Johnson, “Money for Nothing,” Counter-Currents, January 17, 2012; reprinted in Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).
[6] Greg Johnson, The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018). Greg Johnson, Toward a New Nationalism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).
[7] Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger und Nietzsche. Zu Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht,” Aletheia 9/10 (1996): 19.
[8] See “Graduate School with Heidegger.”
23 comments
Great essay! A few philosophical questions about this:
“Providence denies the ultimate reality of loss, finitude, and evil, blinding us to the tragic dimension of life and replacing it with the stoner mantra that “it’s all good.” It is a delusion of ultimate metaphysical invulnerability to evil and loss.”
You seem to be saying that ultimate reality is tragic: there is “loss, finitude and evil” and, in reality, we are vulnerable to these things rather than invulnerable. Liberalism is a delusion because it denies this ultimate reality. And by implication, Christianity and any other world-view that offers a vision of “metaphysical invulnerability” is also a delusion. But–if that’s what you mean to say–isn’t this claim about the nature of ultimate reality just as much an article of faith as liberalism or Christianity? As far as I can tell, the question of whether ultimate reality is tragic or anti-tragic is not one that we can ever properly answer intellectually. There is no way to prove empirically or philosophically (or in any other way) that the ultimate nature of things is tragic–for example, that we are finite, that our losses or injuries are never going to be compensated or redeemed somehow. (Nor is there any way to prove that they will be.) But then, again, isn’t the tragic view itself something that has to be accepted on faith?
I’m also wondering about the situation of the right-wing critic of liberalism or modernity who regards the anti-tragic world-view as a “delusion”. In effect, the critique is that this world-view is not true: reality isn’t really like that. But this perspective seems to be in tension with the Nietzschean or Heideggerian idea that what we need is a “horizon” of meaning which need not be true, that the quest for objective universal truth is destructive insofar as it ends up eliminating any “horizon”. Aren’t you in effect arguing that the “horizon” of liberalism or modernity–constituted by notions of equality and dignity and freedom, etc–should be rejected because it isn’t true? But then isn’t exactly the same kind of “nihilistic” thinking that you’re criticizing? I am not saying that you’re contradicting yourself. But I find the situation paradoxical.
I am saying that reality as we experience it is tragic, and claims that “It’s all good” are lies that weak people tell themselves to spare themselves the necessity of being strong. The two beliefs are not on equal footing. The first is based on reality as we experience it. The second posits a better world that we don’t experience. The first is not a matter of faith. The second is.
Sure, horizons need not be true to give people meaning. Think of myths and religions. But in the end, I am a metaphysical realist, so I believe that some horizons are better than others. Some worldviews take better account of facts, are more internally coherent, and have better explanatory power than others. Some cultivate human greatness while others let the worst flourish. Philosophy and science can get to objective, universal truths. But we also need to recognize that this is not healthy for most people, that it leads to the collapse of culture and meaning.
Liberal modernity is a false worldview and it leads to disastrous consequences. The solution, as I envision it, is to deconstruct and de-institutionalize this worldview, at which point both human nature and organic cultural identities will reassert themselves, for these have not so much been replaced by modernity as covered over by it. Modernity is not so much a new age, a break with the past, as it is a false consciousness that depends upon the persistence of archaic and natural values even as it derides them. Thus, I do not see the solution to modernity as moving forward or backward to a different time, but as going from surface to depth in the present, clearing away the encrustation of false consciousness and false values, so that natural and authentic historical values can reassert themselves.
Excellent. I wonder if you’d agree to this: Liberal modernity is based on the provably false idea that “It’s all good” within the immanent, empirical world. Whereas earlier or non-liberal-modern teachings such as Christianity or Stoicism are based on the unprovable (and possibly true) idea that “It’s all good” in some transcendental dimension. And so these various “anti-tragic” world-views are radically different. Only liberal modernity is provably false, nihilistic and destructive. (In part because the transcendental version can make people strong enough to accept the tragic nature of this world without becoming Last Men.)
I don’t really agree with your last point.
Can you elaborate on why objective truth is harmful to many people and potentially destructive to culture?
Consider how important religion is to culture and individual lives. Yet they can’t all be true.
