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par Nicolas Bonnal
Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org
Dans ce livre étonnant écrit il y a presque cent ans Guénon faisait le lien entre la constatation de notre abrutissement et la situation de l’après-guerre mondiale (crise culturelle, sociale, communisme, tiers-mondisme, etc.). Il reconnaissait aussi la montée de l’occidentalisme en orient.
Il évoquait déjà notre abrutissement qui est très grand, qui est même hallucinant. Michael Hoffman évoque les trois « A » : apathie, aboulie, amnésie. Guénon souligne que comme le chien Ran-Tan-Plan de Lucky Luke l’avant-garde modeste des occidentaux « sent confusément » la crise :
« Que l’on puisse parler d’une crise du monde moderne, en prenant ce mot de « crise » dans son acception la plus ordinaire, c’est une chose que beaucoup ne mettent déjà plus en doute, et, à cet égard tout au moins, il s’est produit un changement assez sensible : sous l’action même des événements, certaines illusions commencent à se dissiper, et nous ne pouvons, pour notre part, que nous en féliciter, car il y a là, malgré tout, un symptôme assez favorable, l’indice d’une possibilité de redressement de la mentalité contemporaine, quelque chose qui apparaît comme une faible lueur au milieu du chaos actuel. »
Le progrès ne serait donc pas ce qu’on avait promis au cycliste Virenque : notre civilisation serait mortelle… Or comme on sait grâce à Philippe Grasset elle est surtout mortifère car c’est une anti-civilisation ; mais en étant mortifère elle en devient immortelle. Je me souviens de ce documentaire US consacré à l’adoration des méduses, seule « bête » survivante du pauvre golfe du Mexique. Le commentaire satanique en était enthousiaste, comme ces foules qui vont voir le dernier produit Marvel sur leur extermination prochaine. Guénon :
« C’est ainsi que la croyance à un « progrès » indéfini, qui était tenue naguère encore pour une sorte de dogme intangible et indiscutable, n’est plus aussi généralement admise ; certains entrevoient plus ou moins vaguement, plus ou moins confusément, que la civilisation occidentale, au lieu d’aller toujours en continuant à se développer dans le même sens, pourrait bien arriver un jour à un point d’arrêt, ou même sombrer entièrement dans quelque cataclysme. Peut-être ceux-là ne voient-ils pas nettement où est le danger, et les craintes chimériques ou puériles qu’ils manifestent parfois prouvent suffisamment la persistance de bien des erreurs dans leur esprit ; mais enfin c’est déjà quelque chose qu’ils se rendent compte qu’il y a un danger, même s’ils le sentent plus qu’ils ne le comprennent vraiment, et qu’ils parviennent à concevoir que cette civilisation dont les modernes sont si infatués n’occupe pas une place privilégiée dans l’histoire du monde, qu’elle peut avoir le même sort que tant d’autres qui ont déjà disparu à des époques plus ou moins lointaines, et dont certaines n’ont laissé derrière elles que des traces infimes, des vestiges à peine perceptibles ou difficilement reconnaissables. »
Une civilisation peut être crevée et durer encore. Relisez la Charogne de Baudelaire…
La crise suppose un point critique qu’on n’a toujours pas passé un siècle plus tard (on y revient) :
« Donc, si l’on dit que le monde moderne subit une crise, ce que l’on entend par là le plus habituellement, c’est qu’il est parvenu à un point critique, ou, en d’autres termes, qu’une transformation plus ou moins profonde est imminente, qu’un changement d’orientation devra inévitablement se produire à brève échéance, de gré ou de force, d’une façon plus ou moins brusque, avec ou sans catastrophe. »
Guénon évoque le kali-yuga, notion fourre-tout, bas de gamme aujourd’hui :
« Le monde moderne ira-t-il jusqu’au bas de cette pente fatale, ou bien, comme il est arrivé à la décadence du monde gréco-latin, un nouveau redressement se produira-t-il, cette fois encore, avant qu’il n’ait atteint le fond de l’abîme où il est entraîné ? Il semble bien qu’un arrêt à mi-chemin ne soit plus guère possible, et que, d’après toutes les indications fournies par les doctrines traditionnelles, nous soyons entrés vraiment dans la phase finale du Kali-Yuga, dans la période la plus sombre de cet « âge sombre », dans cet état de dissolution dont il n’est plus possible de sortir que par un cataclysme, car ce n’est plus un simple redressement qui est alors nécessaire, mais une rénovation totale. »
Tragique il rappelle que le désordre règne partout et se répand comme les méduses :
« Le désordre et la confusion règnent dans tous les domaines ; ils ont été portés à un point qui dépasse de loin tout ce qu’on avait vu précédemment, et, partis de l’Occident, ils menacent maintenant d’envahir le monde tout entier ; nous savons bien que leur triomphe ne peut jamais être qu’apparent et passager, mais, à un tel degré, il paraît être le signe de la plus grave de toutes les crises que l’humanité ait traversées au cours de son cycle actuel. Ne sommes-nous pas arrivés à cette époque redoutable annoncée par les Livres sacrés de l’Inde, « où les castes seront mêlées, où la famille même n’existera plus » ?
La famille tout le monde s’en fout maintenant, y compris la distraite Eglise de Rome. Guénon conclut en termes évangéliques :
« Il suffit de regarder autour de soi pour se convaincre que cet état est bien réellement celui du monde actuel, et pour constater partout cette déchéance profonde que l’Évangile appelle « l’abomination de la désolation ».
Plus important pour moi et la thématique de la Fin de l’histoire, du temps immobile depuis des siècles, cette notation sur la France de Louis XIV, déjà aride et moderne, et même anti-traditionnelle (pensez aux bourgeois de Molière) :
« Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du moyen âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par-là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. »
Le jeune bourgeois qui douterait des ténèbres du moyen âge ne trouverait pas à se marier, disait Léon Bloy (Exégèse, CXXVII)…
Guénon :
« Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue… »
J’ai déjà parlé de Michelet pour qui le moyen âge avait disparu depuis longtemps. Il s’était conservé comme hystérésie (un peu comme la France qui n’est plus rien qu’un sac à stupre, il est temps de le reconnaître en arrêtant d’y pleurnicher) :
« Le vrai moyen âge, pour nous, s’étend du règne de Charlemagne au début du XIVe siècle ; à cette dernière date commence une nouvelle décadence qui, à travers des étapes diverses, ira en s’accentuant jusqu’à nous. C’est là qu’est le véritable point de départ de la crise moderne : c’est le commencement de la désagrégation de la « Chrétienté », à laquelle s’identifiait essentiellement la civilisation occidentale du moyen âge ; c’est, en même temps que la fin du régime féodal, assez étroitement solidaire de cette même « Chrétienté », l’origine de la constitution des « nationalités ». Il faut donc faire remonter l’époque moderne près de deux siècles plus tôt qu’on ne le fait d’ordinaire ; la Renaissance et la Réforme sont surtout des résultantes, et elles n’ont été rendues possibles que par la décadence préalable… »
Les Illuminati dont on nous gave aujourd’hui ne sont en effet que les reproductions des kabbalistes et des sorciers, des alchimistes et des escrocs de tout poil de la Renaissance, espions britanniques y compris. Mais poursuivons car le problème suivant nous importe aussi : l’orient est devenu aussi nul que l’occident. Et si l’occident est crevé, l’orient est en phase terminale de décadence (regardez la numérisation de son humanité à cet orient, que ce soit en Chine ou en Inde – sans parler du monde musulman devenu un zombie comme le christianisme occidental :
« Le désordre moderne, nous l’avons dit, a pris naissance en Occident, et, jusqu’à ces dernières années, il y était toujours demeuré strictement localisé ; mais maintenant il se produit un fait dont la gravité ne doit pas être dissimulée : c’est que ce désordre s’étend partout et semble gagner jusqu’à l’Orient. Certes, l’envahissement occidental n’est pas une chose toute récente, mais il se bornait jusqu’ici à une domination plus ou moins brutale exercée sur les autres peuples, et dont les effets étaient limités au domaine politique et économique ; en dépit de tous les efforts d’une propagande revêtant des formes multiples, l’esprit oriental était impénétrable à toutes les déviations, et les anciennes civilisations traditionnelles subsistaient intactes. »
L’occidentalisation (voyez le ridicule Kim, un sosie CIA selon certains) est donc totale :
« Aujourd’hui, au contraire, il est des Orientaux qui se sont plus ou moins complètement « occidentalisés », qui ont abandonné leur tradition pour adopter toutes les aberrations de l’esprit moderne, et ces éléments dévoyés, grâce à l’enseignement des Universités européennes et américaines, deviennent dans leur propre pays une cause de trouble et d’agitation. »
Guénon nous rassure sans nous rassurer :
« L’esprit traditionnel ne peut mourir, parce qu’il est, dans son essence, supérieur à la mort et au changement ; mais il peut se retirer entièrement du monde extérieur, et alors ce sera véritablement la « fin d’un monde ». D’après tout ce que nous avons dit, la réalisation de cette éventualité dans un avenir relativement peu éloigné n’aurait rien d’invraisemblable ; et, dans la confusion qui, partie de l’Occident, gagne présentement l’Orient, nous pourrions voir le « commencement de la fin », le signe précurseur du moment où, suivant la tradition hindoue, la doctrine sacrée doit être enfermée tout entière dans une conque, pour en sortir intacte à l’aube du monde nouveau. »
L’occident reste un virus en fait :
« Mais laissons là encore une fois les anticipations, et ne regardons que les événements actuels : ce qui est incontestable, c’est que l’Occident envahit tout ; son action s’est d’abord exercée dans le domaine matériel, celui qui était immédiatement à sa portée, soit par la conquête violente, soit par le commerce et l’accaparement des ressources de tous les peuples ; mais maintenant les choses vont encore plus loin. »
Guénon évoque aussi ce besoin démoniaque de prosélytisme humanitaire que j’ai évoqué dans mon texte sur la théosophie et le mondialisme :
« Les Occidentaux, toujours animés par ce besoin de prosélytisme qui leur est si particulier, sont arrivés à faire pénétrer chez les autres, dans une certaine mesure, leur esprit antitraditionnel et matérialiste ; et, tandis que la première forme d’invasion n’atteignait en somme que les corps, celle-ci empoisonne les intelligences et tue la spiritualité ; l’une a d’ailleurs préparé l’autre et l’a rendue possible, de sorte que ce n’est en définitive que par la force brutale que l’Occident est parvenu à s’imposer partout, et il ne pouvait en être autrement, car c’est en cela que réside l’unique supériorité réelle de sa civilisation, si inférieure à tout autre point de vue. »
Rappel des déguisements humanitaires :
« L’envahissement occidental, c’est l’envahissement du matérialisme sous toutes ses formes, et ce ne peut être que cela ; tous les déguisements plus ou moins hypocrites, tous les prétextes « moralistes », toutes les déclamations « humanitaires », toutes les habiletés d’une propagande qui sait à l’occasion se faire insinuante pour mieux atteindre son but de destruction, ne peuvent rien contre cette vérité, qui ne saurait être contestée que par des naïfs ou par ceux qui ont un intérêt quelconque à cette œuvre vraiment « satanique», au sens le plus rigoureux du mot. »
Guénon a tenté et échoué. Comme beaucoup. Cette société est satanique et crèvera après avoir tout souillé et corrompu. Le salut sera personnel.
« Et les folles dirent aux prudentes: Donnez-nous de votre huile, car nos lampes s’éteignent.
Mais les prudentes répondirent, disant: [Non], de peur qu’il n’y en ait pas assez pour nous et pour vous; allez plutôt vers ceux qui en vendent, et achetez‑en pour vous-mêmes. »
Or en grec phronéo veut dire penser et concevoir, pas être prudent ! Etre lucide c’est être - surtout avec des fêtes de la musique comme celle que nous venons de vivre.
Et comme on citait Baudelaire et sa charogne vivante et mélomane qui évoque notre « chienlit » cadavérique et increvable :
« Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint ;
Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s’épanouir (…) »
Cette forme de vie cadavérique exprime bien la vie occidentale contemporaine.
« On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague,
Vivait en se multipliant.
Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
Comme l’eau courante et le vent,
Ou le grain qu’un vanneur d’un mouvement rythmique
Agite et tourne dans son van. »
René Guénon – La crise du monde moderne
Bonnal – La culture comme arme de destruction massive
Léon Bloy – Exégèse…
Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du mal
00:13 Publié dans Philosophie, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, tradiiton, traditionalisme, rené guénon | |
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13:41 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : troy southgate, oswald spengler, révolution conservatrice, allemagne, philosophie, philosophie de l'histoire | |
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Urbaniste, philosophe, antisystème, Paul Virilio était interviewé par Jean-Luc Evard il y a dix ans et tenait les propos suivants sur la vitesse :
« Walter Laqueur l’a montré : une vie accélérée remplace l’atmosphère calme et recueillie de l’avant-guerre. De cent mille voitures particulières au sortir de la guerre, l’Allemagne passe à un million deux cent mille dix ans plus tard.
Les techniciens allemands sont aspirés par une seule ambition : les records de vitesse : le « Ruban Bleu » avec le Bremen, la première auto-fusée chez Opel, les trains ultrarapides, le développement de la radio avec ses informations hachées et renouvelées. Agitation, fébrilité, impatience donnent le sentiment de perdre la tête ; un poète trouvera l’image résumant l’époque : « Le temps roule en auto et aucun homme ne peut tenir le volant »
Ce bon chrétien en tirait des conséquences philosophiques affolantes :
« Nous créons la nouvelle esthétique de la vitesse, nous avons presque détruit la notion d’espace et singulièrement diminué la notion de temps. Nous préparons ainsi l’ubiquité de l’homme multiplié. Nous aboutirons ainsi à l’abolition de l’année, du jour et de l’heure… »
C’est que le pouvoir moderne, financier notamment, a grand besoin de cette violence/vitesse :
« Dans toute course, depuis le monde animal jusqu’au monde concurrentiel des finances. Donc, le pouvoir de la vitesse est en phase avec l’importance de la richesse. Je ne crois pas qu’on puisse comprendre l’histoire, y compris l’histoire sainte, sans l’accélération, sans les phénomènes d’accélération, qui sont rarement mis en lumière. Je donne un petit exemple, un tout petit : celui du Christ entrant à Jérusalem sur un âne. Il y a là un déni du cheval, manifeste. »
Virilio remontait dans le temps :
« La vitesse va jusqu’à la vitesse de la lumière. Quand Josué dispose ses troupes face au soleil, c’est pour la capter dans ses boucliers, c’est déjà l’arme-lumière, il anticipe l’invention du laser. À mon avis, on est là dans la théologie de la vitesse… »
Le progrès adore l’hybris :
« Il n’y a pas de dromologie si on est amené à accélérer ou à freiner. Le mot frein n’a aucun sens, ce qui compte c’est la décélération. Ce qui est en cause dans le progrès, c’est une accélération sans décélération, c’est-à-dire une hybris, une démesure. »
Un beau développement sur l’écologie grise et la « pollution des distances » avec une conséquence, l’incarcération :
« À côté de la pollution des substances (dont traite l’écologie “verte”), il y a une pollution des distances : le progrès réduit à rien l’étendue du monde. Il y a là une perte insupportable, qui sera bien plus rapide que la pollution des substances. Et qui aura des conséquences autrement plus drastiques que celles relevées par Foucault à la suite du grand enfermement — la réalisation du grand enfermement, de l’incarcération du monde, dans un monde réduit par l’accélération des transports et des transmissions. Pour moi, l’écologie grise remet en cause la grandeur nature. La terre n’est pas seulement une sphère, une biosphère, mais aussi une proportion (et là c’est l’architecte qui parle). »
Conclusion apocalyptique :
« Projetons-nous en imagination deux générations devant nous : vivre sur terre sera insupportable, de par le phénomène d’incarcération dans un espace réduit à rien. »
Virilio critiquait aussi la conquête spatiale (qui est un simulacre parmi d’autres pourtant) :
« Les astrophysiciens sont déjà en train de nous préparer une autre Terre promise. En Europe, il y a déjà des gens qui vivent enfermés dans des containers pour expérimenter les voyages vers Mars. La vie en exil aux limites de l’extrême. Toutes ces choses-là sont des signes pathologiques de l’exil à venir, ou de l’exode. Derrière l’écologie et la préservation de l’environnement, pour beaucoup de scientifiques, c’est déjà fichu. On est déjà en train d’anticiper une outre-Terre. Ce qui pour moi est une pure folie… »
Il se méfie bien sûr de la promesse virtuelle :
« Le sixième continent est une colonie virtuelle. On nous dit que les gens s’y amusent, que c’est pour leur bien, pour la communication. En réalité, l’aventure coloniale recommence. »
Il rappelle qu’il faut condamner la technoscience – et sa dimension impériale :
« L’idée de la colonie est très importante. Au moment où on demande aux ex-empires coloniaux de faire leur meaculpa, on ne demande pas aux moyens qui ont favorisé la colonie de faire leur mea culpa. Par exemple les navires très performants. Michelet, je crois, disait : « Qui dit colonie dit grande marine. » Les gros porteurs, les grosses fusées ! Il y a là, encore une fois, déni de la responsabilité de la technoscience, le fait qu’elle produit les instruments du pouvoir, du pouvoir de la vitesse. À mon avis, cela n’est pas un hasard si l’on nous dit : « La colonie, c’est affreux » — car on est en train de nous préparer un autre empire. »
Il reconnait que ce monde moderne c’est la fin de la liberté :
« J’ai été occupé. Je suis un enfant de la Blitzkrieg, j’avais dix-onze ans. Entre la guerre-éclair — 1940 — et la fermeture-éclair — 1945 —, c’est mon monde. Je n’ai plus l’impression d’être libre… Les Allemands dans la rue et les amis qui nous bombardaient. Eh bien j’ai de nouveau le sentiment d’être occupé. La mondialisation nous occupe, elle nous enferme. »
Le nomadisme est un leurre :
« Qui sont les sédentaires ? Ceux qui ne quittent jamais leur siège d’avion, d’automobile, ceux qui sont partout chez eux, grâce au téléphone portable. Qui sont les nomades ? Ceux qui ne sont nulle part chez eux sauf sur les trottoirs, sous les tentes des sans-abri. »
Virilio mettait les points sur les I scientifiques :
« Comme disait un scientifique récemment : « Nous appliquons au monde que nous ne connaissons pas la physique que nous connaissons.
