1,246 words / 9:37
The following is the video and transcript of F. Roger Devlin speaking during the “Battle of Ideas” panel discussion at this year’s Counter-Currents retreat. His subject is the problem of winning ordinary conservatives over to the cause of White Nationalism. The title is editorial. (more…)
1,163 words
We are a small group of highly committed people with ambitious aims whose achievement will require the mobilization of great masses of our people. For this reason, the first thing to say about our battle of ideas is that it will have to be fought on more than one level. We have distinct audiences to reach. (more…)
2,156 words
“Have you accepted Jesus, Agent Starling? Do you have faith?”
“I was raised Lutheran.”
“That’s not what I asked.” — Thomas Harris, Hannibal
I am a sick man. I am an angry man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“I am one thing,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “my writings another.” Although a few decades after his death this aphorism would chime with the Derridean, post-structuralist dictum that there is “nothing outside the text,” a hermeneutic approach to philosophy excludes the philosopher’s life to its detriment. (more…)
5,254 words
Part 1 of 4 (Part 2 here)
1. Introduction
Early in his career as a writer, Julius Evola published several philosophical works expounding a theory he called “magical idealism.” These include Saggi sull’idealismo magico (Essays on Magical Idealism, 1925), Teoria dell’individuo assoluto (Theory of the Absolute Individual, 1927), (more…)
6,383 words
1. Introduction: Remind me, why Fichte?
Readers have been asking me why I am devoting multiple essays to J. G. Fichte, an exceedingly difficult and seldom-read German Idealist born in 1762. The simple answer is that these essays are a continuation of my series on Heidegger’s “history of metaphysics.” Having devoted several essays to Kant, I am continuing with Fichte, then will move on to Schelling and Hegel, and then, finally, to Nietzsche. (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…)
6,227 words
1. Martin Heidegger Reads Fichte
On June 25, 1929, Heidegger wrote to Karl Jaspers, “At the present moment I am lecturing on Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling for the first time — and once more a new world opens up before me. (more…)
1961 West German Bundespost stamp featuring Kant
6,542 words
All essays in this series available here
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…)
M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935.
6,864 words
All essays in this series available here
My two previous essays introduced readers to Kant’s transcendental idealism and discussed the similarities and differences between Kant’s critique of metaphysics and Heidegger’s. It is now time to begin to consider Heidegger’s critique of Kant, and how Heidegger locates him within his history of metaphysics. (more…)