I think this argument is faulty. Suppose that all religions but one are false. Then the example shows that some false beliefs are good for culture and individual life. It doesn’t follow that any particular true beliefs are bad, or that if these false beliefs were replaced by true ones the results would be bad for culture or individual life. Maybe the truth in this area is some particular religion, and maybe if everyone believed that one true religion all cultures and lives would be just as good or better than they actually are. Or maybe the truth is some set of religious claims common to many or even all religions, and all religious people would be far worse off if they didn’t believe those religious truths (as seems to be the case with modern people who reject all religious belief).
I was kicking and screaming while reading this essay. Unreflective belief in a closed, normatively binding cultural horizon? That’s for schoolchildren!
But with this amendment, I can almost sign up for this. It should be in the original text.
I disagree with Johnson’s position that the proverb, “It’s all good,” is in the wrong. “It’s all good” is obviously the pagan Perennial Philosophy that, “all is one.” (Because everything is the result of cause and effect, everything is interconnected, everything is the way it has to be, thus all is good, perfect.) …Nietzsche’s formula was to say “yes” to the tragic.
Very interesting article. I’m motivated to go read some Heidegger now.
One question for you. You wrote: “Providence denies the ultimate reality of loss, finitude, and evil, blinding us to the tragic dimension of life and replacing it with the stoner mantra that “it’s all good.””
What is “evil” in the sense you mean? Do you believe there is a disembodied, malevolent force in the universe that does harm to people? What is this thing called “evil” that you believe has ultimate reality?
I don’t care for the concept because to me it is abstract and vague. The things we call “evil” are actually just human beings seeking the emotional pleasures of power over other human beings. We are wired in such a way that it feels good to have power, and some people are wired with less empathy than others and give those impulses free rein to inflict pain on others in order to feel the emotional satisfactions, the dopamine rushes, of strength and domination and control. There’s nothing mysterious or supernatural or abstract about it. It’s not some disembodied “evil” force doing it; it’s human beings responding to very natural evolved impulses to dominate other human beings. People have been doing cruel things to other people since the first proto-people enjoyed bashing in the skulls of the competing tribe down the valley.
I think Greg was referring to the mentality that many have in the face of real evil, such as having a loved one senselessly and brutally murdered. They fall back on the belief that “God works in mysterious ways” and “everything happens for a reason”, instead of looking at FBI crime statistics and realizing if they lived in a better neighborhood (or a white ethnostate), the odds of their loved one being murdered would be much lower and thus likely prevented.
To think in those terms one must first admit that not all people are alike (God didn’t “make us all equal”), and that the kinds of psychopaths you describe are, in many cases, simply irredeemable. How many Christians have you heard say they forgive the criminals that victimized them? You can ascribe whatever defects you want to explain why they do the things they do, and I’m sure Greg would agree with you that diagnosing the reasons are important. The problem is most people find that kind of behavior incomprehensible, which is why the label “evil” is useful, and it is too easy to avoid thinking about these things if you think there’s some sort of master plan at work that will solve everything.
Same thing goes for environmental protection, for example. People who think the Earth was gifted to us by a God, to be exploited as we see fit, and it will all work out because that’s God’s plan are equally misguided.
Speaking of dangerous thinking and the holocaust, I’m wondering what your take on the 6 million is, Greg. As others have pointed out the holocaust has become the new Foundation Myth of the West and has worked as a replacement for atheistic Jews.
I have reviewed a chunk of revisionist material over the past couple of years on sites like Codoh.com and have found it in equal parts shocking and convincing, from the kangaroo court that was the Nuremberg trials, the complete lack of evidence and investigation of extraordinary claims, the ever-shrinking estimated death tolls, all the way to the outlawing of “denial” in so many countries.
I think there are strong parallels between the gas chambers and the “soap accusation”, both in terms of where and how these stories originated, and how they grew over time such that it seemed almost every survivor repeated them as if they were fact. That many so-called survivors have been outed as liars, or made absurd unbelievable claims that not even holocaust scholars would stand by hardly does them any favors.
