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The latest convocation of the Counter-Currents Brain Trust is now available for online listening and downloading. Greg Johnson was joined by two Counter-Currents writers, Mark Gullick and Stephen Paul Foster. Since all three have doctorates in philosophy, it was an opportunity to discuss some really DEEP QUESTIONS. (more…)

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Alexander Jacob
Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity, and the State: Three Essays, Second Edition
Melbourne: Manticore, 2020

“I am the most German being. I am the German spirit.” — Richard Wagner[1]

Counter-Currents readers will welcome another contribution from Alexander Jacob.[2] These essays make a useful companion, or counterpoint (sit venia verbo!), to Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition. (more…)

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Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)

Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1815.

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Whether attending a birthday party or a social event, people have sometimes referred to me as being “the life of the party.” There have also been times where I found myself excluded from my social circle and community. Recently, I found myself not being invited to a birthday party that some of my other friends were invited to. Although I always try to stay positive and optimistic, I couldn’t help but feel ignored and forgotten. (more…)

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Why does Scruton not examine the role of Melot in Death-Devoted Heart more closely?

Tristan und Isolde echoes themes from Romeo and Juliet and Othello, so it is unlikely that Wagner did not have both plays in mind when he composed his opera. The Othello theme is especially clear in the regrets expressed by King Marke that he could not clearly see, just as Othello could not clearly see. Melot, like Iago, faces death if he cannot make good the claim of adultery; (more…)

Christopher Ventris as Palestrina in the 2009 Bavarian State Opera production of the opera.

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Hans Pfitzner
Palestrina
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, conducted by Rafael Kubelík
Deutsche Grammophon, 1989

Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina is one of the unsung masterpieces of twentieth-century opera. (more…)

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Why I write is very simple: I believe that, in the final analysis, ideas — not economics, not technology, not brute force — are the decisive factor in history, and I believe that history is going in the wrong direction. (more…)

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Marta Petreu
An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005

‘The Romanians, what have they ever done for us, eh?’ So might Emil Cioran, himself a Romanian, have wondered when he wrote his third book The Transfiguration of Romania, published in 1936. Bewailing Romania’s insignificant past and culture, he proposed a program that would transform the country in parallel with the contemporary national revivals in Germany and Italy then underway. (more…)

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Timothy Ryback
Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
London: Vintage, 2010

I want to thank the commenters who have reacted to my previous articles, providing many useful insights and bits of information. This is the kind of reactive, collaborative, or even “crowd-sourced” discovery of history which was indeed impossible before the blessed age of the Internet.  (more…)

Young Arthur Schopenhauer

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Part 3 of 3

Schopenhauer on Genius

In contrast with the mediocre majority of mankind, there is the rare genius. Schopenhauer’s ruminations on the tragic loneliness of the genius, no doubt in part autobiographical, are some of the most touching and the most consoling. There is reason to think Hitler sympathized with and perhaps attempted to live up to the model of the Schopenhauerian genius. (more…)

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Part 2 of 3

Schopenhauer’s political views were based on his extremely low assessment of the intellectual and moral quality of the great majority of mankind. One could not rule against the will of the people, therefore:

[T]he people is sovereign: But this sovereignty never comes of age and therefore has to remain under the permanent care of a guardian: (more…)

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Part 1 of 3

I recently came across a collection of Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings entitled Essays & Aphorisms.[1] It really is wonderful stuff, ruthlessly realistic, insightful, and often very droll. (more…)

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“Spinoza was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. He neither laughed at life nor grieved over it. It is possible that he understood it.” —Edgar Saltus, The Anatomy of Negation

After making something of an effort to keep up with the terrific output of Vox Day’s Castalia House imprint, I’m now poking my nose into Kevin Slaughter’s doings over at his Underworld Amusements publishing venture. (more…)

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Part 2 of 5

Editor’s Note:

Religion for Infidels (London: Holborn, 1961) was Anthony Ludovici’s last book. In it, he addresses the increasing population of individuals who have religious or spiritual inclinations and yet find it impossible to believe in revealed religions such as Christianity.  (more…)

Man as microcosm

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Part 6 of 7 (other parts here)

6. All and Nothing

In my account of ekstasis, I have drawn principally on two philosophers: Heidegger and Schopenhauer. And Hegel has been peeping out at certain points in my discussion (he will have a much bigger role to play very soon). But the truth is that the ideas I have been expounding in this essay have deep roots in the Western tradition, and are much older even than Hegel.