» Là, de fait, on est devant l’illusionnisme scientifique. »
Ce monde moderne c’est la déportation :
« Il y a là quelque chose qui a été vécu dans la déportation et l’extermination nazie. Il ne faut jamais oublier — et là je suis d’accord avec R. Hilberg — que la déportation est plus importante que l’extermination. C’est la déportation qui a mené à l’extermination. Le mouvement de déplacement de population a été l’origine de l’extermination. »
Et d’expliquer comment nous sommes entrés dans la société des dissuadés :
« Je considère qu’après la dissuasion militaire (Est-Ouest), qui a duré une quarantaine d’années, nous sommes entrés, avec la mondialisation, dans l’ère d’une dissuasion civile, c’est-à-dire globale. D’où les interdits si nombreux qui se multiplient aujourd’hui (exemples : un des acteurs de La Cage aux folles déclarant qu’aujourd’hui on ne pourrait plus tourner ce film ; ou mon ami Éric Rohmer à qui son film, L’Astrée, a valu un procès, un président de conseil régional l’attaquant pour avoir déclaré que L’Astrée — le film — n’a pu être tourné sur les lieux du récit engloutis par l’urbanisation, tu te rends compte ?). Donc je suis très sensible au fait que nous sommes des Dissuadés. »
Jean-Luc Evard, Conférence/entretien avec Paul Virilio
15:54 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, paul virilio | |
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09:49 Publié dans Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, philosophie politique, théorie politique, sciences politiques, espagne, ortega y gasset | |
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12:08 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : bhl, bernard-henry lévy, philosophie, polémique, cornelius castoriadis, pierre vidal-naquet, france, parisianisme | |
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On peut s’adonner à l’adoration de la démocratie en ces temps d’État profond et d’Europe de Bruxelles, il reste que le mot plèbe, dont elle marque la triomphe, a été balayé de tous temps par les génies de l’humanité, à commencer par Platon ou Juvénal, jusqu’à Nietzsche ou Tocqueville. On a évoqué les transformations sociétales (les chiens et les gosses qui parlent aux maîtres et aux parents, etc.) du livre VIII de la République, mais on va revenir ici à la démocratie à la grecque et à sa gestion compliquée…
Fustel de Coulanges dresse un tableau assez terrible de la progression démocratique à Athènes et dans la Grèce ancienne, où elle fut plus cruelle qu’à Athènes, parfois abominable. Mais elle est tellement fatale et inévitable – y compris la décadence qui va avec – qu’on ne va pas la dénoncer !
La Cité dans l’Histoire… Fustel écrit, dans un style proche de Tocqueville :
« Mais telle est la nature humaine que ces hommes, à mesure que leur sort s’améliorait, sentaient plus amèrement ce qu’il leur restait d’inégalité. »
La progression de la plèbe est bien sûr liée à celle de la tyrannie :
« Dans quelques villes, l’admission de la plèbe parmi les citoyens fut l’œuvre des rois ; il en fut ainsi à Rome. Dans d’autres, elle fut l’œuvre des tyrans populaires ; c’est ce qui eut lieu à Corinthe, à Sicyone, à Argos. »
Fustel ici nous fait découvrir un poète méconnu et politiquement réac, Théognis de Mégare. Le passage est passionnant, décrivant un déclin de l’humanité qui nous rappelle celui où Ortega nous explique que l’humanité moderne, comme la romaine, est devenuestupide :
« Le poète Théognis nous donne une idée assez nette de cette révolution et de ses conséquences. Il nous dit que dans Mégare, sa patrie, il y a deux sortes d’hommes. Il appelle l’une la classe des bons, ἀγαθοί; c’est, en effet, le nom qu’elle se donnait dans la plupart des villes grecques. Il appelle l’autre la classe des mauvais, κακοί; c’est encore de ce nom qu’il était d’usage de désigner la classe inférieure. Cette classe, le poète nous décrit sa condition ancienne : « elle ne connaissait autrefois ni les tribunaux ni les lois » ; c’est assez dire qu’elle n’avait pas le droit de cité. Il n’était même pas permis à ces hommes d’approcher de la ville ; « ils vivaient en dehors comme des bêtes sauvages ». Ils n’assistaient pas aux repas religieux ; ils n’avaient pas le droit de se marier dans les familles des bons. »
Théognis apparaît comme un nostalgique du temps jadis, le laudator temporis acti, façon Bonald par exemple qui écrit au lendemain de la brutale Révolution dite française (comme disait Debord, une bourgeoisie habillée… à la romaine). Il ajoute :
« Mais que tout cela est changé ! les rangs ont été bouleversés, « les mauvais ont été mis au-dessus des bons ». La justice est troublée ; les antiques lois ne sont plus, et des lois d’une nouveauté étrange les ont remplacées. La richesse est devenue l’unique objet des désirs des hommes, parce qu’elle donne la puissance. L’homme de race noble épouse la fille du riche plébéien et « le mariage confond les souches ».
Et Fustel décrit le noble destin de Théognis :
« Théognis, qui sort d’une famille aristocratique, a vainement essayé de résister au cours des choses. Condamné à l’exil, dépouillé de ses biens, il n’a plus que ses vers pour protester et pour combattre. Mais s’il n’espère pas le succès, du moins il ne doute pas de la justice de sa cause ; il accepte la défaite, mais il garde le sentiment de son droit. A ses yeux, la révolution qui s’est faite est un mal moral, un crime. Fils de l’aristocratie, il lui semble que cette révolution n’a pour elle ni la justice ni les dieux et qu’elle porte atteinte à la religion. « Les dieux, dit-il, ont quitté la terre ; nul ne les craint. La race des hommes pieux a disparu ; on n’a plus souci des Immortels. »
Puis, comme Mircéa Eliade, mais bien avant, Fustel explique que Théognis comprend qu’on oubliera même le souvenir de la nostalgie :
« Ces regrets sont inutiles, il le sait bien. S’il gémit ainsi, c’est par une sorte de devoir pieux, c’est parce qu’il a reçu des anciens « la tradition sainte », et qu’il doit la perpétuer. Mais en vain la tradition même va se flétrir, les fils des nobles vont oublier leur noblesse ; bientôt on les verra tous s’unir par le mariage aux familles plébéiennes, « ils boiront à leurs fêtes et mangeront à leur table » ; ils adopteront bientôt leurs sentiments. Au temps de Théognis, le regret est tout ce qui reste à l’aristocratie grecque, etce regret même va disparaître. »
Et comme on ne descend jamais assez bas, cette semaine j’ai découvert que ma libraire ne savait pas écrire Shakespeare, ma femme que son imprimeur de partitions ignorait qui était Mozart.
Le culte religieux, lié à l’aristocratie (la marque de l’aristocrate c’est la piété, dit Bonald) disparait donc :
« En effet, après Théognis, la noblesse ne fut plus qu’un souvenir.
Les grandes familles continuèrent à garder pieusement le culte domestique et la mémoire des ancêtres ; mais ce fut tout. Il y eut encore des hommes qui s’amusèrent à compter leurs aïeux ; mais on riait de ces hommes. On garda l’usage d’inscrire sur quelques tombes que le mort était de noble race ; mais nulle tentative ne fut faite pour relever un régime à jamais tombé. Isocrate dit avec vérité que de son temps les grandes familles d’Athènes n’existaient plus que dans leurs tombeaux (La cité antique, pp.388-389). »
Arrive la démocratie dont on oublie qu’elle fut surtout une corvée compliquée (comme dit Cochin, il faut se coucher tard pour conspirer longtemps…). Le peuple gagne peu à devenir démocrate. Il en devient esclave, explique Fustel dans des chapitres justement ignorés…
« A mesure que les révolutions suivaient leur cours et que l’on s’éloignait de l’ancien régime, le gouvernement des hommes devenait plus difficile. Il y fallait des règles plus minutieuses, des rouages plus nombreux et plus délicats. C’est ce qu’on peut voir par l’exemple du gouvernement d’Athènes. »
Ici on croirait du Tocqueville. Peut-être que la sensibilité aristocratique de nos deux grands historiens…
Mais Fustel décrit la corvée démocratique au jour le jour (pp.451-452) :
« On est étonné aussi de tout le travail que cette démocratie exigeait des hommes. C’était un gouvernement fort laborieux. Voyez à quoi se passe la vie d’un Athénien. Un jour il est appelé à l’assemblée de son dème et il a à délibérer sur les intérêts religieux ou financiers de cette petite association. Un autre jour, il est convoqué à l’assemblée de sa tribu ; il s’agit de régler une fête religieuse, ou d’examiner des dépenses, ou de faire des décrets, ou de nommer des chefs et des juges. »
Après c’est du Prévert :
« Trois fois par mois régulièrement il faut qu’il assiste à l’assemblée générale du peuple ; il n’a pas le droit d’y manquer. Or, la séance est longue ; il n’y va pas seulement pour voter : venu dès le matin, il faut qu’il reste jusqu’à une heure avancée du jour à écouter des orateurs. Il ne peut voter qu’autant qu’il a été présent dès l’ouverture de la séance et qu’il a entendu tous les discours. Ce vote est pour lui une affaire des plus sérieuses ; tantôt il s’agit de nommer ses chefs politiques et militaires, c’est-à-dire ceux à qui son intérêt et sa vie vont être confiés pour un an ; tantôt c’est un impôt à établir ou une loi à changer ; tantôt c’est sur la guerre qu’il doit voter, sachant bien qu’il aura à donner son sang ou celui d’un fils. Les intérêts individuels sont unis inséparablement à l’intérêt de l’État. L’homme ne peut être ni indifférent ni léger. »
Tout est préférable au règne des Agathoi (les « bons » de Théognis)… Fustel ajoute :
« Le devoir du citoyen ne se bornait pas à voter. Quand son tour venait, il devait être magistrat dans son dème ou dans sa tribu. Une année sur deux en moyenne, il était héliaste, c’est-à-dire juge, et il passait toute cette année-là dans les tribunaux, occupé à écouter les plaideurs et à appliquer les lois. Il n’y avait guère de citoyen qui ne fût appelé deux fois dans sa vie à faire partie du Sénat des Cinq cents ; alors, pendant une année, il siégeait chaque jour, du matin au soir, recevant les dépositions des magistrats, leur faisant rendre leurs comptes, répondant aux ambassadeurs étrangers, rédigeant les instructions des ambassadeurs athéniens, examinant toutes les affaires qui devaient être soumises au peuple et préparant tous les décrets. »
Avec sa méticulosité et sa soif de taxes et de règlements, la démocratie exige déjà un job à temps plein qui va créer une bureaucratie fonctionnarisée. Et on retombe inévitablement sur l’importance de l’argent déjà dénoncée par Théognis :
« Enfin il pouvait être magistrat de la cité, archonte, stratège, astynome, si le sort ou le suffrage le désignait. On voit que c’était une lourde charge que d’être citoyen d’un État démocratique, qu’il y avait là de quoi occuper presque toute l’existence, et qu’il restait bien peu de temps pour les travaux personnels et la vie domestique. Aussi Aristote disait-il très-justement que l’homme qui avait besoin de travailler pour vivre ne pouvait pas être citoyen. »
N’oublions que la Révolution Française accoucha de la plus formidable armée de fonctionnaires au monde, celle qui émerveillait aussi bien Taine que le pauvre Karl Marx qui inspira les totalitarismes révolutionnaires(« dans un pays comme la France, où le pouvoir exécutif dispose d’une armée de fonctionnaires de plus d’un demi-million de personnes et tient, par conséquent, constamment sous sa dépendance la plus absolue une quantité énorme d’intérêts et d’existences, où l’État enserre contrôle, réglemente, surveille et tient en tutelle la société civile… »).
On n’est pas ici pour transformer le cours de l’histoire humaine, et on s’en gardera, vu que ce désir malheureux est si souvent promis à un sort malheureux ! Mais on ne s’étonnera alors pas, etj’inviterai à découvrir l’œuvre du philosophe libertarien Hoppe à ce propos, en affirmant que le grand avènement démocratique, avec son cortège de guerres impériales-humanitaires-messianiques, de contrôles étatiques et d’inflation fiscale, marque souvent la fin d’une civilisation en fait – y compris et surtout sur le plan culturel. Que le phénomène démocratique ait débouché sur le césarisme ici, le fascisme ou le communisme là, et sur la création maintenant d’une caste mondialisée de bureaucrates belliqueux ne devra bouleverser personne.
Théognis – Elégies (Remacle.org)
Fustel – La cité dans l’histoire (classiques.uqac.ca)
Marx – Le dix-huit Brumaire
12:05 Publié dans Philosophie, Réflexions personnelles, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : nicolas bonnal, politologie, philosophie, philosophie politique, théorie politique, sciences politiques | |
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The subtitle of the English translation of Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger (Cavalcare la Tigre) promises that it offers “A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul.”[1] [2] As a result, one comes to the work with the expectation that it will constitute a kind of “self-help book” for Traditionalists, for “men against time.” One expects that Evola will offer moral support and perhaps even specific instructions for revolting against the modern world. Unfortunately, the subtitle proves misleading. Ride the Tiger is primarily devoted to an analysis of aspects of the present age of decline (the Kali Yuga): critiques of relativism, scientism, modern art, modern music, and of figures like Heidegger and Sartre; discussions of the decline of marriage, the relation between the sexes, drug use, and so forth. Many of the points Evola makes in this volume are made in his other works, sometimes at greater length and more lucidly.