I’d love to know what you think of it, but I know it’s a topic even Kevin MacDonald avoids so I’ll understand if you’d rather not talk about it. But I think if more people knew about the plot holes in the holocaust script, we’d have a much easier time convincing normies that our ideas don’t necessarily lead to genocide (particularly if we can prevent outbreaks of typhus).
There are plenty of absurd and unbelievable claims, fake victims, and fake witnesses connected with any major historical event. They are not proof that the underlying event did not take place in some form.
Fortunately, I don’t think that the Holocaust in its canonical or revised forms is relevant to making a case for ethnonationalism.
https://counter-currents.com/2014/04/dealing-with-the-holocaust/
https://counter-currents.com/2016/03/why-the-holocaust-happened/
Ah, thanks. I mostly agree with what you’ve said on the topic, and perhaps I have gotten a bit distracted by it myself, but I still think holocaust revisionism is useful (if not essential or politically potent). Beyond the JQ, it also serves to inoculate our people against future atrocity lies used to justify military misadventures. A couple of the revisionist filmmakers point out that the first Iraq war may have been avoided if people weren’t so easily fooled into believing the story of Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators by Iraqi soldiers sans documentary evidence. Of course, we just had the one about Assad gassing his own people (again), and outside of a precious few voices, the American media machine was on board with using it as an excuse to escalate the war in Syria.
It just so happens that despite holocaust revisionism being viewed with revulsion by the American public, the media has so thoroughly discredited itself in recent living memory that many Americans did not take the bait on Syria. Then again, I worry that if atrocity lies stop working then false flags against America may become the norm to mobilize us against the next enemy on the list…
“Since virtually everyone teaching Heidegger in academia today is a Leftist, …”
Are there any right wing (or at least non-leftist) teachers of Heidegger still around? How about Nietzsche?
I had one graduate class on Nietzsche and the professor was a leftist.
Great article that I’m planning to read again along with your other ones on Heidegger.
What you say about this type of book being the perfect introduction to radical conservative theory is so true. Twenty years ago I accidentally picked up a copy of “Metapolitics” by Peter Viereck. It was intended as a scathing denunciation of Wagner and ther german romantic philosophers, but of course it was utterly fascinating. I’ve been a convert ever since
Fantastic essay, really one of the best ever published at Counter-Currents (which is saying something).
Greg’s engagement with Beiner’s book is an analog of the entire debate between Liberalism and the Alt Right. The fact that Beiner ignores CC / Johnson, while tilting at lesser bogeyman windmills, makes the analogy all the more apt.
Western societies consist of Hegemonic Liberalism. Anything outside of that construct cannot be acknowledged, countenanced or allowed any oxygen. There is an intellectual breakthrough that occurs in any person who can summon the “escape velocity” to see beyond Liberal Hegemony. Many can never achieve it: Conservatism Inc. (a.k.a Cuckseratism) cannot, Civic Nationalism cannot, Skeptics cannot. Ultimately, all contemporary Western thought — other than the Dissident Right — is Liberal, is a part of Liberalism.
Beiner flinches upon seeing even a glimmer of the possibility of political and civilizational life outside of Liberal Hegemony. However, as Greg forcefully and persuasively argues in this essay, that glimmer is actually the beam from the lighthouse, guiding us away from the straits and whirlpools that are Liberalism. Beiner and his ilk are temptors, Sirens, who would have us crash and perish amidst lies.
There is no intellectual outlet today that can match Counter-Currents for explicating the import of Nietzsche and, particularly, Heidegger. A debate between Johnson and Beiner would be excellent; Beiner would be outmatched, probably knows it and would likely decline.
Again, great great review essay.
This Beiner strikes me as a honest fool. Left’s method was, always was, to subvert and co-opt, which is what the academia did with Heidegger. They shan’t be reliquinshing Heidegger, for so much of their thought in the past several decades is based in large part on their (mis)reading of Heidegger.
Thirty years since Allan Bloom’s reflections on the revolution of 1968 in The Closing of the American Mind.
Seems a prescient book. A lot of the themes took a generation to play out since the neoliberal victory of 1989.
I wonder if this summer will be a long hot echo of 1968.
