11,114 words

Mr. Reagan is not going to make it to the year 1987, I can tell you that much. Now you mark that down.

— Brother Stair, 1987

We don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?

— Silence of the Lambs

(more…)

3,018 words

The singer Édith Piaf famously, and throatily, regretted nothing about anything. But the poet John Betjeman wished that he’d had more sex. And the economist John Maynard Keynes that he’d drunk more champagne. Me? I regret two things much more important than recreational sex or champagne. (more…)

6,735 words

Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here

If the architects of globalization succeed in establishing the New World Order, they will have obtained a magnitude of concentrated power unprecedented in history. The globalists’ steady accumulation of economic, bureaucratic, political, cultural, and many other forms of power has received determined support from the Western democracies. (more…)

M. C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935.

6,864 words

All essays in this series available here

1. Introduction

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…)

1974 West German Bundespost stamp, commemorating Kant’s 250th birthday

5,568 words

Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here

1. Introduction

In the previous essay in this series, we saw Heidegger claiming that Leibniz “prepares” the completion of the metaphysical tradition, but that it is Nietzsche who actually brings it about. I will devote a future essay to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, but we may note here that the completion of metaphysics would have been impossible without Kant, who answers Leibniz and inadvertently prepares the way for Nietzsche. (more…)

Detail, Paolo Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565-70.

4,453 words

Part I here, Part II here, Part III here

Internationalism vs. Nationalism

The chief threat to the viability of European nations is the extreme concentration of private wealth, which the globalists have parlayed into political influence on a global level. (more…)

5,939 words

Thomas Rohkrämer
Martin Heidegger: Eine politische Biographie
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020

“Heidegger passes the comeback test with the grade of fully satisfactory on both sides.” 

— Carl Schmitt (1950) [1] (more…)

George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”

7,971 words

Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)

1,095 words

Jalal El-Kadali
Oyster Mountain: Poems
Charleston, WV: Nine-Banded Books, 2020

To say that frogs turn
Into princes is blasphemy
Against Nature; Salvador Dali, however
Was a painter who painted the things in his subconscious
The world of his dreams; at least
He didn’t expect anyone to believe that they were real

At least he wasn’t telling lies to children  (more…)

Hieronymus Bosch, Outer Wings of the Garden of Delights, ca. 1510.

4,305 words

1. Introduction: From Objectivism to Subjectivism

In the previous two installments (Part Three here, Part Four here) we have discussed at length Heidegger’s treatment of the “objectification of beings” in early modernity: how beings come to be seen as “objects” related to a “subject” that confronts them (indirectly) from within an interior space that is called “mind,” “awareness,” or even “self.” This objectification is essentially identical with the representationalist theory of knowledge, which holds that we are only indirectly aware of the “external world,” via internal images which “represent” external objects. So far, however, this may not be the account of modernity that my readers were expecting. (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Lookout, 1887.

6,044 words

One of the more common tropes found in Dissident Right discourse concerns the relationship between the Left and “reality.” This discourse articulates a belief held by Right-wingers that the Left lives in denial of reality, and that this leads to deleterious outcomes for peoples of European descent. However, in another sense, Right-wing discourses concerning the Left-wing relationship with reality focuses on how particular personalities common on the Left cause them to relate to present and future realities differently than those on the Right. (more…)

Detail, Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, ca. 1550.

1,379 words

I had been aware for some time of the phrase “the engineer’s fallacy,” but unaware of its provenance and exact definition. I struck lucky on the ‘net, because this gentleman claims to have invented the phrase, and this short piece repays inspection. 

Mr. Kelly’s definition of the Engineer’s Fallacy is pleasingly simple: (more…)

1,789 words

Adam Curtis has been compiling and documenting the nature of power in the world for over two decades now for the BBC. Those of us who reside in the UK and are required by law to pay a yearly sum of £157.50 ($218.35) for a television license, and for many native British people, paying this sum has been increasingly feeling like a spit in the face. Adam Curtis’ documentaries have been the one reprieve from the stream of abuse and guilt-tripping amongst the state-sponsored news media and junk celebrity TV.   (more…)

Frans Hals, Portrait of René Descartes, 1649-1700.