For those seeking something like a “how to” guide for living as a Traditionalist, it is mainly the second division of the book (“In the World Where God is Dead”) that offers something, and chiefly it is to be found in Chapter Eight: “The Transcendent Dimension – ‘Life’ and ‘More than Life.’” My purpose in this essay is to piece together the miniature “survival manual” provided by Chapter Eight – some of which consists of little more than hints, conveyed in Evola’s often frustratingly opaque style. It is my view that what we find in these pages is of profound importance for anyone struggling to hold on to his sanity in the face of the decadence and dishonesty of today’s world. It is also essential reading for anyone seeking to achieve the ideal of “self-overcoming” taught by Evola – seeking, in other words, to “ride the tiger.”
The central figure of the book’s second part is unquestionably Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom Evola repeatedly refers. Evola’s attitude toward Nietzsche is critical. However, it is obvious that Nietzsche exercised a profound and positive influence on him. Indeed, virtually every recommendation Evola makes for living as a Traditionalist – in this section of the work, at least – is somehow derived from Nietzsche. This despite the fact that Nietzsche was not a Traditionalist – a fact of which Evola was well aware, and to which I shall turn later.
In the last paragraph of Chapter Seven, Evola announces that in the next chapter he will consider “a line of conduct during the reign of dissolution that is not suitable for everyone, but for a differentiated type, and especially for the heir to the man of the traditional world, who retains his roots in that world even though he finds himself devoid of any support for it in his outer existence.”[2] [3] This “line of conduct” turns out, in Chapter Eight, to be based entirely on statements made by Nietzsche. That chapter opens with a continuation of the discussion of the man who would be “heir to the man of the traditional world.” Evola writes, “What is more, the essential thing is that such a man is characterized by an existential dimension not present in the predominant human type of recent times – that is, the dimension of transcendence.”[3] [4]
Evola clearly regarded this claim as of supreme importance, since he places the entire sentence just quoted in italics. The sentence is important for two reasons. First, as it plainly asserts, it provides the key characteristic of the “differentiated type” for whom Evola writes, or for whom he prepares the ground. Second, the sentence actually provides the key point on which Evola parts company with Nietzsche: for all the profundity and inspiration Nietzsche can provide us, he does not recognize a “dimension of transcendence.” Indeed, he denigrates the very idea as a projection of “slave morality.” Our first step, therefore, must be to understand exactly what Evola means by “the dimension of transcendence.” Unfortunately, in Ride the Tiger Evola does not make this very easy. To anyone familiar with Evola’s other works, however, his meaning is clear.
“Dimension of transcendence” can be understood as having several distinct, but intimately-related meanings in Evola’s philosophy. First, the term “transcendence” simply refers to something existing apart from, or beyond the world around us. The “aristocrats of the soul” living in the Kali Yuga must live their lives in such a way that they “stand apart from” or transcend the world in which they find themselves. This is the meaning of the phrase “men against time,” which I have already used (and which derives from Savitri Devi). The “differentiated type” of which Evola writes is one who has differentiated himself from the times, and from the men who are like “sleepers” or pashu (beasts). Existing in the world in a physical sense, even playing some role (or roles) in that world, one nevertheless lives wholly apart from it at the same time, in a spiritual sense. This is the path of those who aim to “ride the tiger”: they do not separate themselves from the decay, like monks or hermits; instead they live in the midst of it, but remain uncorrupted. (This is also little different from what the Gurdjieffian tradition calls “the fourth way,” and it is the essence of the “Left-Hand Path” as described by Evola and others.)
However, there is another, deeper sense of the “dimension of transcendence.” The type of man of which Evola speaks is not simply reacting to the world in which he finds himself. This is not what his “apartness” consists in – not fundamentally. Nor does it consist in some kind of intellectual commitment to a “philosophy of Traditionalism,” as found in books by Evola and others. Rather, “transcendence” in the deepest sense refers to the Magnum Opus that is the aim of the “magic” or spiritual alchemy discussed by Evola in his most important works (chiefly Introduction to Magic and The Hermetic Tradition). “Transcendence” means the overcoming of the world and of the ego – really, of all manifestation, whether it is objective (“out there”) or subjective (“in here”). Such overcoming is the work of what is called in Vedanta the “witnessing consciousness.” Evola frequently calls this “the Self.” (For more on this teaching, see my essays “What is Odinism? [5]” in TYR, Vol. 4 [6], and “On Being and Waking” in TYR, Vol. 5, forthcoming [7].)
These different senses of “transcendence” are intertwined. It is only through the second sense of “transcendence,” of the overcoming of all manifestation, that the first sense, standing apart from the modern world, can truly be achieved. The man who is “heir to the man of the traditional world” can retain “his roots in that world” only by the achievement of a state of being that is identical to that of the “highest type” of the traditional world. That type was also “differentiated”: set apart from other men. Fundamentally, however, to be a “differentiated type” does not mean to be differentiated from others. It refers to the state of one who has actively differentiated “himself” from all else, including “the ego.” This active differentiation is the same thing as “identification” with the Self – which, for Evola, is not the dissolution of oneself in an Absolute Other, but the transmutation of “oneself” into “the Self.” Further, the metaphysical differentiation just described is the only sure and true path to the “differentiation” exhibited by the man who lives in the Kali Yuga, but stands apart from it at the same time.
Much later I will discuss how and why Nietzsche fails to understand “the dimension of transcendence,” and how it constitutes the fatal flaw in his philosophy. Recognizing this, Evola nonetheless proceeds to draw from Nietzsche a number of principles which constitute the spirit of “the overman.”[4] [8] Evola offers these as characterizing his own ideal type – with the crucial caveat that, contra Nietzsche, these principles are only truly realizable in a man who has realized in himself the “dimension of transcendence.” Basically, there are ten such principles cited by Evola, each of which he derives from statements made by Nietzsche. The passage in which these occur is highly unusual, since it consists in one long sentence (lasting more than a page), with each principle set off by semi-colons. I will now consider each of these points in turn.
1. “The power to make a law for oneself, the ‘power to refuse and not to act when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodigious force and an enormous tension.’”[5] [9] This first principle is crucial, and must be discussed at length. Earlier, in Chapter Seven (“Being Oneself”), Evola quotes Nietzsche saying, “We must liberate ourselves from morality so that we can live morally.”[6] [10] Evola correctly notes that in such statements, and in the idea of “making a law for oneself,” Nietzsche is following in the footsteps of Kant, who insisted that genuine morality is based upon autonomy – which literally means “a law to oneself.” This is contrasted by Kant to heteronomy (a term Evola also uses in this same context): morality based upon external pressures, or upon fealty to laws established independent of the subject (e.g., following the Ten Commandments, conforming to public opinion, acting so as to win the approval of others, etc.). This is the meaning of saying, “we must liberate ourselves from morality [i.e., from externally imposed moral commandments] so that we can live morally [i.e., autonomously].” In order for the subject’s standpoint to be genuinely moral, he must in a sense “legislate” the moral law for himself, and affirm it as reasonable. Indeed, for Kant, ultimately the authority of the moral law consists in our “willing” it as rational.
Of course, Nietzsche’s position is not Kant’s, though Evola is not very helpful in explaining to us what the difference consists in. He writes that Nietzsche’s notion of autonomy is “on the same lines” as Kant’s “but with the difference that the command is absolutely internal, separate from any external mover, and is not based on a hypothetical law extracted from practical reason that is valid for all and revealed to man’s conscience as such, but rather on one’s own specific being.”[7] [11] There are a good deal of confusions here – so much so that one wonders if Evola has even read Kant. For instance, Kant specifically rejects the idea of an “external mover” for morality (which is the same thing as heteronomy). Further, there is nothing “hypothetical” about Kant’s moral law, the “categorical imperative,” which he specifically defines in contrast to “hypothetical imperatives.” We may also note the vagueness of saying that “the command” must be based “on one’s specific being.”
Still, through this gloom one may detect exactly the position that Evola correctly attributes to Nietzsche. Like Kant, Nietzsche demands that the overman practice autonomy, that he give a law to himself. However, Kant held that our self-legislation simultaneously legislates for others: the law I give to myself is the law I would give to any other rational being. The overman, by contrast, legislates for himself only – or possibly for himself and the tiny number of men like him. If we recognize fundamental qualitative differences between human types, then we must consider the possibility that different rules apply to them. Fundamental to Kant’s position is the egalitarian assertion that people do not get to “play by their own rules” (indeed, for Kant the claim to be an exception to general rules, or to make an exception for oneself, is the marker of immorality). If we reject this egalitarianism, then it does indeed follow that certain special individuals get to play by their own rules.
This does not mean that for the self-proclaimed overman “anything goes.” Indeed, any individual who would interpret the foregoing as licensing arbitrary self-indulgence of whims or passions would be immediately disqualified as a potential overman. This will become crystal clear as we proceed with the rest of Evola’s “ten principles” in Chapter Eight. For the moment, simply look once more at the wording Evola borrows from Nietzsche in our first “principle”: the “power to refuse and not to act when one is pressed to affirmation by a prodigious force and an enormous tension.” To refuse what? What sort of force? What sort of tension? The claim seems vague, yet it is actually quite clear: autonomy means, fundamentally, the power to say no to whatever forces or tensions press us to affirm them or give way to them.
The “forces” in question could be internal or external: they could be the force of social and environmental circumstances; they could be the force of my own passions, habits, and inclinations. It is a great folly to think that my passions and such are “mine,” and that in following them I am “free.” Whatever creates an “enormous tension” in me and demands I give way, whether it comes from “in me” or “outside me” is precisely not mine. Only the autonomous “I” that can see this is “mine,” and only it can say no to these forces. It has “the power to refuse and not to act.” Essentially, Nietzsche and Evola are talking about self-mastery. This is the “law” that the overman – and the “differentiated type” – gives to himself. And clearly it is not “universalizable”; the overman does not and cannot expect others to follow him in this.[8] [12]
In short, this first principle asks of us that we cultivate in ourselves the power to refuse or to negate – in one fashion or other – all that which would command us. Again, this applies also to forces within me, such as passions and desires. Such refusal may not always amount to literally thwarting or annihilating forces that influence us. In some cases, this is impossible. Our “refusal” may sometimes consist only in seeing the force in question, as when I see that I am acting out of ingrained habit, even when, at that moment, I am powerless to resist. Such “seeing” already places distance between us and the force that would move us: it says, in effect, “I am not that.” As we move through Evola’s other principles, we will learn more about the exercise of this very special kind of autonomy.
2. “The natural and free asceticism moved to test its own strength by gauging ‘the power of a will according to the degree of resistance, pain, and torment that it can bear in order to turn them to its own advantage.’”[9] [13] Here we have another expression of the “autonomy” of the differentiated type. Such a man tests his own strength and will, by deliberately choosing that which is difficult. Unlike the Last Man, who has left “the regions where it is hard to live,”[10] [14] the overman/differentiated man seeks them out.
Evola writes that “from this point of view everything that existence offers in the way of evil, pain, and obstacles . . . is accepted, even desired.”[11] [15] This may be the most important of all the points that Evola makes in this chapter – and it is a principle that can serve as a lifeline for all men living in the Kali Yuga, or in any time. If we can live up to this principle, then we have made ourselves truly worthy of the mantle of “overman.” The idea is this: can I say “yes” to whatever hardship life offers me? Can I use all of life’s suffering and evils as a way to test and to transform myself? Can I forge myself in the fire of suffering? And, going a step further, can I desire hardship and suffering? It is one thing, of course, to accept some obstacle or calamity as a means to test myself. It is quite another to actively desire such things.
Here we must consider our feelings very carefully. Personally, I do not fear my own death nearly as much as the death of those close to me. And I fear my own physical incapacitation and decline more than death. Is it psychologically realistic for me to desire the death of my loved ones, or desire a crippling disease, as a way to test myself? No, it is not – and this is not what Evola and Nietzsche mean. Rather, the mental attitude in question is one where we say a great, general “yes” to all that life can bring in the way of hardship. Further, we welcome such challenges, for without them we would not grow. It is not that we desire this specific calamity or that, but we do desire, in general, to be tested. And, finally, we welcome such testing with supreme confidence: whatever life flings at me, I will overcome. In a sense, I will absorb all negativity and only grow stronger by means of it.
3. Evola next speaks of the “principle of not obeying the passions, but of holding them on a leash.” Then he quotes Nietzsche: “greatness of character does not consist in not having such passions: one must have them to the greatest degree, but held in check, and moreover doing this with simplicity, not feeling any particular satisfaction thereby.”[12] [16] This follows from the very first principle, discussed earlier. To repeat, giving free rein to our passions has nothing to do with autonomy, freedom, or mastery. Indeed, it is the primary way in which the common man finds himself controlled.
To see this, one must be able to recognize “one’s own” passions as, in reality, other. I do not choose these things, or the power they exert. What follows from this, however, is not necessarily thwarting those passions or “denying oneself.” As Evola explains in several of his works, the Left-Hand Path consists precisely in making use of that which would enslave or destroy a lesser man. We hold the passions “on a leash,” Evola says. The metaphor is appropriate. Our passions must be like well-trained dogs. Such animals are filled with passionate intensity for the chase – but their master controls them completely: at a command, they run after their prey, but only when commanded. As Nietzsche’s words suggest, the greatest man is not the man whose passions are weak. A man with weak passions finds them fairly easy to control! The superior man is one whose passions are incredibly strong – one in whom the “life force” is strong – but who holds those passions in check.
4. Nietzsche writes, “the superior man is distinguished from the inferior by his intrepidity, by his defiance of unhappiness.”[13] [17] Here too we have invaluable advice for living. The intrepid man is fearless and unwavering; he endures. But why does Nietzsche connect this with “defiance of unhappiness”? The answer is that just as the average man is a slave to the passions that sweep him away at any given time, so he is also a prisoner of his “moods.” Most men rise in the morning and find themselves in one mood or another: “today I am happy,” “today I am sad.” They accept that, in effect, some determination has been made for them, and that they are powerless in the matter. If the unhappiness endures, they have a “disease” which they look to drugs or alcohol to cure.
As with the passions, the average man “owns” his moods: “this unhappiness is mine, it is me,” he says, in effect. The superior man learns to see his moods as if they were the weather – or, better yet, as if they were minor demons besetting him: external mischief makers, to whom he has the power to say “yes” or “no.” The superior man, upon finding that he feels unhappiness, says “ah yes, there it is again.” Immediately, seeing “his” unhappiness as other – as a habit, a pattern, a kind of passing mental cloud – he refuses identification with it. And he sets about intrepidly conquering unhappiness. He will not acquiesce to it.
5. The above does not mean, however, that the superior man intrepidly sets about trying to make himself “happy.” Evola quotes Nietzsche as saying “it is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle.”[14] [18] The superior man responds with incredulity to those who “point the way to happiness,” and respond, “But what does happiness mean to us?”[15] [19] The preoccupation with “happiness” is characteristic of the inferior modern type Nietzsche refers to as “the Last Man” (“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.”[16] [20]
But if we do not seek happiness, in the name of what do we “defy unhappiness”? Answer: in the name of greatness, self-mastery, self-overcoming. Kant can be of some limited help to us here as well, for he said that the aim of life should not be happiness, but making oneself worthy of happiness. Many individuals may achieve happiness (actually, the dumber one is, the greater one’s chances). But only some are worthy of happiness. The superior man is worthy of happiness, whether he has it or not. And he does not care either way. He does not even aim, really, to be worthy of happiness, but to be worthy of greatness, like Aristotle’s “great-souled man” (megalopsuchos).[17] [21]
6. According to Evola, the superior man claims the right (quoting Nietzsche) “to exceptional acts as attempts at victory over oneself and as acts of freedom . . . to assure oneself, with a sort of asceticism, a preponderance and a certitude of one’s own strength of will.”[18] [22] This point is related to the second principle, discussed earlier. The superior man is master, first and foremost, of himself. He therefore seeks opportunities to test himself in exceptional ways. Evola provides an extended discussion of one form of such self-testing in his Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (and, of course, for Evola mountain climbing was not entirely metaphorical!). Through such opportunities, one “assures oneself” of the strength of one’s will. But there is more: through such tests, one’s will becomes even stronger.
