Tag: consciousness

G. I. Gurdjieff

1,981 words

As I write this, I am spending Yuletide in Salzburg. A day ago, I took the train to Vienna and stopped at the Café Mozart for lunch. There, as luck would have it, I ran into a good friend of mine who is some 15 years younger than me. After lunch, we decided to visit the Christmas markets. There, we drank Glühwein and he unburdened himself. My young friend has had his share of personal problems, and very much wants to move on with his life. However, as he talked I noticed a pattern showing up in his conversation, one which I had seen before. It was a tendency to dwell on the past. (more…)

J. G. Fichte meets Immanuel Kant, 1791

6,194 words

1. “The circumference of my world is equivalent to the limits of my will.”

In my last essay, we established that for Fichte self-consciousness is an ultimate fact. We saw via our own experiments in introspection that the “I” — this “presence” that says, in effect “I am” — is not simply a feature of the self, it is the self. (more…)

J. G. Fichte

4,888 words

1. Fichte’s Foundationalism

J. G. Fichte holds that the human self has no intrinsic identity, aside from that which we create for it. He completely rejects the notion that our identity is in any way determined by nature. This is the modern “blank slate” theory pushed to a radical extreme. It is to Fichte that we must look if we wish to find the philosophical origins of current intellectual fashions such as “gender fluidity,” “social construction” of race and gender, and radical egalitarian claims about human perfectibility. (more…)

Wolfgang Lettl, Die Verwandlung, 1977.

5,630 words

All essays in this series available here

1. Introduction: The Identity of Representation and Will

Everyone with a basic knowledge of the history of philosophy has heard that Kant is the philosopher of moral duty above all else, (more…)

1961 West German Bundespost stamp featuring Kant

6,542 words

All essays in this series available here

1. Introduction

With this, the tenth essay in this series, we have reached a significant milestone. Our journey has taken us from Plato to Kant, and this is the fourth essay on Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the last installment, we saw that Kant is struggling to transcend the representationalist paradigm, but that he is inconsistent in this. (more…)

“Death found an author writing his life. . .” from Edward Hull’s Danse Macabre, 1827.

1,180 words

It always sounds silly to me when people tell the dead to “rest in peace.”

Practically speaking, don’t you have to disturb their rest to tell them that? It makes about as much sense as nudging someone who’s snoring to say, “Hey — HEY! Wake up and go to sleep.” (more…)

G. W. Leibniz Memorial in Leipzig

7,567 words

Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here

1. Introduction: Leibniz and the Completion of Metaphysics

Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz (1646–1716) is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of ideas. A true polymath, he was not only a philosopher but a physicist, historian, jurist, diplomat, inventor, and mathematician. (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.

6,316 words

Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.

“Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem?” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1]  (more…)

6,166 words

Introduction

In the previous essay (“Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part One: Platonism”) I began to sketch Heidegger’s argument for the claim that Western metaphysics lays the groundwork for the nihilism and decadence of modernity. I framed this account partly as a critique of the Traditionalists Julius Evola and René Guénon, who aimed to combat modernity with a “Traditionalism” grounded in Western metaphysics (more…)

3,871 words

Camille Paglia infuriated feminists when she observed in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) that males – as biological beings – are responsible for the development of civilized life and most of the world’s cultural creativity. What no one has wanted to say is that the implicit argument throughout Sexual Personae is that only white males have possessed the Apollonian rationality that “has taken us to the stars.”

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Julian Jaynes

7,982 words

Half of my book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, is about discrediting the multicultural claim that, as late as the mid-1700s, the West was no more advanced than the major civilizations of Asia, or China in particular, and that only a set of fortuitous circumstances gave the West a chance to industrialize first. The West did not “stumble” accidentally into the New World, I argued, and it was not “easy access” to the resources of the Americas, enslavement of blacks, or availability of cheap coal in Britain that made Britain’s takeoff possible.

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4,188 words / 26:20

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As I have written about previously for Counter-Currents (as well as in a considerably revised and expanded version of this same essay that was included in North American New Right, vol. 2), the English philosopher, novelist, and compiler of eclectic knowledge of all kinds, Colin Wilson (1932-2013), is one of the most unjustly forgotten writers of our time. (more…)