Tag: ancient Greeks

Heidegger (right) and Husserl in 1921.

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In my “Notes on Strauss and Husserl,” I discuss the following passage from Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History:

To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy. It is not necessary for this purpose to engage in extensive and necessarily hypothetical anthropological studies. The information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices . . . (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)

Aristophanes

6,912 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Strepsiades Flunks Out

It hasn’t gone well. First Socrates bursts out of the Thinkery swearing an oath: “By Respiration, by Chaos, by the Air.” The usual places of gods in his oath are occupied by three natural forces. Socrates then rants about a particularly bad student who is “rustic . . . resourceless . . . dull . . . and forgetful.” Then he calls this student to come out. And out comes Strepsiades.

Socrates then quizzes Strepsiades on what he has learned. (more…)

A sixteenth-century engraving of Strepsiades, his son, and Socrates in Clouds.

7,651 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

“The Thinkery, a likeness of death, teaching Whirligig and Bamboozle, ‘back to nature’ without families, without the old paternal gods, and without nomoi (not paying back money owed and using unusual forms of words) . . .” — Thomas Prufer (more…)

Terror Antiquus, L. Bakst (1908)

6,674 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Prologue: Little Pine Lake

The first time I got lost, it was because of a map. It was Easter in my grandparents’ home of Marshall, Texas, and during that golden-age glow that now suffuses the nineties. (more…)

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About a week ago a young black employee brought back news from the ghetto (colored folks are now the only reliable and honest sources left when it comes to these sorts of adventures). Earlier that afternoon, “authorities” had placed her high school on lock-down. A student had marched through the front doors with a gun and then began shooting up the place. Only notoriously bad black marksmanship prevented the school from becoming an abattoir. He then turned and fled, hiding somewhere inside the building (supposedly). (more…)

Nietzsche at age 18.

3,017 words

In the Alps I am unconquerable, that is, when I am alone and have no enemy other than myself. — Nietzsche, letter to Malwida von Meysenburg

Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most enigmatic of philosophers. Claimed by both the political Left and Right over the 121 years since his death (by which time he had been incurably insane for 11 years), the Lutheran pastor’s son left a philosophical legacy which remains mysterious, and yet to the “philosophers of the future” for whom Nietzsche wrote, ultimately uplifting even in its ominous predictions for the Western culture to which he felt he was a physician. (more…)

Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1510-1511.

8,701 words

1. Introduction

In my essay “Heidegger Against the Traditionalists,” I sketched a critique of Guénon and Evola from a Heideggerian perspective. Although I raised several objections to Traditionalism, the crucial one was this: Guénon and Evola are thoroughly (and uncritically) invested in the Western metaphysical tradition.  According to Heidegger, however, it is precisely the Western metaphysical tradition that is responsible for all the modern ills decried by the Traditionalists. (more…)

Oil painting of Heraclitus by Etienne Parrocel (1696-1775)

6,037 words

To understand why Europeans were the progenitors of the highest accomplishments in history – close to one hundred percent of the great ideas in philosophy, science, anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, geology, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, technology, dance, and music – you must understand the Presocratic self-conscious separation of the knowing “I” from the “not-I.” (more…)

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Faust in his Study

5,530 words

Part 4 of 4 (Part 3 here)

Definition of “Axial thought”

The Axial Age idea is the most concerted effort to retain aspects of the idea of progress while disallowing Western civilization from claiming to be the most progressive in the sciences, technology, cultural creativity, and forms of state organization. This idea has historical merits. (more…)

7,688 words

As the Chinese “silent invasion” of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada continues, you may want to learn something about the Western academics who lay the intellectual groundwork for this invasion. In a prior article, “The Transcendental Mind of Europeans Stands Above the Embedded Mind of Asians,” we met two influential scholars calling upon whites to abandon their “failed” attempts to formulate transcendental truths for the sake of the more “profound” contextual approach of Chinese philosophers with their demonstration that all thinking is “embedded” to a time and a place. (more…)

7,002 words

Europeans were the first – and are still the only – race to become conscious of their consciousness, to identify the faculty of thinking as the point from which all knowledge must proceed in separation from all extra-intellectual sources and inclinations, be they conventions of the time, religious mandates, or emotional inclinations.

(more…)