“Asceticism” suggests self-denial. But how does such testing of the will constitute “denying oneself”? The key, of course, lies in asking “what is my self?” The self that is denied in such acts of “self-mastery” is precisely the self that seeks to hold on to life, to safety, to security, and to its ephemeral preoccupations and possessions. We “deny” this self precisely by threatening what it values most. To master it is to progressively still its voice and loosen its hold on us. It is in this fashion that a higher self – what Evola, again, calls the Self – grows in us.
7. The superior man affirms the freedom which includes “keeping the distance which separates us, being indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privations, even to life itself.”[19] [23] This mostly reaffirms points made earlier. But what is “the distance that separates us”? Here Nietzsche could be referring to hierarchy, or what he often calls “the order of rank.” He could also be referring to the well-known desire of the superior man for apartness, verging sometimes on a desire for isolation. The superior man takes himself away from others; he has little need for the company of human beings, unless they are like himself. And even then, he desires the company of such men only in small and infrequent doses. He is repulsed by crowds, and by situations that force him to feel the heat and breath and press of others. Such feelings are an infallible marker of the superior soul – but they are not a “virtue” to be cultivated. One either has such feelings, or one does not. One is either the superior type, or a “people person.”
If we consult the context in which the quote appears – an important section of Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche offers us little help in understanding specifically what he means by “the distance that separates us.” But the surrounding context is a goldmine of reflections on the superior type, and it is surprising that Evola does not quote it more fully. Nietzsche remarks that “war educates for freedom” (a point on which Evola reflects at length in his Metaphysics of War), then writes:
For what is freedom? Having the will to responsibility for oneself. Maintaining the distance that separates us. Becoming indifferent to trouble, hardships, deprivation, even to life. Being ready to sacrifice people to one’s cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts, the instincts that celebrate war and winning, dominate other instincts, for example the instinct for “happiness.” The human being who has become free, not to mention the spirit that has become free, steps all over the contemptible sort of wellbeing dreamt of by grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free human being is a warrior.[20] [24]
The rest of the passage is well worth reading.
8. Evola tells us that the superior man rejects “the insidious confusion between discipline and enfeeblement.” The goal of discipline is not to produce weakness, but a greater strength. “He who does not dominate is weak, dissipated, inconstant.” To discipline oneself is to dominate one’s passions. As we saw in our discussion of the third principle, this does not mean stamping out the passions or denying them. Neither does it mean indulging them: the man who heedlessly indulges his passions becomes “weak, dissipated, inconstant.” Rather, the superior man learns how to control his passions and to make use of them as a means for self-transformation. It is only when the passions are mastered – when we have reached the point that we cannot be swept away by them – that we can give expression to them in such a way that they become vehicles for self-overcoming.
Evola quotes Nietzsche: “Excess is a reproach only against those who have no right to it; and almost all the passions have been brought into ill repute on account of those who were not sufficiently strong to employ them.”[21] [25] The convergence of Nietzsche’s position with Evola’s portrayal of the Left-Hand Path could not be clearer. The superior man has a right to “excess” because, unlike the common man, he is not swept away by the passions. He holds them “on a leash” (see earlier), and uses them as means to transcend the ego, and to achieve a higher state. The common man, who identifies with his passions, becomes wholly a slave to them, and is sucked dry. He gives “excess” a bad reputation.
9. Evola’s penultimate principle is in the spirit of Nietzsche, but does not quote from him. Evola writes: “To point the way of those who, free from all bonds, obeying only their own law, are unbending in obedience to it and above every human weakness.”[22] [26] The first words of this passage are somewhat ambiguous: what does Evola mean by “to point the way of those who . . .” (the original Italian – l’indicare la via di coloro che – is no more helpful). Perhaps what is meant here is simply that the superior type points the way for others. He serves as an example – or he serves as the vanguard. This is not, of course, an ideal to which just anyone can aspire. But the example of the superior man can serve to “awaken” others who have the same potential. This was, indeed, something like Nietzsche’s own literary intention: to point the way to the Overman; to awaken those whose souls are strong enough.
10. Finally, Evola tells us that the superior type is “heir to the equivocal virtus of the Renaissance despots,” and that he is “capable of generosity, quick to offer manly aid, of ‘generous virtue,’ magnanimity, and superiority to his own individuality.”[23] [27] Here Evola alludes to Nietzsche’s qualified admiration for Cesare Borgia (who Nietzsche offers as an example of what he calls the “men of prey”). The rest of the quote, however, calls to mind Aristotle’s description of the great-souled man – especially the use of the term “magnanimity,” which some translators prefer to “greatness of soul.”[24] [28] The superior man is not a beast. He is capable of such virtues as generosity and benevolence. This is because he is free from that which holds lesser men in thrall. The superior man can be generous with such things as money and possessions, for these have little or no value for him. He can be generous in overlooking the faults of others, for he expects little of them anyway. He can even be generous in forgiving his enemies – when they are safely at his feet. The superior man can do all of this because he possesses “superiority to his own individuality”: he is not bound to the pretensions of his own ego, and to the worldly goods the ego craves.
Evola’s very long sentence about the superior man now ends with the following summation:
all these are the positive elements that the man of Tradition also makes his own, but which are only comprehensible and attainable when ‘life’ is ‘more than life,’ that is, through transcendence. They are values attainable only by those in whom there is something else, and something more, than mere life.
In other words, Nietzsche presents us with a rich and inspiring portrayal of the superior man. And yet, the principles he discusses will have a positive result, and serve the “man of Tradition,” only if we turn Nietzsche on his head. Earlier in Chapter Eight, Evola writes: “Nietzsche’s solution of the problem of the meaning of life, consisting in the affirmation that this meaning does not exist outside of life, and that life in itself is meaning . . . is valid only on the presupposition of a being that has transcendence as its essential component.” (Evola places this entire statement in italics.) In other words, to put the matter quite simply, the meaning of life as life itself is only valid when a man’s life is devoted to transcendence (in the senses discussed earlier). Or we could say, somewhat more obscurely, that Nietzsche’s points are valid when man’s life transcends life.
Evola’s claim goes to the heart of his criticism of Nietzsche. A page later, he speaks of conflicting tendencies within Nietzsche’s thought. On the one hand, we have a “naturalistic exaltation of life” that runs the risk of “a surrender of being to the simple world of instincts and passions.” The danger here is that these will then assert themselves “through the will, making it their servant.”[25] [29] Nietzsche, of course, is famous for his theory of the “will to power.” But surrender to the baser impulses of ego and organism will result in those impulses hijacking will and using it for their own purposes. One then becomes a slave to instincts and passions, and the antithesis of a free, autonomous being.
On the other hand, one finds in Nietzsche “testimonies to a reaction to life that cannot arise out of life itself, but solely from a principle superior to it, as revealed in a characteristic phrase: ‘Spirit is the life that cuts through life’ (Geist ist das Leben, das selber ins Leben schneidet).” In other words, Nietzsche’s thought exhibits a fundamental contradiction – a contradiction that cannot be resolved within his thought, but only in Evola’s. One can find other tensions in Nietzsche’s thought as well. I might mention, for example, his evident preference for the values of “master morality,” and his analysis of “slave morality” as arising from hatred of life — which nevertheless co-exist with his relativism concerning values. Yet there is so much in Nietzsche that is brilliant and inspiring, we wish we could accept the whole and declare ourselves Nietzscheans. But we simply cannot. This turns out to be no problem, since Evola absorbs what is positive and useful in Nietzsche, and places it within the context of Tradition. In spite of what Nietzsche himself may say, one feels he is more at home with Tradition, than with “perspectivism.”[26] [30]
Evola’s ten “Nietzschean principles,” reframed for the “man of Tradition,” provide an inspiring guide for life in this Wolf Age. They point the way. They show us what we must become. These are ideas that challenge us to become worthy of them.
Notes
[1] [31] Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, trans. Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2003).
[2] [32] Evola, 46, my italics.
[3] [33] Evola, 47.
[4] [34] Übermensch; translated in Ride the Tiger as “superman.”
[5] [35] Quoting Nietzsche, Will to Power, section 778.
[6] [36] Evola, 41. Translator notes “adapted from the aphorism in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, part 1, 371.”
[7] [37] Evola, 41.
[8] [38] There is a great deal more that can be said here about the difference between Kantian and Nietzschean “autonomy.” Indeed, there is an argument to be made that Kant is much closer to Nietzsche than Evola (or Nietzsche) would allow. Ultimately, one sees the stark difference between Kant and Nietzsche in the “egalitarianism” of the different formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative. How can a man who is qualitatively different and superior to others commit to following no other law than what he would will all others follow? How can he affirm the inherent “dignity” in others, who seem to have no dignity at all? Should he affirm their potential dignity, which they themselves simply do not see and may never live up to? But suppose they are so limited, constitutionally, that actualizing that “human dignity” is more or less impossible for them? Kant wants us to affirm that whatever men may actually be, they are nonetheless potentially rational, and thus they possess inherent dignity. For those of us who have seen more of the world than Königsberg, and who have soured on the dreams of Enlightenment, this rings hollow. And how can the overman be expected to adhere to the (self-willed) command to always treat others as ends in themselves, but never as means only – when the vast bulk of humanity seems hardly good for anything other than being used as means to the ends of greater men?
[9] [39] The translator’s note: “Adapted from Twilight of the Idols, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,’ sect. 38, where, however, it is ‘freedom’ that is thus gauged.” Beware: Evola sometimes alters Nietzsche’s wording.
[10] [40] Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 5.
[11] [41] Evola, 49.
[12] [42] Evola, 49. The Will to Power, sect. 928.
[13] [43] Will to Power, sect. 222.
[14] [44] Will to Power, sect. 790.
[15] [45] Will to Power, sect. 781.
[16] [46] Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 5.
[17] [47] Aristotle also said that the aim of human life is “happiness” (eudaimonia) – but “happiness” has a connotation here different from the familiar one.
[18] [48] Will to Power, sect. 921.
[19] [49] Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” sect. 38. Italics added by Evola.
[20] [50] See Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 74-75.
[21] [51] Here I have substituted the translation of Walter Kaufmann and R. G. Hollingdale for the one provided in Ride the Tiger, as it is more accurate and concise. See The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 408.
[22] [52] Evola, 49.
[23] [53] The translators of Ride the Tiger direct us here to Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 260.
[24] [54] Grandezza d’animo literally translates to “greatness of soul.”
[25] [55] Evola, 48.
[26] [56] Evola writes (p. 52), “[Nietzsche’s] case illustrates in precise terms what can, and indeed must, occur in a human type in which transcendence has awakened, yes, but who is uncentered with regard to it.”
08:07 Publié dans Philosophie, Traditions | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : tradition, julius evola, friedrich nietzsche, philosophie, éthique | |
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11:54 Publié dans Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : allemagne, philosophie, révolution conservatrice, oswald spengler, philosophie de l'histoire | |
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Du grec holos, « entier », le holisme est un terme inventé en 1926 par le général Jan Christiaan Smuts, Premier ministre d’Afrique du Sud, pour désigner un ensemble supérieur à la somme de ses parties. L’écrivain britannique Arthur Koestler vulgarisa la notion dans Le cheval dans la locomotive (1967) et Janus (1978). L’anthropologue français Louis Dumont s’y référait déjà en 1966 dans Homo hierarchicus.
Bien connu pour son action permanente envers les plus démunis des nôtres, le pasteur Jean-Pierre Blanchard reprend à son compte le concept dans son nouvel essai L’Alternative holiste ou la grande révolte antimoderne (Dualpha, coll. « Patrimoine des héritages », préface de Patrick Gofman, 2017, 156 p., 21 €). Il y développe une thèse qui risque d’agacer tous ceux qui gardent un mur de Berlin dans leur tête.
Si le monde moderne se caractérise par le triomphe de l’individu et l’extension illimitée de ses droits considérés comme des désirs inaliénables à assouvir, l’univers traditionnel préfère accorder la primauté au collectif, au groupe, à la communauté. Certes, chacune de ces visions du monde antagonistes comporte une part de l’autre. La domination de la Modernité demeure toutefois écrasante, d’où des réactions parfois violentes. Ainsi le pasteur Blanchard voit-il dans la longue révolte des paysans mexicains entre 1911 et 1929 la première manifestation du holisme. Ensuite surgiront tour à tour les révolutions communiste, fasciste et nationale-socialiste. L’auteur insiste longuement sur le paradoxe bolchevique : le progressisme revendiqué se transforma en un conservatoire des traditions nationales et populaires. Le communisme réel est en fait un holisme contrarié par le matérialisme historique. On sait maintenant que la République populaire démocratique de Corée a une société plus communautaire, plus holiste, que cet agrégat bancal d’atomes individualistes déréglés qu’est le Canada.
Aujourd’hui, la vision holistique des rapports collectifs humains prend la forme de l’idéologie islamiste. Le choc frontal entre la modernité occidentale et cet autre holisme est brutal. L’incantation lacrymale et victimaire aux droits de l’homme, au « vivre ensemble » et à l’individu-tyran n’écartera pas la menace islamiste; elle la fortifiera au contraire. La civilisation européenne ne survivra que si elle renoue avec « la transcendance, ce retour qui combat le monde occidental bourgeois issu de la philosophie des Lumières [qui] offre de nouvelles perspectives pour l’avenir (p. 156) », un avenir holistique, communautaire et organique pour les peuples autochtones d’Europe.
Georges Feltin-Tracol
• « Chronique hebdomadaire du Village planétaire », n° 76, diffusée sur Radio-Libertés, le 27 avril 2018.
09:35 Publié dans Livre, Livre, Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : livre, holisme, philosophie, philosophie politique, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | |
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Ronald Beiner
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018
Ronald Beiner is a Canadian Jewish political theorist who teaches at the University of Toronto. I’ve been reading his work since the early 1990s, starting with What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (1992). I have always admired Beiner’s clear and lively writing and his ability to see straight through jargon and cant to hone in on the flaws of the positions he examines. He is also refreshingly free of Left-wing sectarianism and willing to engage with political theorists of the Right, like Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus, although I was delighted that a theorist of his caliber had decided to write a book on the contemporary far Right, I was also worried that he might, after a typically open and searching engagement with our outlook, discover some fatal flaw.
But it turns out that an honest confrontation with our movement is a bridge too far. Beiner does not even wish to engage with our ideas, much less critique them. Instead, he uses the rise of the Right simply as lurid packaging to sell his publisher a book that focuses on Nietzsche and Heidegger. (The cover is of the torchlight march at Unite the Right, which is supposed to look sinister.)
Beiner’s target is not the Right, but the Left, specifically those who think that Nietzsche and Heidegger can be profitably appropriated for Left-wing causes. To combat this view, he mounts a persuasive case that Nietzsche and Heidegger are deeply anti-liberal thinkers. Thus, although Dangerous Minds is sensationalist and dismissive in its treatment of our movement, it is nevertheless extremely useful to us. If anyone wants to understand why Nietzsche and Heidegger are so useful to the New Right, Beiner gives a clear and engaging account in a bit more than 100 pages.
Since Beiner wants to cast our movement in the worst possible light, he naturally begins with Hailgate [2]:
In the fateful fall of 2016, a far-right ideologue named Richard B. Spencer stirred up some fame for himself by exclaiming in a conference packed with his followers not far from the White House: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” On the face of it, this mad proclamation would appear to have nothing in common with the glorious tradition of Western philosophy.
But think again.
Beiner then quotes Spencer denouncing “fucking middle class” values and proclaiming “I love empire, I love power, I love achievement.” We even learn from a Jewish female reporter that Spencer will sometimes “get a boner” from reading about Napoleon. (Another triumph of press engagement [3].)
This is Nietzsche’s work, declares Beiner.
