Author: Collin Cleary

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Part 4 of 15

The Internal Differentiation of God

Schelling now throws us another curve, and it is a major one. All this time we have been speaking of the “immanence” of all things within God. But now Schelling tells us that “the concept of immanence is to be set aside completely insofar as thereby a dead containment of things in God is supposed to be expressed. (more…)

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A young Martin Heidegger.

Part 3 of 15 (Part 1 here. Part 2 here.)

Self-Affirmation as Being

We have seen that Schelling claims “there is no being other than will. Will is primal being [Ursein] to which alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence from time, self-affirmation.” We must now look more closely at these “predicates of being.” (more…)

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Part 2 of 15 (Read Part 1 here)

1. Freedom, System, and Pantheism

Schelling begins the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (henceforth referred to as the Freiheitsschrift) by challenging the widespread idea that the existence of human freedom is incompatible with “system.” (more…)

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Part 1 of 15

Introduction: The Peak of the Metaphysics of German Idealism

In 1936, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture course on F. W. J. Schelling’s 1809 treatise Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, which scholars often refer to simply as the Freiheitsschrift (Freedom Essay).[1] (more…)

Mr. Gurdjieff

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We are not exactly sure when George Ivanovich Gurdjieff arrived on this Earth, but it was probably January 13, around 1866. He was born in Alexandropol, then part of the Russian Empire, to a Greek father (an ashik or singer-poet) and an Armenian mother. As a young man, Gurdjieff travelled through the Middle East and Central Asia for around 20 years, searching for enlightenment. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

4. The Ascetic Ideal

The third essay that makes up On the Genealogy of Morality is concerned with asceticism, as it has exhibited itself in religion and in philosophy. Nietzsche writes:

I can think of hardly anything that has sapped the health and racial strength of precisely the Europeans so destructively as [the ascetic ideal]; without any exaggeration we are entitled to call it the real catastrophe in the history of the health of Europeans. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

1. Introduction: An Extremely Impious Book

Perplexed, as so many of us are, by the utter mindlessness and malevolence of today’s Leftists, I decided several years ago to undertake an ambitious project: developing a comprehensive theory of their psychology. I assembled an extensive reading list, including Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (which delighted me). When I reread Friedrich Nietzsche, however, I realized that I had almost nothing to add to what he had already said. (more…)

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition here.

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Longtime Counter-Currents contributor Collin Cleary, author of Wagner’s Ring and the Germanic Tradition, was the guest on Nathan C. J. Hood‘s livestream for Wagner Day last weekend, where they discussed the use of Germanic mythology, as well as Faustian themes and the concept of fate, in Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungen. See below. (more…)

Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

In the first part of this essay I introduced readers to Schelling, who is one of the first philosophers to react against what Heideggereans have called “the metaphysics of presence”: the hidden will in Western metaphysics that gives primacy to human subjectivity, adjusting our understanding of the Being of beings to the human desire that beings should be completely transparent to us, hiding nothing, and readily available for our manipulation. In response to this, Schelling argues that it is nature, not human subjectivity, that should be the starting point of philosophy. (more…)

A daguerreotype of F. W. J. Schelling from 1848, the first known photograph of a philosopher.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

1. Introduction: A Philosophical Rebel

This essay is a continuation of my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” With Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) we have reached a significant milestone, in a number of ways. Behind us, in our journey toward Gelassenheit, we have Plato, the philosophers of the Middle Ages, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte. Ahead of Schelling we have only two more philosophers to discuss, Hegel and Nietzsche, before we turn to cover in more detail Heidegger’s response to the metaphysical tradition and to modernity. (more…)

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Having already published two extensive articles on The Prisoner (see here and here), I didn’t expect to ever write about the series again. But times have changed, and so has The Prisoner. Works of art are living things, and their meaning changes over time. This ultimately has little to do with the artist’s intentions. That The Prisoner had changed was brought home to me one evening when, on a whim, I chose to revisit an episode I had always disliked. (more…)

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

1. Fichte on the Nature of the State

We began to explore Fichte’s political philosophy in the last installment, as expounded primarily in his 1796 work Foundations of Natural Right. It is a basic principle of Fichte’s philosophy that subjectivity, what he calls the “I,” must bring nature under the control of reason. (more…)

A French Jacobin

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

1. Introduction: Transcendental Idealism as Political Radicalism

In part one of this essay, I covered J. G. Fichte’s moral philosophy, as set out in his 1798 work The System of Ethics. In the present installment, which is largely self-contained, I shall cover his social and political philosophy, chiefly as expounded in The Foundations of Natural Right. Here we will find many ways in which Fichte lays the groundwork for contemporary Leftism, including a surprising anticipation of what Gen Z calls “real Communism.” (more…)