1,174 words
Like a shooting star in a white hood, the news crossed my Twitter feed about how evil white supremacist Republicans in Texas voted last Friday to make it impossible for teachers to say anything bad about the Ku Klux Klan.
Naturally, that’s not what happened, (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…)
Giacomo Balla, Science Against Obscurantism, 1920
6,034 words
Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here
My last essay ended with the observation that there are clear points of convergence between Kant’s thought and Heidegger’s. (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…)
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…)
6,166 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…)
2,583 words
“This is who we are” is the final argument of identity politics. “Who we are” is a compound of kinship and culture. But identity is politically impotent unless a people is willing to assert itself, to take its own side in a fight. Thus the third pillar of white identity politics has to be that fighting spirit. (more…)
Mars, ca. 2nd century AD.
2,096 words
You are here because you are convinced of the rightness of your ideas. This is not meant in a specific, epistemological sense; as in, your ideas have been verified by some kind of universal truth or that they are backed by data drawn from rigor, though these things could be applied to many of the ideas we hold on the Right. I mean that you are convinced enough of what you hold to be true that you are taking a risk in upholding it, even in the face of great adversaries. (more…)
Socrates
2,151 words
Author’s Note:
The following text is based on a transcript by Rollo Walker of a 1999 lecture on “Objectivity, Relativism, and Well-Being.” This text only includes the first half of the transcript, and it has been massively condensed and rewritten.
Socrates is famous for arguing that all human beings pursue happiness; (more…)