(more…)

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Part 5 of 7 (other parts here)

5. Can Biology Explain Ekstasis?

I have already mentioned that scientists speculate that cave art (and religion, language, etc.) comes about as a result of some kind of genetic mutation, perhaps a “sudden, serendipitous, genetically-based brain reorganization.” (more…)

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Part 3 of 7 (other parts here)

3. Art Begins in Wonder

My thesis, quite simply, is that art, religion, and language are all made possible by a mental or cognitive act which I have called elsewhere ekstasis.[1] To better understand what this consists in, I will ask the reader to consider a simple (or, perhaps, not so simple) question. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2

Point of Terror (1973); 88 min. Director: Alex Nicol; Writers: Peter Carpenter (story), Ernest A. Charles (screenplay); Stars: Peter Carpenter, Dyanne Thorne, Lory Hansen. (more…)

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1. Life and the “Creative Mystery”

Lawrence believes that the chief thing modern science simply cannot explain is life itself. And he regards life as an irreducible, and ultimately inexplicable, primary. (more…)

Georgia O’Keeffe, “D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree,” 1929

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D. H. Lawrence is best known to the general public as a writer of sexy books. In his own time, his treatment of sex made him notorious and caused him to run afoul of the authorities on a number of occasions. I have no desire to rehearse in detail the well-known history of Lawrence’s troubles with censorship, (more…)

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Part 8 of 8

Gelassenheit

We can say that the plot of the Ring is simply this: Western man, in the person of Wotan, finally awakens to the destructiveness of his thumotic nature, and wills his own end. (See my review of Duchesne’s Uniqueness of Western Civilization for a discussion of how Western man is preeminently thumotic man.) (more…)

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Part 7 of 8

Siegfried

If Wotan is the main character of the Ring, Siegfried is its hero. However, in dealing with the character of Siegfried we do not depart from our discussion of Wotan at all. This is because Siegfried, like many of the other characters in the Ring, is a kind of hypostatization of an aspect of Wotan himself.  (more…)

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Part 6 of 8

Das Rheingold

When the events of Das Rheingold begin, the Wotan-Loge relationship is already well-established, and the primeval crimes described earlier are long past. However, the opera begins with yet another crime against nature: Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold. (more…)

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Part 5 of 8

The story of the Ring involves four ages, similar to those taught in Tradition.

The Age of Titans is the period represented by figures somehow more primordial than the gods: Erda, the Norns, and possibly the Rhine daughters. Events in this age are not depicted in the Ring; they are merely referred to (primarily in Götterdämmerung).

(more…)

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Part 4 of 8

Wotan and the Faustian West

As noted in the Introduction to this essay, at the time of the Ring’s conception Wagner was an anarchist revolutionary. Major influences on his thinking included Bakunin, Feuerbach, Hegel, and possibly Marx (though of these only Bakunin was an anarchist). (more…)

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In 1878 Nietzsche sent a copy of his book Human, All Too Human to Richard Wagner. At the same time Wagner sent Nietzsche a copy of the verse for his opera Parsifal. Nietzsche was later to write that when received this text, “I felt as if I heard an ominous sound – as if two swords had crossed.”[1] (more…)

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Bryan Magee
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000

Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (just Wagner and Philosophy in the UK) combines two of my favorite subjects into an informative, stimulating, and highly readable book. Creativity and critical reflection are two very different activities, and excellence in one is seldom accompanied by excellence in the other. (more…)

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Edited by Alex Kurtagić 

Editor’s Note: 

The following is excerpted from Jonathan Bowden’s Skin, a book he wrote in the early 1990s. The text has been lightly edited, mainly for punctuation, spelling, and capitalization.

In Samuel Beckett’s work . . . , which has become emblematic of the modern condition, (more…)

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Camille Paglia
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
New York: Pantheon, 2012

Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) is the greatest work of art and literary criticism since the days of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. It is a work of extraordinary ambition, the most sweeping and synoptic book on Western civilization since Spengler’s Decline of the West. (more…)

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“I am the most German being. I am the German spirit.”[1] — Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is today universally celebrated as the consummate exponent of nineteenth century German opera, whose developed Romantic idiom helped to usher in the musical innovations of Modernism in the early twentieth century. (more…)