A fascinating review. As always, I learned a lot from this article. Gregs explanations are clear and comprehensible … until Nietzsche ruined Heidegger.
I started to loose him when the ‘human mind doesn’t create culture’, but culture falls from blue sky and creates human minds, when beliefs cannot be chosen, but seize you and I lost him and Heidegger completely, with the 100%-Un-Nietzschean claim “Only a god can save us now”.
The only purpose of this esoterism seems to sustain the claim “Heidegger overcame Nazism by overcoming Nietzsche.
After 1945 all high-profile Germans wanting to survive “under the repressive conditions of the Occupation and the Federal Republic” – better known as Denazification terror – were obliged to dismiss their previous views. Heidegger, Schmitt, Salomon, … tens of thousands. If they were lucky they managed to keep silence or went “oblique and esoteric”, if they were less lucky they were inventing under torture hilarious amounts of mass murders.
“After 1945 all high-profile Germans wanting to survive “under the repressive conditions of the Occupation and the Federal Republic” – better known as Denazification terror – were obliged to dismiss their previous views. … If they were lucky they managed to keep silence …, if they were less lucky they were inventing under torture hilarious amounts of mass murders.”
Except that there was nothing “hilarious” in the Denazification terror, neither in the torture employed nor in the unbelievable claims of mass murders extracted under that torture.
I take it, Sylvie, that when you employed the term “hilarious”, you intended “unbelievable”. Quite right.
Interesting review, Greg. Clearly, Beiner’s willingness reduce Nietzsche and Heidegger to ideological strawmen rather than engage them on the level of their thought demonstrates a shameful lack of intellectual integrity.
But I’m afraid I have to take issue with your reading of Nietzsche too — mainly regarding the suggestion that a limited, normative ethnic and mythical horizon is a necessary condition for human cultivation. I also strongly dispute your suggestion that Nietzsche is responsible for Heidegger’s Nazism, which I don’t think this is in the slightest bit plausible once we relinquish the presumption of a “romantic” Nietzsche.
Undoubtedly, Nietzsche’s relationship with nationalism and romanticism is complex. You noted his ambivalent relationship with German culture, which only grew more bitter as he matured. And you’d undoubtedly be aware of his mature views about anti-semites, and that his much vaunted ‘free spirits’ are inextricable from a rather cosmopolitan notion of the “good European”. But most significantly, I think it’s also fairly clear that Nietzsche abandoned what he calls the “deliberate adherence to illusion and the forcible incorporation of the same as the basis of culture” by 1878 at the latest.
Indeed, Nietzsche comes to realise that the onset of modernity means humanity must contend with pessimistic truths that necessarily destroy the possibility of such an enclosed horizon. On this we could compare what he has to say about the historical sense in On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life, with Beyond Good and Evil 224.
But the point is, the mature Nietzsche’s response to the problem of modernity is not to seek a return to the ethnic community enclosed by a mythic horizon and rooted in the firm soil of tradition. Rather, he pursues the basis for a new regime of human cultivation in the passion for knowledge and the idea that life can be an experiment. In other words, in communion with the very infinite that has dissolved traditional culture’s firm foundation. Now this project is certainly anti-egalitarian. But it is not blood and soil reaction either.
Hence we arrive at such declarations as: “How much truth can a spirit tolerate, how much truth is it willing to risk? This increasingly became the real measure of value for me. Error — the belief in the ideal — is not blindness, error is cowardice” (EH Pref 3). Christianity, anti-nature ideals, slave morality, ressentiment; all must be destroyed by the crucible of truth and knowledge. Prior to the farcical pagan larping that devastated Europe last century, Nietzsche rightly recognise that we can’t possibly hope recover such values by pushing back against modernity — that well was poisoned long ago — rather, we must push through it.
Thank you for recommending this book. It came so fast, that I had to read it immediately. For a while I was getting very pessismistic about the new right as it seemed to be caught in a whirlpool going around and around. However, the title of his last chapter “How to do Theory in Political Treacherous Times” just made me laught out loud. Does he not know that theory and philosophy are the same thing? If I have learned anything from counter-currents it is that. It is not just high tide dear liberal professor, it is a spiritual tsunami.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.