Tag: the ego

A daguerreotype of F. W. J. Schelling from 1848, the first known photograph of a philosopher.

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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…)

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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

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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…)

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Australian nationalist activist Blair Cottrell was Nick Jeelvy‘s guest on the most recent broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc where they discussed the phenomenon of pharmacology and its origins, as well as answer your questions, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

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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…)

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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…)

The Varangian Guard of the Eastern Roman Empire.

1,783 words

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

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Just as it would be vain to oppose to abstract equality a similarly abstract inequality, it would in my opinion be mistaken to try to oppose nationalism or ethnocentrism to the ideology of Sameness. (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…)

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…)