George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”
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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…)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…)
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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.
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
Mr. Gurdjieff
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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.
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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…)
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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…)
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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:
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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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.
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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…)
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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…)
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Yukio Mishima’s 1963 novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of his darkest works. Set in post-War Yokohama, it is the story of Fusako Kuroda, a thirty-three-year-old widow who runs a boutique selling Western luxury goods, and her thirteen-year-old son Noboru Kuroda. (See Alex Graham’s discussion of the novel here.)
Fusako’s world is entirely feminine, bourgeois, modern, and Western. She is also deeply lonely. Then she meets Ryuji Tsukazaki, the second-mate on a steamship. (more…)
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Jim Goad
Gender Psychosis: Insanity and Sexual Identity
Pine Lake, Georgia: Obnoxious Books, 2020
One of the strengths of this new collection of short pieces about today’s sexual confusions is that the author has no qualifications for writing them. Qualifications for writing about sex go mainly to the sources of our confusion. Thanks to an overabundance of experts, (more…)
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Did you know that there are only two countries in the world where it’s legal to advertise pharmaceutical drugs on television? One is the U.S., of course, and the other is New Zealand. I remember the early days of those ads, back in the 1990s. For example, there was the classic Zyrtec ad that showed someone climbing a mountain. You had to guess what the drug was for, because back then, they weren’t allowed to be more explicit. All the ad said was “ask your doctor.” My, how times have changed. (more…)
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Ross Douthat
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
New York: Simon & Schuster (2020)
Never-Trumper Ross Douthat is a faux-Christian, faux-conservative writer for leftist publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times. His presence at those publications is akin to that of the house Negro, (more…)
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As you can see. . . girls, music, disease, heartbreak. . . they all go together. . .
About three months ago, I was asked to give one of those “four recommendations” type interviews for an eminent publication (an old buddy’s blog) in the old country. (more…)
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Emmanuel Todd
Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus
Cambridge, England, and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019
Much of today’s dominant globalist ideology derives from development theory, a body of thought which shares with Marxism the view that economic relations are the basis of social life and sees the races of mankind as fundamentally equivalent beneath the superficial cultural differences which have arisen over history. (more…)
Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943.
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I think it is safe to assume that most Counter-Currents readers are familiar with the phrase “death by 1000 cuts,” which is an expression translated into English from the protracted Chinese torture process known as lingchi. In political-speak, its close cousin is the analogy of the slow boiling frog. Dissidents on our side of the great divide have an intuitive understanding that we’ve come to our current impasse through subtle but profound changes in policy and attitudes that our political enemies call “progress.” (more…)
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