Beiner goes on to call Spencer a “lunatic ideologue” (p. 11) and an advocate of “virulently antiliberal, antidemocratic radicalism” (p. 12). He blames it all on a graduate seminar on Nietzsche that Spencer took at the University of Chicago. This is laying it on a bit thick, since Spencer is not offering a system of ideas. He’s just name-dropping and Nietzsche-posting to impress middlebrow journalists. Perhaps sensing this, Beiner turns his attention to a prolific author of essays and books, Alexander Dugin. Beiner easily establishes the Nietzschean and Heideggerian pedigree of Dugin’s dangerous ideas.
Naturally, at this point, I was wondering if I was next, so I flipped to the back of the book to see if my name appeared in the index. But there is no index. (This from a serious academic publisher?) So I continued to read. By the end, I was a bit relieved, and maybe a bit miffed, to receive no mention at all in Dangerous Minds. Nor is Counter-Currents mentioned by name, although it is referred to on page 12 as “One of the typically odious far-right websites” and on page 150 as “Another far-right outfit of the same ilk” as Arktos. In the first case, Beiner refers to James O’Meara’s review of Jason Jorjani’s Prometheus and Atlas [4], but he does not name O’Meara or give the url of the review. (Jorjani is, however, singled out for abuse as a “crackpot philosopher.”) In the second case, Beiner provides the url of my Heidegger commemoration [5] but does not cite the author or title. Beiner is known as a Left-wing admirer of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. These glaring oversights might lead those of a Straussian bent to think that Beiner regards Counter-Currents, James O’Meara, me, and perhaps Collin Cleary [6], who is also noticeably omitted, to be of central importance. But of course he has plausible deniability.
Beiner zeroes in on equality as the essential issue that divides the Left and the Right:
A view of society where all individuals are fundamentally equal or a view of society where people can live meaningful lives only under the banner of fundamental hierarchy: this is an either/or, not a moral-political choice that can be submitted to compromise or splitting the difference. . . . [O]ne either sees egalitarianism as essential to the proper acknowledgement of universal human dignity, or one sees it as the destruction of what’s most human because its incompatible with human nobility rightly understood. (p. 8)
This is basically correct, but I have two caveats.
First, I think equality and liberty are genuine political values. But they are not the most important values. Individual self-actualization and the pursuit of the common good are more important than individual liberty, for instance. And justice is more important than equality, since justice requires unequal people receive unequal treatment. But even here, justice demands that unequal status and rewards be proportionate to unequal merit. By this Aristotelian view of justice, however, most forms of contemporary social and political inequality are grossly unjust.
This is why I oppose people on the Right who praise “hierarchy” as such. Not all hierarchies are just. Thus one can defend the principle of hierarchy without embracing ideas like hereditary monarchy, aristocracy, and caste, much less slavery. These are at best merely imperfect historical illustrations of the principle of hierarchy, not blueprints for the future.
Second, the notion of “universal human dignity” is simply an article of faith, like Stoic and Christian ideas of providence and liberal ideas of progress. Progress and providence are our trump cards against ultimate misfortune. They allow us to keep believing that things will work out in the end. “Dignity” is really a trump card against dehumanization: it is the assertion that no matter how botched, degraded, and corrupt a human being is, he is still a human being; he still possesses some intrinsic worth that he can use, as a measure of last resort, to gain some consideration from the rest of us. But when aliens land and discover that human beings are delicious, appeals to the universal dignity of rational beings are not going to save us. True nobility requires that we face reality and dispense with such moralistic illusions.
But that does not mean that we dispense with empathy for others. I have zero patience for people on the Right who defend slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. They are guilty of another form of providential wishful thinking, for they apparently feel themselves invulnerable to the sufferings they would cheerfully inflict on others. It does not occur to them that others could do the same to them. But nobility requires thinking and living without such illusions. You might be high and mighty today, but you are not bulletproof (which is really all Hobbes meant by equality). Empathy allows us to imagine ourselves in the positions of others. Fortune can elevate or lower us into the positions of others. And if none of us are immune to fortune, then we should create a political system in which we could morally bear to trade places with anyone, a society in which all social stations are fundamentally just. This leads to the sort of live-and-let-live ethos that is at the core of ethnonationalism as I define it.
This is why I don’t regard Alexander Dugin and Richard Spencer as contributing anything to White Nationalism, which is the advocacy of ethnic self-determination for all white peoples. Instead, they are simply apologists for Russian imperial revanchism. Spencer regards ethnonationalism as “petty,” siding with the UK against Scottish independence, the EU against Brexit, and Spain against Catalan independence. But although he opposes the UK leaving the EU, he opposes Ukraine joining it. He praises the EU as a transnational, imperial organization — but not NATO. Clearly, he is more interested in shilling for Russian geopolitical interests than in setting forth a coherent moral and political framework for white survival. I can’t blame Beiner for focusing on Dugin and Spencer, however, because they embrace all of Nietzsche’s most lurid and questionable ideas as well as his good ones.
Beiner on Nietzsche
According to Beiner’s chapter on “Reading Nietzsche in an Age of Resurgent Fascism,” the “one central, animating Nietzschean idea” is: “Western civilization is going down the toilet because of too much emphasis on truth and rationality and too much emphasis on equal human dignity” (p. 24). (This passage also illustrates the vulgar and often hysterical tone of Beiner’s polemic. Dangerous Minds has a rambling, informal, often autobiographical style that makes it read like an extended blog post. Beiner also peppers his prose with exclamation points, sometimes 4 or 5 to the page, to drive his points home. I began to worry that he would soon resort to emoticons.)
Nietzsche offers two arguments against liberalism. First, liberalism destroys the meaning of life. Second, liberalism destroys human nobility.
For Nietzsche, a meaningful life requires a normative culture as the context or “horizon” in which each individual is immersed and formed. In short, a meaningful life is rooted in ethnic identity, although Nietzsche does not put it in these terms, as he was deeply alienated from and ambivalent about his own German identity. A normative culture provides an encompassing worldview and a hierarchy of values. These need not be “true” in any metaphysical sense to provide foundations for a meaningful life. Hence the danger of modernity’s high value for truth and rationality. These horizons are always plural (there are many different cultures), and they are closed (they generate differences between insiders and outsiders, us and them; thus they are “political” in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the word).
Liberalism destroys meaning because it is cosmopolitan and egalitarian. Its cosmopolitanism opens horizons to other cultures and undermines attachment to one’s own culture. Its egalitarianism overthrows value hierarchies that make people feel bad about themselves. The result is the collapse of rootedness and meaning and the emergence of nihilism. This is why Nietzsche “regards old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberalism — to say nothing of radicalized twentieth- and twenty-first century versions — as rendering culture per se impossible” (p. 34).
Beiner doesn’t offer a very clear account of why Nietzsche thinks liberalism undermines human nobility. The short answer is that it is simply the political application of the slave revolt in morals, in which the aristocratic virtues of the ancients were transmuted into Christian and eventually liberal vices, and the vices of the enslaved and downtrodden were transmuted into virtues.
But what makes us noble in the first place? Like Hegel, Nietzsche believes that human nobility shows itself by triumphing over the fear of death and loss and doing beautiful and noble things in spite of them. Thus, human nobility is essentially connected with facing up to the tragic character of human life and finding the strength to carry on.
Liberalism, like Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity, is anti-tragic because it is based on faith in providence, the idea that the universe is ruled by and directed toward the good — appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Providence denies the ultimate reality of loss, finitude, and evil, blinding us to the tragic dimension of life and replacing it with the stoner mantra that “it’s all good.” It is a delusion of ultimate metaphysical invulnerability to evil and loss.
Modern liberals replace faith in providence with faith in progress, which they believe will result in the perfection of mankind and the amelioration of human suffering and evils. It is a false vision of the world that smothers the possibility of human nobility. Although Beiner has the chutzpah to suggest that maybe Nietzscheans can ennoble themselves by enduring life in the “iron cage” of modernity and learning to love the Last Man (p. 116). (Why not ennoble oneself even more by living with head-lice as well?)
The plurality of horizons also means the possibility of existential conflict and the necessity of choosing and taking responsibility for one’s choices. As Schmitt argued, however, the whole liberal ethos is to replace the government of responsible choosers — the sovereign — with the government of laws, rules, and anonymous bureaucrats.
Beiner doesn’t delve too deeply into Nietzsche’s views of nobility because he wants to hang them on Nietzsche’s praise of slavery, caste, war, and cruelty. But while it is true that these phenomena accompanied the emergence of aristocratic values — and most of what we recognize as high culture, for that matter, for the leisure that gave rise to science and culture was secured by the labor of slaves — one can legitimately ask if it is possible to bring about a rebirth of aristocratic values and high culture without first becoming barbarians again. For instance, this is the utopia offered by Social Credit, the preferred economic theory of interwar Anglophone fascists, who hoped to unleash human nobility and creativity once machines put us all out of work.
But if we cannot renew civilization without starting over from scratch, then I would gladly hit the reset button rather than allow the world to decline endlessly into detritus. Thus, on Nietzschean and Heideggerian grounds, it makes sense to try to renew the world, because if one fails, that failure might contribute to the civilizational reset that we need. Indeed, the more catastrophic the failure, the greater the chance of a fresh start. The only way we can’t win is if we don’t try.
Beiner on Heidegger
Beiner’s chapter on “Reading Heidegger in an Age of Resurgent Fascism” is less incisive than his account of Nietzsche, largely because he does not see how close Heidegger really is to Nietzsche. Beiner takes Heidegger’s question of Being at face value and finds it rather bizarre that Heidegger could think that modern civilization is going to hell because of forgetting about Being. But for Heidegger Being = meaning [7], and the modern oblivion of Being is basically the same thing that Nietzsche meant by the collapse of closed normative horizons and the rise of nihilism. Indeed, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein simply refers to man as a being situated within and defined by horizons of meaning. The occlusion of these horizons by the false individualism and cosmopolitanism of modernity leads to nihilism, a life deprived of meaning.
Heidegger thought National Socialism could bring about the spiritual renewal of the German people — and presumably any other nation that tried it — by rejecting cosmopolitanism and individualism and reaffirming the rootedness, community, and the closed horizon of the nation. He rejected National Socialism when he came to see it as just another form of modern technological nihilism. Nietzsche, of course, rejected German nationalism, but Heidegger’s thinking was truer to the implications of Nietzsche’s thinking about the closed cultural horizons that grant meaning.
Beiner is at his best in his reading of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” his post-war statement publicly inaugurating “the late Heidegger.” Beiner correctly discerns that Heidegger’s lament against the “homelessness” of modern man and his loss of Heimat (homeland) is an expression of the same fundamentally reactionary, anti-modern, anti-cosmopolitan, and pro-nationalist sentiments that led him to embrace National Socialism. Indeed, there’s good reason to think that Heidegger never changed his fundamental political philosophy at all. The only thing that changed was his evaluation of National Socialism and his adoption of a more oblique and esoteric way of speaking about politics under the repressive conditions of the Occupation and the Federal Republic. Carrying out Heidegger’s project of offering a case for a non-nihilistic, non-totalitarian form of ethnonationalism is the project of the New Right as I define it.
Heidegger and the Holocaust
Beiner, like many Jewish commentators, seems to feel that Heidegger owes him a personal apology for the Holocaust. We are told that Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust is unforgivable. But when we point out that Heidegger did say something about the Holocaust, namely that it was a sinister application of mechanized modern mass slaughter to human beings, we are told that this view is also unforgivable, since the Holocaust somehow transcends all attempts to classify and understand it. Which would seem to require that we say nothing about it at all, but we have already learned that this is unforgivable as well.
Beiner tells the story of Rudolf Bultmann’s visit to Heidegger after the war, when he told Heidegger, “Now you must like Augustine write your retractions [Retractiones] . . . in the final analysis for the truth of your thought.” Bultmann continues: “Heidegger’s face became a stony mask. He left without saying anything further” (p. 119).
Beiner treats this as outrageous. But Heidegger’s reaction is not hard to understand. He had nothing to retract. He felt that he had done nothing wrong. He was not responsible for the war or the Holocaust. They were none of his doing or his intention. They were part and parcel of the very nihilism that he opposed. The fact that the National Socialist regime went so terribly wrong did not refute Heidegger’s basic diagnosis of the problems of modern rootlessness and nihilism but rather proved how all-pervasive they were. Nor did anything the Nazis did refute the deep truth of ethnonationalism as the political corollary of spiritually awakening from the nightmare of liberal modernity. Thus Heidegger absolutely refused to say anything about the war or the Holocaust that could be interpreted as conceding that modern liberal democracy had somehow been proven true. Instead, he continued to make essentially the same arguments as he made before the war, but in more esoteric terms by focusing on rootlessness and technology.
Bultmann was telling Heidegger to lie, to retract beliefs he believed were true, and to do it in the name of “the truth of [his] thought” when in fact the only motive could be to win the approval of the victors. But that approval was something Heidegger decided to do without. Frankly, Bultmann was making an indecent proposal, and Heidegger’s stony silence was admirably restrained.
Beiner mentions that according to Gadamer, Heidegger “was so preoccupied by modernity’s forgetfulness of Being [rootlessness, nihilism] that even the Nazi genocide ‘appeared to him as something minimal compared to the future that awaits us’” (p. 107). Here’s another unforgivable statement breaching Heidegger’s unforgivable silence. But this unforgivable statement is, unfortunately, quite prophetic. For the consummation of global technological civilization, including the erasure of borders and the destruction of roots, will lead to a genocide far vaster and more complete than the Holocaust. I refer the reader to my essays “White Extinction [8],” “White Genocide [9],” and especially “Why the Holocaust Happened, and Why It Won’t Happen Again [10].”
A New Age of Gods?
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger think that spiritual health requires unreflective belief in and commitment to a closed, normatively binding cultural horizon. Christianity, post-Socratic philosophy, and the Enlightenment, however, made self-reflection and universal truth into transcendent values. But as Nietzsche argued, this was a self-defeating move, for Christianity could not stand up to rational criticism. Reason soon escaped the control of the Church, which led to the downfall of Christianity (Nietzsche’s “death of God”), the erasure of the West’s horizon, and the rise of modern nihilism. It follows that the return to spiritual health requires the emergence of a new age of unreflective belief and commitment. Giambattista Vico called this an “Age of Gods,” the first age of a new historical cycle.
The great question is: can a new “Age of Gods” emerge within the context of our present civilization, or must the modern world perish utterly, completely liquidating the Western tradition of philosophy, science, and liberalism, so that mankind can truly believe, belong, and obey again? The new horizons and myths that we need, moreover, cannot be “chosen,” for adopting a belief system as a matter of choice is not an alternative to nihilism, it is just an expression of it. Genuine belief is not chosen. It chooses you. It does not belong to you. You belong to it.
Nietzsche believed that a new age of gods could be imposed by great philosopher-legislators who could create new myths and new tables of values. Under Nietzsche’s sway, Heidegger believed this as well, and it accounts for why he thought National Socialism could lead to a spiritual renewal of Germany. It was only later that Heidegger realized that National Socialism was not an alternative to nihilism, but an expression of it.
It was at this point that Heidegger began his great confrontation with Nietzsche in the mid-1930s. Heidegger later told Gadamer that “Nietzsche ruined me.” Nietzsche ruined Heidegger by offering him nihilism as a cure for nihilism. Nietzsche made Heidegger a Nazi. Heidegger overcame Nazism by overcoming Nietzsche.
In Heidegger’s later terminology, Nietzsche and National Socialism were both “humanistic,” premised on the idea that the human mind creates culture, whereas in fact culture creates the human mind. No genuine belief can be chosen. It has to seize us. This is one of the senses of Heidegger’s later concept of Ereignis, often translated “the event of appropriation”: the beginning of a new historical epoch seizes and enthralls us. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s later claim that “Only a god can save us now” — as opposed to a philosopher-dictator.
