Tag: reality

Gorgias of Leontini

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Part 1 of 14 (Part 2 here)

An ancient commentator on Aristotle tells a story about a farmer who got ahold of Plato’s Gorgias and was so stunned that he gave up the life of farming, trudged to Athens, looked up Plato, and put his soul in Plato’s care.[1]

Like the Alcibiades I, the Gorgias offers a wonderful argument for pursuing the philosophical life. But there are differences. The Gorgias is twice as long as the Alcibiades I. Instead of speaking to a naïve young man, Socrates faces three formidable opponents, including one of the greatest of all sophists, Gorgias of Leontini, for whom the dialogue is named. But in the end, philosophy wins. Sorry for giving away the ending, but did you imagine it would turn out any other way given that Plato is our author? (more…)

5,487 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Mitch Horowitz
Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind
G&D Media, 2022

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

To trifle with such ideas, rather than fall to your knees and sustain them as lifelong questions, is to toy with destruction. — Mitch Horowitz, Daydream Believer (more…)

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Greg Johnson and guest co-host Pox Populi (Telegram, YouTube) welcomed David Zsutty of the Homeland Institute (website, Telegram) on the first half of last weekend’s Counter-Currents Radio broadcast to talk about the Institute’s history so far, as well as its purpose and goals. The broadcast is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

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We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. — Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States

And different statistics for violent crime.

Almost a quarter of the twenty-first century is “history” and, given how badly it’s been going, perhaps it’s time to pause and ask the question: Who’s to blame? (more…)

785 words / 2:13:09

Jason Kessler and American Krogan were host Nick Jeelvy‘s guests on the latest broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc, where they had a panel discussion on the Carny Question in Right-wing politics, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

Carl Friedrich Lessing, Rocky Landscape

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Many theories have been posited as to the cause of the decline of the Western world, from demographic disaster and dysgenics to spiritual malaise and the death of Christianity. Yet, while these phenomena are symptoms of our collapsing societies, they do not fully explain why we have embarked on our wholesale self-destruction. Could it be that we have let our world descend into rack and ruin because we simply do not live there anymore? For the vast majority of the developed world, cyberspace has supplanted reality. (more…)

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Part 4 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

5. Critique of Magical Idealism (Continued)

(b) How strong is Evola’s case for idealism?

I noted earlier that Evola sums up his idealism using Berkeley’s famous expression esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). (more…)

4,214 words

Part 2 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

4. The Principles of Magical Idealism

Evola’s critique of transcendental idealism, which we examined in the last installment, is insightful and interesting — though grand choruses of academic voices would be raised against every step of it, insisting that Evola has misunderstood idealism. (more…)

J. G. Fichte meets Immanuel Kant, 1791

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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…)

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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…)

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“Psychosis”: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. 

You wake up these mornings and ask yourself: how much worse is it going to get today? You skim a news story or an editorial coming out of the New York Times, Washington Post, or the Detroit Free Press. Or, perhaps you turn on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Something is terribly wrong. You ask yourself: Where am I? In Moscow? Is it 1936? Why do I feel terror all around me? (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.

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Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.

“Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem?” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1]  (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…)