6,518 words

1. To Be Is to Be “Set Before”

In the previous installment of this series, we saw Heidegger contrasting modernity to the Middle Ages in the following terms:

For the Middle Ages . . . the being is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal creator-God, who is considered to be the highest cause. (more…)

6,023 words

1. Introduction

For Heidegger, the history of Western metaphysics is characterized by understanding Being narrowly in terms of what satisfies human needs and desires – especially the desire for knowledge, prediction, and control. This “subjective turn” is usually associated with the modern period, but Heidegger locates its inception much earlier, with Plato and some of the Pre-Socratics. (These points are discussed at length in Part One of this series.) (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…)

2,460 words

But when ye see Jerusalem encompassed with armies, then know that its desolation is drawn nigh. [1]

Constant Readers know that my go-to source for Radio Christianity, especially the apocalyptic sort, is Brother Stair. (more…)

Mr. Gurdjieff

7,589 words

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born on this day in 1866, 1872, or 1877 — depending on whom you ask. [1] Much else about his biography is equally uncertain. We do know that his father was Greek, his mother Armenian, and that he was born in Alexandropol which was then part of the Russian Empire (it is now in Armenia and is called Gyumri). (more…)

White students pondering over a Herbert Marcuse lecture on the “one-dimensional mind” of the white race.

1,364 words

No one knows Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861). He was a legal philosopher of Jewish parentage who converted to Christianity and became a defender of Prussian Lutheran conservatism against the imposition of Enlightenment values. He rejected Hegel’s argument (more…)

1,985 words

It would be easy to make Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru into something trite and hopeful — like an existential affirmation of life. But that wouldn’t be right. Despite the film’s title translating into English as “to live,” the film poignantly demonstrates how any real meaning life has is barely hanging by a thread. In fact, you would have to be a little crazy — or on death’s door — to act upon this meaning at all. You will be going against the grain, you see. Humanity is organized in such a way to impede meaning. (more…)

7,911 words

Benjamin Teitelbaum
War For Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers
New York: HarperCollins, 2020

“I am sure you can appreciate the urgency of such matters. . . Richard Spencer [is not someone] that you play around with.”  — Jason Jorjani [1] (more…)

6,392 words

The idea that the norms implanted upon us by our families affect our personalities and our prospects in life is almost a truism. The idea that there is a strong relationship between the Western nuclear family and liberal modernity is no longer controversial, and so is the idea that different family types have existed across the world and that these types have played a significant role in the historical trajectories of the cultures of the world. Some are aware of the so-called “Hajnal line” proposed in 1965 by John Hajnal, (more…)

Greg Johnson
Graduate School with Heidegger
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2020
220 pages

There are three formats for Graduate School with Heidegger: 

1. Hardcover: $40 (including postage; add $13 for postage to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & the Far East)
2. Paperback: $25 (including postage; add $13 for postage to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, & the Far East).
3. E-book: $5. 

(more…)

Winslow Homer, The Woodcutter, 1891.

6,121 words

I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods sometime in college. I found it more Flannery O’Connor than Marvel Studios, but it’s hardly surprising that the latter interpretation seems to have driven the new television series’ production team (but I haven’t watched). (more…)

1,214 words

Kid A belongs on an end-times list of anti-modern records. How is that possible? Radiohead is, by any measure, one of the most successful recording groups in the world and also one of the most reliable when it comes to mainstreaming alternative and experimental music. Does it make sense to call a record like this one (more…)

4,645 words

Translations: Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian

Martin Heidegger is one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, both in terms of the depth and originality of his ideas and the breadth of his influence in philosophy, theology, the human sciences, and culture in general.

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in the town of Meßkirch in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He died on May 26, 1976 in Freiburg and was buried in Meßkirch. (more…)

2,306 words

The Charge

One of the most sensational charges against Heidegger is that he claimed that the Holocaust was the “self-annihilation” (Selbstvernichtung) of the Jews. This charge was first made by Italian philosophy professor Donatella di Cesare in an article in Corriere Della Sere on February 9, 2015: “Heidegger: ‘Jews Self-Destructed’: New Black Notebooks Reveal Philosopher’s Shocking Take on Shoah.”[1] (more…)

1,901 words

All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

I was recently asked if Hermann Hesse is a man of the Right. My answer, such as it was, was a qualified yes. (more…)

Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Mountain Lake in the Morning, 1823.

3,918 words

Among those on the Right who address man’s relationship to the rest of the natural world, one finds a variety of approaches. There are the anthropocentric conservationists, who promote the “wise use” or prudent management of natural resources for future generations. There are the Social Darwinist varieties, (more…)

1,349 words

In memory of Gabi Delgado-López (April 18, 1958 — March 22, 2020).

Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, more concisely known as DAF, is a German electronic music band from Wuppertal consisting of Gabi Delgado-López and Robert Görl. Their name contains a light touch of irony, rendered into English as “German-American Friendship.” (more…)