One could, however, read Nietzsche in a non-humanistic way, if one sees his rhapsodies to the Übermensch, the philosopher-legislator, and the coming century of global wars (yes, Nietzsche predicted that) not as a solution to modern nihilism, but as an intensification of it to the breaking point as a way of hurrying along the downfall of the modern world and inaugurating a new age of gods. (“That which is falling should also be pushed.”) If this is Nietzsche’s true view, then offering nihilism to cure nihilism is not a self-contradiction, it is just sound homeopathic medicine.
Beiner asks “are any of us really prepared to entertain the possibility of the comprehensive cancelling-out of modernity to which Heidegger in his radicalism seems committed?” (p. 105). Elsewhere he asks “. . . with what do we undertake to replace [liberal modernity]? A regime of warriors and priests? A return from Enlightenment to magic?” (p. 132). But Beiner is asking these questions from within liberal modernity, and of course from within that perspective, people are going to cling to liberalism simply out of fear. From Heidegger’s point of view, we will only have a solution when individuals can no longer pose such questions. Instead, the answers will be imposed upon us by historical forces outside our comprehension or control.
A Smug Criticism of Smugness
Beiner’s conclusion, “How to Do Theory in Politically Treacherous Times,” is, like the rest of his book, directed to Leftist academics. He makes a strong case against the smugness and complacency of contemporary political theorists, who think they can ignore the Right because we have been refuted by history: “For Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas, Nietzsche has been refuted by history and sociology. He hasn’t! He can only be refuted by a more compelling account of the human good” (p. 125). This is excellent advice, but it ill-accords with Beiner’s own supremely smug, question-begging, and dismissive tone throughout Dangerous Minds. Judging from what he does, as opposed to what he says, Beiner’s real aim is not to intellectually engage the Right, but to censor and suppress it. But if Beiner really does want to debate the philosophical foundations of the New Right, I’m game.
Should We Read Heidegger and Nietzsche?
If Nietzsche and Heidegger are so dangerous to liberal democracy, shouldn’t something be done to keep their books out of the hands of impressionable young men?
Beiner ends his discussion of Nietzsche by referring to Leo Strauss’s advice to Canadian conservative political philosopher George Grant, who was about to embark on a series of popular radio lectures on Nietzsche. Strauss viewed Nietzsche as a profoundly dangerous thinker and advised Grant not to talk about Nietzsche at all but simply refer to his “epigones” Freud and Weber. The only reason Beiner brings this up, of course, is to plant the idea that academics should drop Nietzsche from the canon. Beiner, however, strenuously denies that this is his intent in his Introduction:
Hopefully no reader of my book will draws from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche and Heidegger — that is, stop reading them. [Of course reading them does not necessarily entail teaching them, especially to undergraduates.] On the contrary, I think that we need to read them in ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life and hence what defines that view of life. But if one is handling intellectually radioactive materials, one has to be much less naïve about what one is dealing with. . . . We need to open our eyes, at once intellectually, morally, and politically, to just how dangerous they are. (p. 14)
But this seems disingenuous in light of Beiner’s repeated assertion that Nietzsche and Heidegger should have censored their own ideas insofar as they are dangerous to liberal modernity:
There is a kind of insane recklessness to Nietzsche — as if nothing he could write, no matter how irresponsible, no matter how inflammatory, could possibly do any harm. All that matters is raising the stakes, and there is no such thing as raising the stakes too high. (p. 63)
One has to ask: “To whom does Beiner think Nietzsche is being irresponsible? What could his thought possibly harm?” The answer, of course, is the modern liberal democratic world, the world that Nietzsche rejects, the world that Nietzsche crafted his doctrines to destroy.
Beiner is even more blatant in his advocacy of self-censorship in Heidegger’s case:
Near the end of his life, Heidegger decided to include the Black Notebooks (including explicitly racist passages conjuring up a diabolical conspiracy on the part of “World Judaism” [sic: World Jewry]) in the official Collected Works, whereas any reasonably sane person would have burned them, or at least burned the most incriminating passages. It’s as if he either were trying to spur a revival of fascist ideology or intended to confess to the world just how grievously stained he had been by that ideology. All of this is thoroughly damning. (pp. 113–14)
Again, one must ask: “Sane by whose standards? Incriminating to whom? Damning by whose standards?” The answer, of course, is: modern liberal democrats. But Heidegger thought these people were intellectually benighted and morally corrupt. So why should be censor his thought to conform to their sensibilities? To hell with them. He was addressing himself to freer minds, to a better world, to generations yet to come.
At the beginning of his Heidegger chapter, Beiner also writes:
The question I’m raising in this chapter is whether, finding ourselves now in a political landscape where the possibility increasingly looms of Heidegger as a potential resource for the far right, it might be best for left Heideggerianism (a paradox to being with) to close up shop. (p. 67)
Since virtually everyone teaching Heidegger in academia today is a Leftist, this basically amounts to removing Heidegger from the canon. Beiner’s talk of looming possibilities and potential resources is off the mark, for Heidegger already is a resource and inspiration for the New Right, and he knows this. (Frankly, I hope Left-wing Heideggerians close up shop soon. It would be an ideal opportunity to launch the Heidegger Graduate School [11].)
It is absurd to wish that Nietzsche and Heidegger had censored their ideas to remove their challenges to the system they despised and wished to destroy. If liberals want to stop these ideas from influencing policy, they need to refute them. Demanding censorship is simply an admission that one cannot refute ideas rationally and thus must repress them. Asking one’s opponents to engage in self-censorship takes some brass. If liberals can’t refute anti-liberals like Nietzsche and Heidegger, they are just going to have to screw up their resolve and do their own censorship. This is hardly a stretch, sadly, since the suppression of dissent is second nature to modern academics. It’s really all they have left.
Indeed, if wishing aloud that Nietzsche and Heidegger had censored themselves has any practical meaning today, it is as a suggestion that political theorists and philosophers censor themselves and their syllabi, i.e., remove Nietzsche and Heidegger from the canon.
If Beiner is really arguing that Leftists should stop teaching Nietzsche and Heidegger, he apparently did not anticipate what would happen if his book fell into the hands of Rightist readers like me. For Dangerous Minds, despite its obnoxious rhetoric and smug dismissal of our movement, is a very helpful introduction to Nietzsche and Heidegger as anti-liberal thinkers. Thus I recommend it highly. And if I have anything to say about it, this book will help create a whole lot more dangerous minds, a whole new generation of Right-wing Nietzscheans and Heideggerians.
11:54 Publié dans Livre, Livre, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, livre, martin heidegger, friedrich nietzsche | |
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00:10 Publié dans Philosophie, Psychologie/psychanalyse | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : françoise bonardel, carl gustav jung, psychanalyse, gnose, philosophie | |
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Ex: http://www.autochtonisme.com
Premièrement, les Européens ont été largement domestiqués. Ils furent autrefois des conquérants capables de soumettre le monde, mais force est de constater qu’ils n’ont plus qu’une lointaine ressemblance avec leurs ancêtres. On ne doit rien attendre de gens qui laissent sans réagir leurs femmes se faire violer, comme à Cologne en décembre 2015. L’Européen type est un quinquagénaire isolé qui n’aspire plus qu’à une retraite paisible. Autant en être conscient.
Deuxièmement, les Etats supranationaux européens se sont dotés de moyens qui les rendent indestructibles frontalement : arsenal juridique (loi sur le renseignement, lois contre le terrorisme…), capacités techniques (satellites, logiciels espions, « boîtes noires »…), moyens de renseignement (écoutes, balises, indicateurs…), militarisation du cadre urbain (plan Vigipirate, opération sentinelle), forces de police efficaces et soumises, paramétrages des moyens militaires pour répondre à la violence civile (« opération ronces »), etc.
Troisièmement, notre peuple ne se relèverait pas d’une défaite. En cas de défaite « à domicile », face à l’Etat supranational, face aux communautés allochtones, voire, ce qui est le plus probable, face aux deux réunis contre lui, la dilution de notre peuple s’accélèrerait inéluctablement.
Quatrièmement, voulons-nous la Syrie pour nos enfants, si d’autres solutions sont possibles ? La violence est toujours réciproque. Décider de l’employer est un acte grave dont il faut bien peser les conséquences sur soi, sa famille et son peuple.
En d’autres termes, la violence, en l’état actuel des choses, n’est pas envisageable. Il faut faire face au régime avec réalisme et ne pas l’attaquer sur son point fort. La population autochtone est une masse d’individus isolés, incapables d’agir ensemble, ne se faisant pas confiance, inconscients parfois de la situation, bref, pour tout dire : incapables de résister. Le premier travail consistera donc à rassembler le « reste pur » de la population (les « Réfractaires ») puis à organiser celui-ci de manière à agréger progressivement toute la population. Ce premier travail, non-violent par définition, devra se concrétiser par la formation d’un Etat parallèle, d’un gouvernement parallèle et de communautés autochtones. La proto-nation autochtone ainsi formée et structurée sera une puissante force de résistance au régime en place, à condition de ne pas faire le jeu d’un régime paramétré pour vaincre toute opposition frontale et d’adopter une forme de « désobéissance civile ».
« La désobéissance civile est le refus assumé et public de se soumettre à une loi, un règlement, une organisation ou un pouvoir jugé inique par ceux qui le contestent, tout en faisant de ce refus une arme de combat pacifique » (Wikipedia). La désobéissance civile s’adresse au sens de la justice de la majorité au nom de « principes supérieurs » qui ont été violés. On parlera ici du droit à l’existence du peuple autochtone, droit ouvertement bafoué par le pouvoir républicain.
La désobéissance civile n’est pas la passivité. C’est un combat. Comme tout combat, la désobéissance civile a une stratégie et mène des actions. Que ces actions soient non-violentes ne changent rien à leur nature. Elles devront tenir compte des « ressources » disponibles (ressources humaines, financières, médiatiques…), de la situation (rapport de force…) et de l’état de conscience de la population (l’action sera-t-elle comprise ?). Elles devront aussi trouver leur place et leur justification par leur conformité à la stratégie choisie.
La référence absolue en matière de lutte non-violente est le politologue américain Gene Sharp. Celui que certains nomment le « Machiavel de la non-violence » n’est certes pas un ami des peuples autochtones. L’Albert Einstein Institution fondée par Sharp en 1983 est la vitrine séduisante de la CIA et de l’OTAN. Financée par la National Endowment for Democracy (CIA), l’Albert Einstein Institution travaille en étroite collaboration avec d’autres officines spécialisées dans « l’ingérence démocratique » comme l’USAID, Freedom House, ou l’Open Society de Georges Soros.
Il est admis par l’ensemble des analystes que les théories de Gene Sharp sont à l’origine des révolutions de couleurs. L’Albert Einstein Institution revendique d’ailleurs la « révolution originelle » (sic) en Serbie (2000), la « révolution orange » en Ukraine (2004), la « révolution des tulipes » au Kirghizistan (2005) auxquelles nous pouvons ajouter la « révolution des roses » en Géorgie (2003), la « révolution bleue » en Biélorussie (2005) et même le « printemps arabe » en Tunisie, Egypte et Syrie durant les premières semaines (2010-2012).
Le lecteur accoutumé à ce blog aura compris que conformément à ce qu’énonce Gene Sharp, nous avons défini une « stratégie globale » (libérer le peuple autochtone du « corps d’associés » qui l’étouffe et du régime qui l’opprime) et des stratégies plus limitées se situant dans la stratégie globale (rassembler et organiser ; lutter pour les droits).
La « stratégie globale » détermine l’objectif à atteindre (la libération du peuple autochtone). Elle coordonne l’action de l’ensemble des organisations, des communautés, des institutions autochtones de manière à atteindre cet objectif. Les stratégies limitées, ou intermédiaires, ont un niveau de planification plus restreint. Nous en déterminons deux :
Les stratégies de conservation et d’expansion ont chacune leurs propres objectifs. Ceux-ci doivent être en cohérence avec la stratégie globale retenue. Pour atteindre ces objectifs stratégiques, il est nécessaire de procéder par étapes en utilisant des « tactiques » appropriées en fonction des ressources disponibles, du contexte et des opportunités. Les engagements tactiques mobilisent un ensemble de moyens sur une période courte, des domaines spécifiques et des objectifs mineurs (campagne de sensibilisation à l’antijaphétisme, campagne de boycott de produits…) . Les gains tactiques obtenus réalisent progressivement les buts stratégiques fixés. Au contraire de la stratégie qui détermine des objectifs plus ou moins lointains et généraux, la tactique vise donc des actions limitées et des objectifs restreints à la portée d’un mouvement de libération.
Les engagements tactiques utilisent des « méthodes », c’est-à-dire des formes d’action pour atteindre leurs objectifs. Ces « méthodes » sont multiples et doivent toujours, selon nous, être non-violentes. Dans son manuel, De la dictature à la démocratie (L’Harmattan 2009), Gene Sharp répertorie près de 200 méthodes d’actions non-violentes. Le politologue les classe en trois catégories :
1. Les méthodes de protestation et de persuasion non-violentes :
2. Les méthodes de non-coopération
3. Les méthodes d’intervention non-violentes
Dans cette optique, la résistance autochtone peut mener une multitude d’actions non-violentes : blocages momentanés de certains nœuds routiers, autoroutiers ou ferroviaires ; résistance fiscale ; boycott des élections ; lobbying ; constitution de ZAD identitaires ; interpellation d’élus républicains ; sit-in ; occupation d’écoles ; manifestations ; harcèlement ; etc. Il n’y a de limites que notre imagination… et l’étendue du Grand Rassemblement, c’est-à-dire des forces disponibles.
Ce sont en effet les ressources humaines disponibles qui conditionneront en grande partie la nature et l’ampleur des actions entreprises. Tout plan d’action devra au préalable évaluer le plus précisément possible la situation et les possibilités d’action. Une action réussie est une action qui aura d’une part entamé la légitimité du régime et qui aura d’autre part propagé parmi les Autochtones l’idée de sécession et de rassemblement. Gene Sharp établit que les actions initiales devront comporter peu de risques, surtout si la population est craintive et se sent impuissante, ce qui est le cas pour le peuple autochtone. Il faudra alors limiter l’action à des protestations symboliques ou à des actes de non-coopération limités et temporaires (dépose de fleurs dans un emplacement symbolique, veillées, boycotts…). L’important est de fixer des objectifs intermédiaires réalisables dont le succès ne peut qu’encourager à la répétition. Il n’y a rien de plus facile que d’engorger le standard téléphonique d’une municipalité hostile, que d’harceler la permanence d’un politicien, que de donner de la voix lors de la projection d’un film antijaphite. Répété 1000 fois, « sans haine, sans violence et sans armes », ces petites actions uniront le peuple autochtone et abattront le régime en place.
Antonin Campana
09:52 Publié dans Actualité, Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : désobéissance civile, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, philosophie politique | |
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An evocation of Ludwig Klages
by Thierry Durolle
It is important for the militants of the Greater Europe to possess a philosophical background which enables them to build or comfort a proper Weltanschaaung. One important understanding, we believe, is the antagonistic relationship between the philosophie des Lumières and the (neo) romantic movement. The latter was embodied by a lot of different thinkers and writers, most of them being German.
Some of us would think that Friederich Nieztsche would represent the zenith of this movement, whose ideas would consist of a « surhumanism », as per the Italian thinker Giorgio Locchi’s writtings. For sure Nietzsche is a good start so to speak and he obviously influenced and will influence a lot people out there. Thinking of Nietzsche’s heirs, the names of Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages immediately come to mind. If the first one became famous with his Decline of the West, Ludwig Klages remains quite unknown to some.
