Tag: God

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.

4,839 words

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…)

1,598 words

I have confidence in the Right as the political entity we know today largely because Right-wing extremism has proved to be less insidious, murderous, and destructive than Left-wing extremism. This has been the case for the last 250 years. Nothing can compare to the hideous wake left by the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet terror famines and gulags, the mass starvations of Mao’s China, and the crimes committed by the North Vietnamese, among other atrocities. The Nazis at least waited until wartime to commit their acts of barbarism. The worst of the Left had no such compunctions, and were deadlier to boot. (more…)

Gustave Doré, The Fall of Lucifer

3,236 words

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? — Jeremiah 17:9

Unde malum? Where does evil come from? I first pondered that question as a child, a childhood of full immersion in a fundamentalist, Baptist Weltanschauung. Evil’s origin and its persistence in the world was the central motif in the narrative of the Great Rebellion, the failure of Angel Lucifer’s insurrection against God. The origin of evil came from a titanic battle of supernatural beings. (more…)

A French Jacobin

3,782 words

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…)

2,359 words

In the distant and ancient era we now call the “mid-2000s,” there arose a phenomenon we now call New Atheism. New Atheism was militant; its adherents not only rejected religion, but actively sought to expurgate it from society, usually by haranguing the religious online. The idea was for humanity to reject all irrationality, delusion, and superstition and bring about an era of enlightenment and progress through reason and evidence. (more…)

1,700 words

It is the season of giving, and in that spirit I would like to give a Christmas present to the Christians within our ranks as a gesture of good will. Due to the Brandon economy, I do not have any partridges or pear trees, but I do have two arguments that can be used in defense of our politics by Christian Nationalists: Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and the differentiation between the private and public spheres. And what’s more, they are arguments that can operate entirely within the Christian worldview. (more…)

Attorney General Merrick Garland enjoying walkies.

3,207 words

At our recent conference in the subterranean stronghold supplied by our Vril-ya comrades, there was an evocative item that came up for discussion. Specifically, it invoked the proverbial image of a drowning man grasping at straws. I’m not at liberty to quote directly, but a brief paraphrase shouldn’t be a problem. (more…)

7,590 words

1. Knowledge of the Right Use of All Things

To explain what philosophy is, we always have to go back to the beginning. Pythagoras (ca. 570-495 BC) is said to have been confronted by Leon, the tyrant of Philius, who demanded to know if he was wise. He responded that he was not a wise man, but merely a φιλόσοφος (philosophos), a “lover of wisdom”; a practitioner of φιλοσοφία (philosophia). Φίλος (philos) means “love,” and σοφῐ́ᾱ (sophia) means “wisdom.” (more…)

René Descartes

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I rooted out of my mind all those errors that had formerly crept in . . . — René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

I know this much is true. — Spandau Ballet, “True”

There are famous concepts in Western philosophy, but it is hard to find any better known than René Descartes’ seemingly indubitable pronouncement that “I think, therefore I am.” (more…)

Christopher Forth is a white dude at the University of Kansas who will soon be offering his students courses in “Angry White Male Studies.”

2,484 words

Whoopi Goldberg and Stacey Abrams Say God Gave Women Free Will to Abort Their Fetuses

Have there ever been two more pugnaciously undesirable black women on this multicolored planet than Stacey Abrams and Whoopi Goldberg? Although one can thank cosmic beneficence for the fact that both of them are past breeding age, the idea that they both at one time in their lives had a sex drive, and thus a hardwired instinct to inflict replicas of themselves upon the world, is a haunting and thoroughly objectionable proposition. (more…)

The Togatus Barberini in the Capitoline Museums is believed by some scholars to represent a Roman Senator holding two ancestral funerary portraits.

2,865 words

For early man there could not have been a difference between “living” and “dead” things, or even “imaginary” and “real,” instead for him there was only a hierarchy of forms, an order of images and signs in accordance with their force. — Dr. Ernest Schertel, Magic: History, Theory, Practice

If you can no longer stand the world you’re living in, it’s time to imagine a new one. We have now surpassed the time where changes to civilization can be made through rational argumentation and the presentation of pure facts, if such a time ever existed. No material advance in science or technology will lift us out of our current morass. (more…)