Tag: Arthur Schopenhauer

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John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame is one of the funniest men alive. He’s also fearsomely smart. Beyond that, he has the vision and courage to oppose political correctness, one of the banes of comedy, creativity, and civilization itself. Thus it was an easy decision to snap up his new book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (London: Hutchison, 2020), now out in paperback from Penguin. Creativity truly is a short book — I estimate about 20,000 words. It can be easily read in one sitting, and with great profit, for it is brimming with arresting insights and useful advice on cultivating one’s creativity. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

While basing itself on consensus scholarship, the hypothesis of Creating Christ has some interesting local effects on mainstream scholarship. For one thing, the dating of the “later” so-called “pastoral” epistles: the elaborate bureaucratic system of deacons, bishops, orders of consecrated virgins, and so on seems to indicate a later stage of the cult; but if Christianity was a top-top movement imposed by the Romans, the Romanesque bureaucracy could have been nearly original, as with the Mafia. (more…)

You can buy Christopher Pankhurst’s Numinous Machines here.

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Christopher Pankhurst
Numinous Machines
San Francisco, Calif.: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2017

Whenever I read a book with the intention of writing a review, I like to underline certain passages as well as jot notes in the margins. This quickly became an untenable approach for Christopher Pankhurst’s Numinous Machines, as there was simply too much to pull from the text. The book is a collection of essays that seeks out the numinous spirit in arts and culture in an era that is devoid of almost anything vital whatsoever. (more…)

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Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Penguin Classics, 2020

“How do you have the nerve to write some of the things you do?” I asked him. “Oh, it’s easy. I just pretend that I’m already dead.” — Michel Houellebecq[1]

Some years ago, in that white-collar internment camp known as graduate school, a classmate pointed out to me a book with a title that, being nominally philosophy students, amused us: Philosopher or Dog? by one Machado de Assis. (more…)

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Host Greg Johnson was joined by learned Counter-Currents writers Stephen Paul Foster, Mark Gullick, James J. O’Meara, and Kathryn S. on the last installment of Counter-Currents Radio to share their lists of five essential books every educated person needs to read — plus, of course, answer YOUR QUESTIONS — and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:05:00 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (more…)

Leopold Ziegler

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Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958) was a German philosopher who was steeped in the philosophy of the Will of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and in the philosophy of the Unconscious of the Schopenhauerian philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906). Already as a secondary school student at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Ziegler was introduced to the doctrines of Hartmann by the philosopher Arthur Drews (1865-1935), and in 1910 he wrote a work on his philosophy entitled Das Weltbild Hartmanns: Eine Beurteilung. He obtained his doctorate in 1905 from the University of Jena, but was unable to take up an academic career on account of his poor health. (more…)

Nietzsche at age 18.

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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…)

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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…)