Ludwig Klages was a one-of-a-kind brilliant man who is firstly known for his graphology work. But it is his philosophical work especially which deserves our attention. In fact, Klages belongs to what used to be called Lebensphilopsohie, a term that applies to Nietzsche’s. One thing they share is this dionysiac view on life which is often called « biocentric » when applied to Klages’ philosophy. His anti-christianity is another common point with Friedrich Nietzsche, and the same goes for a genre of paganism, or pantheism, shared by both philosophers.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s famous concept of Wille zur Macht (Will to Power), a concept often misunderstood, does not meet Ludwig Klages’ approval. Indeed, he considers it to be a spark which lit the fire of modern technician craziness - working hand in hand with the worst kind of capitalism at some point. For if Klages is against capitalism, in a wider view, he is against liberalism in general. One important criticism he addresses to both technician and capitalist systems is the destructive effect they both exert on nature.
Ludwig Klages is to be considered as a pioneer of ecology. In 1913, he delivered a speech which was later turned into a small book called Man and Earth. In his speech, Klages foresaw the future devastation caused by capitalism on nature such as the animal extinction, the alienation of the producer/consumer system and even mass tourism. This text must be read by any Right-Wing ecologist.
Thanks to Arktos, glimpses of Ludwig Klages work are now available to the public in English in the form of two books. The first one - entitled Ludwig Klages The Biocentric Worldview - consists of a collection of selected texts which stress the author’s biocentrism. The second one - Ludwig Klages Cosmogonic Reflections - is a collection of aphorism. Both books contain foreword by Joseph D. Pryce who excellently introduce the reader to Ludwig Klages. The reading of Ludwig Klages texts completes those written by Nietzsche and Spengler in a poetic manner typical of Germany’s best authors.
00:05 Publié dans Ecologie, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : ludwig klages, écologie, tellurisme, révolution conservatrice, cosmiques, cosmiques de schwabing, allemagne | |
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Ex: https://manticorepress.net
“Affirmation of life even it its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I call the Dionysian…Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus Aristotle understood it – but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction…And with that I again return to that place from which I set out –The Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can – I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus – I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence…(Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients”)
It is a well known fact that most of the early writings of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, revolve around a prognosis of duality concerning the two Hellenic deities, Apollo and Dionysus. This dichotomy, which first appears in The Birth of Tragedy, is subsequently modified by Nietzsche in his later works so that the characteristics of the God Apollo are reflected and absorbed by his polar opposite, Dionysus. Though this topic has been examined frequently by philosophers, it has not been examined sufficiently in terms of its relation to the Greek myths which pertain to the two Gods in question. Certainly, Nietzsche was no stranger to Classical myth, for prior to composing his philosophical works, Nietzsche was a professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. This interest in mythology is also illustrated in his exploration of the use of mythology as tool by which to shape culture. The Birth of Tragedy is based upon Greek myth and literature, and also contains much of the groundwork upon which he would develop his later premises. Setting the tone at the very beginning of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes:[spacer height=”20px”]
We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality – just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations. The terms Dionysian and Apollonian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods. Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition…[1]
Initially then, Nietzsche’s theory concerning Apollo and Dionysus was primarily concerned with aesthetic theory, a theory which he would later expand to a position of predominance at the heart of his philosophy. Since Nietzsche chose the science of aesthetics as the starting point for his ideas, it is also the point at which we shall begin the comparison of his philosophy with the Hellenic Tradition.
The opposition between Apollo and Dionysus is one of the core themes within The Birth of Tragedy, but in Nietzsche’s later works, Apollo is mentioned only sporadically, if at all, and his figure appears to have been totally superseded by his rival Dionysus. In The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo and Dionysus are clearly defined by Nietzsche, and the spheres of their influence are carefully demarcated. In Nietzsche’s later writings, Apollo is conspicuous by the virtue of his absence – Dionysus remains and has ascended to a position of prominence in Nietzsche’s philosophy, but Apollo, who was an integral part of the dichotomy featured in The Birth of Tragedy, has disappeared, almost without a trace. There is in fact, a simple reason for the disappearance of Apollo – he is in fact still present, within the figure of Dionysus. What begins in The Birth of Tragedy as a dichotomy shifts to synthesis in Nietzsche’s later works, with the name Dionysus being used to refer to the unified aspect of both Apollo and Dionysus, in what Nietzsche believes to the ultimate manifestation of both deities. In early works the synthesis between Apollo & Dionysus is incomplete – they are still two opposing principles – “Thus in The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo, the god of light, beauty and harmony is in opposition to Dionysian drunkenness and chaos”.[2] The fraternal union of Apollo & Dionysus that forms the basis of Nietzsche’s view is, according to him, symbolized in art, and specifically in Greek tragedy.[3] Greek tragedy, by its fusion of dialogue and chorus; image and music, exhibits for Nietzsche the union of the Apollonian and Dionysian, a union in which Dionysian passion and dithyrambic madness merge with Apollonian measure and lucidity, and original chaos and pessimism are overcome in a tragic attitude that is affirmative and heroic.[4]
The moment of Dionysian “terror” arrives when […] a cognitive failure or wandering occurs, when the principle of individuation, which is Apollo’s “collapses” […] and gives way to another perception, to a contradiction of appearances and perhaps even to their defeasibility as such (their “exception”). It occurs “when [one] suddenly loses faith in […] the cognitive form of phenomena. Just as dreams […] satisfy profoundly our innermost being, our common [deepest] ground [der gemeinsame Untergrund], so too, symmetrically, do “terror” and “blissful” ecstasy…well up from the innermost depths [Grunde] of man once the strict controls of the Apollonian principle relax. Then “we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian”.[5]
The Apollonian and the Dionysian are two cognitive states in which art appears as the power of nature in man.[6] Art for Nietzsche is fundamentally not an expression of culture, but is what Heidegger calls “eine Gestaltung des Willens zur Macht” a manifestation of the will to power. And since the will to power is the essence of being itself, art becomes “die Gestaltung des Seienden in Ganzen,” a manifestation of being as a whole.[7] This concept of the artist as a creator, and of the aspect of the creative process as the manifestation of the will, is a key component of much of Nietzsche’s thought – it is the artist, the creator who diligently scribes the new value tables. Taking this into accord, we must also allow for the possibility that Thus Spake Zarathustra opens the doors for a new form of artist, who rather than working with paint or clay, instead provides the Uebermensch, the artist that etches their social vision on the canvas of humanity itself. It is in the character of the Uebermensch that we see the unification of the Dionysian (instinct) and Apollonian (intellect) as the manifestation of the will to power, to which Nietzsche also attributes the following tautological value “The Will to Truth is the Will to Power”.[8] This statement can be interpreted as meaning that by attributing the will to instinct, truth exists as a naturally occurring phenomena – it exists independently of the intellect, which permits many different interpretations of the truth in its primordial state. The truth lies primarily in the will, the subconscious, and the original raw instinctual state that Nietzsche identified with Dionysus. In The Gay Science Nietzsche says:
For the longest time, thinking was considered as only conscious, only now do we discover the truth that the greatest part of our intellectual activity lies in the unconscious […] theories of Schopenhauer and his teaching of the primacy of the will over the intellect. The unconscious becomes a source of wisdom and knowledge that can reach into the fundamental aspects of human existence, while the intellect is held to be an abstracting and falsifying mechanism that is directed, not toward truth but toward “mastery and possession.” [9]
Thus the will to power originates not in the conscious, but in the subconscious. Returning to the proposed dichotomy betwixt Dionysus and Apollo, in his later works the two creative impulses become increasingly merged, eventually reaching a point in his philosophy wherein Dionysus refers not to the singular God, but rather a syncretism of Apollo and Dionysus in equal quantity. “The two art drives must unfold their powers in a strict proportion, according to the law of eternal justice.”[10] For Nietzsche, the highest goal of tragedy is achieved in the harmony between two radically distinct realms of art, between the principles that govern the Apollonian plastic arts and epic poetry and those that govern the Dionysian art of music.[11] To be complete and to derive ultimate mastery from the creative process, one must harness both the impulses represented by Apollo and Dionysus – the instinctual urge and potent creative power of Dionysus, coupled with the skill and intellectualism of Apollo’s craftsmanship – in sum both natural creative power from the will and the skills learnt within a social grouping. This definition will hold true for all creative ventures and is not restricted to the artistic process; ‘will’ and ‘skill’ need to act in harmony and concord.
In Nietzsche’s philosophy, Apollo and Dionysus are so closely entwined as to render them inseparable. Apollo, as the principle of appearance and of individuation, is that which grants appearance to the Dionysian form, without for Apollo, Dionysus remains bereft of physical appearance.
That [Dionysus] appears at all with such epic precision and clarity is the work of the dream interpreter, Apollo […] His appearances are at best instances of “typical ‘ideality,’” epiphanies of the “idea” or “idol”, mere masks and after images (Abbilde[er]). To “appear” Dionysus must take on a form.[12]
In his natural state, Dionysus has no form, it is only by reflux with Apollo, who represents the nature of form that Dionysus, as the nature of the formless, can appear to us at all. Likewise, Apollo without Dionysus becomes lost in a world of form – the complex levels of abstraction derived from the Dionysian impulse are absent. Neither god can function effectively without the workings of the other. Dionysus appears, after all, only thanks to the Apollonian principle. This is Nietzsche’s rendition of Apollo and Dionysus, his reworking of the Hellenic mythos, forged into a powerful philosophy that has influenced much of the modern era. Yet how close is this new interpretation to the original mythology of the ancient Greeks, and how much of this is Nietzsche’s own creation? It is well known that Nietzsche and his contemporary Wagner both saw the merit in reshaping old myths to create new socio-political values. To fully understand Nietzsche’s retelling of the Dionysus myth and separate the modern ideas from that of the ancients, we need to examine the Hellenic sources on Dionysus.
Myths of Dionysus are often used to depict a stranger or an outsider to the community as a repository for the mysterious and prohibited features of another culture. Unsavory characteristics that the Greeks tend to ascribe to foreigners are attributed to him, and various myths depict his initial rejection by the authority of the polis – yet Dionysus’ birth at Thebes, as well as the appearance of his name on Linear B tablets, indicates that this is no stranger, but in fact a native, and that the rejected foreign characteristics ascribed to him are in fact Greek characteristics.[13] Rather than being a representative of foreign culture what we are in fact observing in the character of Dionysus is the archetype of the outsider; someone who sits outside the boundaries of the cultural norm, or who represents the disruptive element in society which either by its nature effects a change or is removed by the culture which its very presence threatens to alter. Dionysus represents as Plutarch observed, “the whole wet element” in nature – blood, semen, sap, wine, and all the life giving juice. He is in fact a synthesis of both chaos and form, of orgiastic impulses and visionary states – at one with the life of nature and its eternal cycle of birth and death, of destruction and creation.[14] This disruptive element, by being associated with the blood, semen, sap, and wine is an obvious metaphor for the vital force itself, the wet element, being representative of “life in the raw”. This notion of “life” is intricately interwoven into the figure of Dionysus in the esoteric understanding of his cult, and indeed throughout the philosophy of the Greeks themselves, who had two different words for life, both possessing the same root as Vita (Latin: Life) but present in very different phonetic forms: bios and zoë.[15]
Plotinos called zoë the “time of the soul”, during which the soul, in its course of rebirths, moves on from one bios to another […] the Greeks clung to a not-characterized “life” that underlies every bios and stands in a very different relationship to death than does a “life” that includes death among its characteristics […] This experience differs from the sum of experiences that constitute the bios, the content of each individual man’s written or unwritten biography. The experience of life without characterization – of precisely that life which “resounded” for the Greeks in the word zoë – is, on the other hand, indescribable.[16]
Zoë is Life in its immortal and transcendent aspect, and is thus representative of the pure primordial state. Zoëis the presupposition of the death drive; death exists only in relation to zoë. It is a product of life in accordance with a dialectic that is a process not of thought, but of life itself, of the zoë in each individual bios.[17]
The other primary association of Dionysus is with the chthonic elements, and we frequently find him taking the form of snakes. According to the myth of his dismemberment by the Titans, a myth which is strongly associated with Delphi, he was born of Persephone, after Zeus, taking snake form, had impregnated her. [18] In Euripides Bacchae, Dionysus, being the son of Semele, is a god of dark and frightening subterranean powers; yet being also the son of Zeus, he mediates between the chthonic and civilized worlds, once again playing the role of a liminal outsider that passes in transit from one domain to another.[19] Through his association with natural forces, a description of his temple has been left to us by a physician from Thasos: “A temple in the open air, an open air naos with an altar and a cradle of vine branches; a fine lair, always green; and for the initiates a room in which to sing the evoe.”[20] This stands in direct contrast to Apollo, who was represented by architectural and artificial beauty. Likewise his music was radically different to that of Apollo’s; “A stranger, he should be admitted into the city, for his music is varied, not distant and monotone like the tunes of Apollo’s golden lyre”. (Euripides Bacchae 126-134, 155-156)[21]
Both Gods were concerned with the imagery of life, art, and as we shall see soon, the sun. Moreover, though their forces were essentially opposite, they two Gods were essentially representative of two polarities for the same force, meeting occasionally in perfect balance to reveal an unfolding Hegelian dialectic that was the creative process of life itself and the esoteric nature of the solar path, for just as Dionysus was the chthonic deity (and here we intentionally use the word Chthon instead of the word Gē – Chthon being literally underworld and Gē being the earth or ground) and Apollo was a Solar deity; but not the physical aspect of the sun as a heavenly body, this was ascribed by to the god Helios instead. Rather Apollo represented the human aspect of the solar path (and in this he is equivalent to the Vedic deity Savitar), and its application to the mortal realm; rather than being the light of the sky, Apollo is the light of the mind: intellect and creation. He is as bright as Dionysus is dark – in Dionysus the instinct, the natural force of zoë is prevalent, associated with the chthonic world below ground because he is immortal, his power normally unseen. He rules during Apollo’s absence in Hyperborea because the sun has passed to another land, the reign of the bright sun has passed and the time of the black sun commences – the black sun being the hidden aspect of the solar path, represented by the departure of Apollo in this myth.
