Tag: nature

Aristophanes

6,912 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Strepsiades Flunks Out

It hasn’t gone well. First Socrates bursts out of the Thinkery swearing an oath: “By Respiration, by Chaos, by the Air.” The usual places of gods in his oath are occupied by three natural forces. Socrates then rants about a particularly bad student who is “rustic . . . resourceless . . . dull . . . and forgetful.” Then he calls this student to come out. And out comes Strepsiades.

Socrates then quizzes Strepsiades on what he has learned. (more…)

A sixteenth-century engraving of Strepsiades, his son, and Socrates in Clouds.

7,651 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

“The Thinkery, a likeness of death, teaching Whirligig and Bamboozle, ‘back to nature’ without families, without the old paternal gods, and without nomoi (not paying back money owed and using unusual forms of words) . . .” — Thomas Prufer (more…)

Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler

5,320 words

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…)

6,341 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

1. Fichte on the Nature of the State

We began to explore Fichte’s political philosophy in the last installment, as expounded primarily in his 1796 work Foundations of Natural Right. It is a basic principle of Fichte’s philosophy that subjectivity, what he calls the “I,” must bring nature under the control of reason. (more…)

J. G. Fichte

6,359 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

1. “I am what I freely make myself to be”

This is the sixth essay I have written for Counter-Currents on the German idealist J. G. Fichte (see the introductory essay here), and it is effectively a continuation of my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” However, the reader need not be familiar with any of the earlier entries in order to understand this one. (more…)

6,017 words

Stefano Boni
Homo confort: Le prix à payer d’une vie sans efforts ni contraintes
Paris: Les Éditions L’échappée, 2022

For several years I worked freelance for a company which specialized in controlling indemnity claims on behalf of automobile insurance companies. Like many others, the company published an annual in-house magazine which included cheesy personal interviews with managers and heads of departments. (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…)

Béla Hamvas

3,830 words

Béla Hamvas (1897-1968) was a Hungarian writer who was the first exponent of Tradition, as understood by René Guénon and Julius Evola, in his country, and remains a highly respected writer and novelist outside metaphysical circles as well. The following essay appeared in The Hungarian Quarterly no. 3 (March 1937).

When a Hungarian hears the word “Bakony” the picture evoked in his mind is not of the mountain range in western Hungary, which skirts lake Balaton for a hundred and fifty kilometres. Geographical names are usually mere names. (more…)

1,411 words

Shawn Bell
Post—: Short Stories by Shawn Bell
Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill, 2022

Other than calling his work “dissident fiction,” it’s hard to categorize Shawn Bell’s short stories. In his recent Antelope Hill collection, entitled Post—, it’s mostly their cutting insights into the insidious façade of globalism — and their tremendously high quality — which link these stories together. Within Post— we have elements of dystopia, coming-of-age, romance, alternate history, family drama, tragedy, and the slice of life found in the faded Houckian suburbs of the American Midwest. (more…)

Theodore Roosevelt, a great pioneer of American conservationism.

5,313 words

The Great Replacement is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. It consists, on the one hand, of encouraging low birth rates among Europeans and their colonial offshoots by promoting secularism and hedonism, guilt and shame for their ancestors and culture, and the virtues of childlessness. Simultaneously, its architects support open borders and increased immigration from the Third World, ostensibly for humanitarian motives or to compensate for population decline among the native-born population. Needless to say, these massive demographic changes will affect every facet of American life in the years ahead. (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…)