Apollo is frequently mentioned in connection to Dionysus in Greek myth. Inscriptions dating from the third century B.C., mention that Dionysos Kadmeios reigned alongside Apollo over the assembly of Theben gods.[22] Likewise on Rhodes a holiday called Sminthia was celebrated there in memory of a time mice attacked the vines there and were destroyed by Apollo and Dionysus, who shared the epithet Sminthios on the island.[23] They are even cited together in the Odyssey (XI 312-25), and also in the story of the death of Koronis, who was shot by Artemis, and this at Apollo’s instigation because she had betrayed the god with a mortal lover.[24] Also, the twin peaks on Parnassos traditionally known as the “peaks of Apollo and Dionysus.”[25] Their association and worship however, was even more closely entwined at Delphi, for as Leicester Holland has perceived:
(1) Dionysus spoke oracles at Delphi before Apollo did; (2) his bones were placed in a basin beside the tripod; (3) the omphalos was his tomb. It is well known, moreover, that Dionysus was second only to Apollo in Delphian and Parnassian worship; Plutarch, in fact, assigns to Dionysus an equal share with Apollo in Delphi[26]
A Pindaric Scholiast says that Python ruled the prophetic tripod on which Dionysus was the first to speak oracles; that then Apollo killed the snake and took over.[27] The association of Apollo and Dionysus in Delphi, moreover, was not limited to their connection to the Delphic Oracle. We also find this relationship echoed in the commemoration of the Great flood which was celebrated each year at a Delphian festival called Aiglē, celebrated two or three days before the full moon of January or February, at the same time as the Athenian Anthesteria festival, the last day of which was devoted to commemorating the victims of the Great Flood; this was the same time of the year when Apollo was believed at Delphi to return from his sojourn among the Hyperboreans. Moreover, Dionysus is said to have perished and returned to life in the flood.[28] Apollo’s Hyperborean absence is his yearly death – Apollonios says that Apollo shed tears when he went to the Hyperborean land; thence flows the Eridanos, on whose banks the Heliades wail without cease; and extremely low spirits came over the Argonauts as they sailed that river of amber tears.[29]
This is the time of Dionysus’ reign at Delphi in which he was the center of Delphic worship for the three winter months, when Apollo was absent. Plutarch, himself a priest of the Pythian Apollo, Amphictyonic official and a frequent visitor to Delphi, says that for nine months the paean was sung in Apollo’s honour at sacrifices, but at the beginning of winter the paeans suddenly ceased, then for three months men sang dithyrambs and addressed themselves to Dionysus rather than to Apollo.[30] Chthonian Dionysus manifested himself especially at the winter festival when the souls of the dead rose to walk briefly in the upper world again, in the festival that the Athenians called Anthesteria, whose Delphian counterpart was the Theophania. The Theophania marked the end of Dionysus’ reign and Apollo’s return; Dionysus and the ghosts descended once more to Hades realm.[31] In this immortal aspect Dionysus is very far removed from being a god of the dead and winter; representing instead immortal life, the zoë, which was employed in Dionysian cult to release psychosomatic energies summoned from the depths that were discharged in a physical cult of life.[32]
Dionysus is the depiction of transcendent primordial life, life that persists even during the absence of Apollo (the Sun) – for as much as Apollo is the Golden Sun, Dionysus is the Black or Winter Sun, reigning in the world below ground whilst Apollo’s presence departs for another hemisphere, dead to the people of Delphi, the Winter Sun reigns in Apollo’s absence. Far from being antagonistic opposites, Apollo and Dionysus were so closely related in Greek myth that according to Deinarchos, Dionysus was killed and buried at Delphi beside the golden Apollo.[33] Likewise, in the Lykourgos tetralogy of Aischylos, the cry “Ivy-Apollo, Bakchios, the soothsayer,” is heard when the Thracian bacchantes, the Bassarai, attacks Orpheus, the worshipper of Apollo and the sun. The cry suggests a higher knowledge of the connection between Apollo and Dionysus, the dark god, whom Orpheus denies in favour of the luminous god. In the Lykymnios of Euripides the same connection is attested by the cry, “Lord, laurel-loving Bakchios, Paean Apollo, player of the Lyre.”[34] Similarly, we find anotherpaean by Philodamos addressed to Dionysus from Delphi: “Come hither, Lord Dithyrambos, Backchos…..Bromios now in the spring’s holy period.”[35] The pediments of the temple of Apollo also portray on one side Apollo with Leto, Artemis, and the Muses, and on the other side Dionysus and the thyiads, and a vase painting of c.400 B.C. shows Apollo and Dionysus in Delphi holding their hands to one another.[36]
An analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy concerning the role of Apollo and Dionysus in Hellenic myth thus reveals more than even a direct parallel. Not only did Nietzsche comprehend the nature of the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus, he understood this aspect of their cult on the esoteric level, that their forces, rather than being antagonistic are instead complementary, with both Gods performing two different aesthetic techniques in the service of the same social function, which reaches its pinnacle of development when both creative processes are elevated in tandem within an individual. Nietzsche understood the symbolism of myths and literature concerning the two gods, and he actually elaborated upon it, adding the works of Schopenhauer to create a complex philosophy concerning not only the interplay of aesthetics in the role of the creative process, but also the nature of the will and the psychological process used to create a certain type, which is exemplified in both his ideals of the Ubermensch and the Free Spirit. Both of these higher types derive their impetus from the synchronicity of the Dionysian and Apollonian drives, hence why in Nietzsche’s later works following The Birth of Tragedy only the Dionysian impulse is referred to, this term not being used to signify just Dionysus, but rather the balanced integration of the two forces. This ideal of eternal life (zoë) is also located in Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Reoccurrence – it denies the timeless eternity of a supernatural God, but affirms the eternity of the ever-creating and destroying powers in nature and man, for like the solar symbolism of Apollo and Dionysus, it is a notion of cyclical time. To Nietzsche, the figure of Dionysus is the supreme affirmation of life, the instinct and the will to power, with the will to power being an expression of the will to life and to truth at its highest exaltation – “It is a Dionysian Yea-Saying to the world as it is, without deduction, exception and selection…it is the highest attitude that a philosopher can reach; to stand Dionysiacally toward existence: my formula for this is amor fati”’[37] Dionysus is thus to both Nietzsche and the Greeks, the highest expression of Life in its primordial and transcendent meaning, the hidden power of the Black Sun and the subconscious impulse of the will.
To order at: https://manticorepress.net
Endnotes:
[1]James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy, (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 40
[2]Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, Inc. 1977), 31
[3] Ibid.,31
[4] Ibid., 51
[5] James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy, 50-51
[6] Ibid., 221
[7] Ibid., 205-206
[8] Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, 114
[9] Ibid, 113
[10] James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy, 82
[11] Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, 32
[12] James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy, 99
[13]Dora C. Pozzi, and John M. Wickerman, Myth & the Polis, (New York: Cornell University 1991), 36
[14]Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, 126
[15] Carl Kerényi, Dionysos Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, (New Jersey: Princeton university press, 1996), xxxxi
[16] Ibid., xxxxv
[17] Ibid., 204-205
[18] Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 378
[19]Dora C. Pozzi, and John M. Wickerman, Myth & the Polis, 147
[20]Marcel Detienne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer Dionysos At Large, (London: Harvard Univeristy Press 1989), 46
[21]Dora C. Pozzi, and John M. Wickerman, Myth & the Polis, 144
[22] Marcel Detienne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer Dionysos At Large, 18
[23] Daniel E. Gershenson, Apollo the Wolf-God in Journal of Indo-European Studies, Mongraph number 8 (Virginia: Institute for the Study of Man 1991), 32
[24]Carl Kerényi, Dionysos Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, (New Jersey: Princeton university press, 1996), 103
[25] Dora C. Pozzi, and John M. Wickerman, Myth & the Polis, 139
[26] Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 375
[27] Ibid., 376
[28]Daniel E. Gershenson, Apollo the Wolf-God in Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph number 8, 61
[29] Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 387
[30] Ibid., 379
[31] Ibid., 380-381
[32] Ibid., 219
[33] Ibid., 388
[34] Carl Kerényi, Dionysos Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, (New Jersey: Princeton university press, 1996), 233
[35] Ibid.,217
[36] Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1989) 203
[37] Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, 261
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In writing not so long ago about my appropriation of the “smart classroom” (that obtrusion of entertainment-technology into the solemnity of the academic space) so as to introduce students in a “Modern Drama” course to the mid-Nineteenth Century operatic theater of Richard Wagner, I concluded with the following thought concerning today’s collegians: “Their education, even in college, once they get there, leaves them bereft of high-cultural experience. That is a pity because taste tends to become fixed in late adolescence.” I remarked that contemporary freshmen, coming from a culturally jejune public-school curriculum, hover as though on a verge, intellectually speaking. “They will never respond to esthetic greatness unless they have an opportunity to experience it”; and yet, “those opportunities shrink away to fewer and fewer every year.”
In writing about the struggles that students experienced, first in understanding and then in articulating their responses, to two challenging novels by H. G. Wells, I ended with this meditation: “Like any healthy person, the specimen college student welcomes the chance to see things from a higher perspective, but the system as it stands is designed precisely to deprive students of any higher perspective. What passes for education is a mental diet of infant pabulum and an entrenched infantilism is one of its noticeable results.”
Wagner was born in 1813, two centuries ago last year; he died in 1883, more than one hundred and thirty years ago. Wells was born in 1866; he died in 1946, nearly seventy years ago. To most college students, dates such as 1813, 1883, 1866, and 1946 are so many meaningless references, number-conglomerations about as significant from their perspective as the number-designations before the course-descriptions in the college catalogue. I was born in 1954. I can report accurately that I first read Wells, his War of the Worlds, in 1965, when I was a fourth-grader at Toland Way Elementary in Highland Park, California. I believe it was my brother, sixteen years my elder from my father’s first marriage, who recommended it. My father needed to check out the Wells omnibus from the Colorado Street branch of the Los Angeles Public Library because the institution shelved it in the adult section and I held borrowing privileges only in the children’s section. I first heard music by Wagner in 1970 or 71, when a quirky, German-born English teacher at Santa Monica High School, who went by the name of Gary Johnston, decided to enliven his summer “Myth and Folklore” course, or lighten the burden of his instruction, by providing us with mimeographed sheets of the libretto and playing for us on a portable stereo in the classroom excerpts from The Ring of the Nibelung.
The encounter with The War of the Worlds made a reader. A doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from UCLA (1990) and teaching career, such as it is, are late effects of the cause. The encounter with The Ring awakened a passionate interest in the Edda and the sagas, a curiosity for serious music, and an inclination to investigate into my mother’s Swedish ancestry, which (the last) eventuated in my first degree, a baccalaureate in Germanic and Scandinavian Languages, also from UCLA.
Other keynote events give articulation to my intellectual journey to adulthood. I omit to mention them, wishing not to bore my readers, except to say that they all have something in common with the two that I have just mentioned: Breaking into the immature consciousness, they put the child, or the adolescent, suddenly in touch with the past, with a tradition – and that bridging of temporal loci entailed the complementary experience that it lifted the initiate out of the present and thus also out of himself. The War of the Worlds is noticeably Edwardian; people take the train, ride in horse-carts, or walk; they read newspapers. Wagner’s Ring takes place in the time-before-time of myth, but its story has connections to events in the Fifth Century AD. Either way, the experience is foreign to someone whose milieu was the mid-Twentieth Century or is, as today, the incipient Twenty-First Century.
In both cases also, an older agent of transmission recommended to the younger person something that he regarded as meaningful and valuable – that the recommender implicitly (in the case of my brother) or explicitly (in the case of the eccentric English teacher) wished to preserve or conserve or pass along by making the representative of a new cohort amenably aware of it. Wells and Wagner made good gifts, intellectually; they proved themselves investments whose value has steadily increased over the years. Without such charitable gestures, every generation would begin again at the degree-zero of culture and history. Viewed in that light, contemporary education is not merely uncharitable; it is stingy and mean – its gift to the present is invariably the present, and when it mentions the past, it does so in language haughty and derisive.
I recently ran across a previous formulation of the same insight, to whose precedence and superior clarity I humbly defer. “It seems to me,” wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) in her chapter on “The Crisis in Education” (included in her book Between Past and Present, 1961), “that conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something – the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.” Arendt argues in a corollary to her “conservation” thesis that education functions “to preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants,” an idea with a good Platonic pedigree. Arendt defines the teacher’s mission as the responsibility “to mediate between the old and the new, so that his very profession requires of him an extraordinary respect for the past.” At the same time, education must constitute itself as something more than “simple, unreflective perseverance.” Otherwise education becomes indoctrination, the production-line of Mandarins for the staffing of the managerial class, or mere rote learning.
A good deal of contemporary education at all levels resembles just what Arendt describes, as indoctrinators prod students to internalize the correct opinions concerning the limited range of topics while guarding them against contamination by actual knowledge and rendering them incapable of independent judgment. The mandarins receive their training in the Ivy League while the rest receive instruction in the state colleges in how to defer to the righteous decrees of the mandarinate. Ideally, as Arendt urges, education should stand aloof from politics and social pressure rather than serving them. Politics and social pressure are corrupting forces, always totalitarian in their direction, always trying to crowd out everything else that constitutes the human world, so that nothing else constitutive of that world might compete with them. Politics and social pressure, belonging as they do to the isolated present, must stand in a hostile relation to history and tradition; respecting only themselves, they invariably revolt against “respect for the past.”
When Arendt writes of “the world” she means the continuum of tradition, that lore of human trial-and-error from which wisdom derives, that forms the object of the conscious curatorship that goes by the name of high culture. It is in this sense of “the world,” as the high-cultural image-of-existence, that the most oft-quoted passage from Arendt’s essay should be understood: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
One phrase in particular, the one concerning the question whether the current adult cohort will leave the members of current child-cohort “to their own devices,” has only increased in poignancy in the decades since “The Crisis of Education” first appeared. Politics and social pressure are now fully digitized and they make themselves universal through the ubiquitous “devices.” The necessary first reflection of the philosopher might well be the Cartesian formula, “I think therefore I am,” which indicates his reflective character. What then is the character of the person whose defining mental activity is not thinking, but tweeting? His character is assimilated to what I have elsewhere named post-literacy. He has become detached from the high-cultural continuum, detached also from history, whose medium is literature, and detached therefore from the possibilities of meaningful growth beyond the paltriness of youth-oriented popular entertainment. He might acquire vocational knowledge and skills, which he can apply to a job, but he will remain in his state of limitation and deprivation through the phase his merely chronological adulthood. He will suffer from a low level of verbal competency, from a restricted ability to reason, and from a concomitant vulnerability of manipulation through political propaganda and advertising.
Arendt writes of assuming responsibility for the inherited world, as the conservative or curatorial heart of education. A strikingly complementary notion occurs in the work of one of Arendt’s contemporaries who also wrote about the perils threatening education in the period of the Cold War. This writer saw in the self-styled progressive pedagogy of his day, which in his view had already begun to subvert traditional education, an essential “irresponsibility to the past and to the structure of reality in the present.” Indeed, he saw that the assumptions of this revolutionary coup-d’état in the classroom could never “serve as the foundations of culture because [they] are out of line with what is.” It was the case that “where [these assumptions] are allowed to provide foundations,” or to allege to provide foundations, “they imperil the whole structure.”
The other writer is Richard Weaver (1910 - 1963) and the lines quoted above come from the chapter on “The Gnostics of Education” in his book Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (published posthumously, 1964). Arendt was a woman of the Left; Weaver was a man of the Right. That their separate and independent commentaries on the same topic, appearing in book form within three years of one another, should be so convergent and complementary is striking. What explains it? A commitment to civilization, shared across the political frontier, might be the best answer to the question. Both Arendt and Weaver, in contrast to the advocates of avant-garde pedagogy whom they criticize, see education in its conservative or curatorial role as a civilizational, rather than as a social, institution. When the high-school English teacher in Santa Monica brought his portable stereo to the classroom and invited his students to listen to Wagner, he appealed to them in the name of civilization, not in the name of society. At the time, society’s idea of music was The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. When I challenge students to read and appreciate Tono-Bungay by Wells, I do so in the name of civilization, not of society, whose notion of literary challenge is non-existent.
Whereas Arendt expresses concern for the direction that education takes in a world, that of the late 1950s, dominated by technocratic convictions, Weaver frankly condemns “the progressive movement in education” for being a type of “apostasy,” and its advocates and practitioners for being “attackers and saboteurs” of actual education. Beginning with the same conception of education, Weaver departs from Arendt in his diagnosis of existing educational arrangements. Among their important traits, these progressives are epistemological nihilists who “do not have faith in the existence of knowledge” and whose real aim is “the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes.” The revolutionary educational regime is also, in Weaver’s scrutiny of it, utopian and therefore totalitarian. It proposes “to substitute a subjective wishfulness for an historical reality.” Weaver omits to quote directly from the prescriptions of the radical educators, preferring to distill them in the form of his own summary. It is easy, however, to find textual support for that summary. In John Dewey’s seminal “Pedagogic Creed” (1909), with its bizarre imitation of the Nicene Creed (Dewey [1859 - 1952] was self-declaredly atheist), the anti-intellectualism of the School of the Radiant Future becomes immediately evident.
According to Weaver, the object of progressive education “is not to teach knowledge”; it is rather, as the slogan says, to “teach students.” Dewey’s “Creed” fully supports Weaver’s characterization of progressive education just as it inaugurates the American chapter of Twentieth-Century pseudo-pedagogy. “I believe,” Dewey writes, “that we violate the child’s nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.” Never mind that “reading, writing, geography” and all that the etcetera also covers constitute Arendt’s “world,” that arduously accumulated representation of reality to which civilized people constantly refer in their negotiations in the market and in private. The world in its pre-existence must stand out of the way. Elsewhere, writes Dewey: “I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.” The anti-literacy implicit in these formulas is quite astonishing; it is also at the root of the post-literate condition prevailing a century later.
In another formula, Dewey anticipates and justifies Twentieth-Century political indoctrination: “I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.” Like good Chinese-Communist re-education leader, Dewey sees consciousness as “essentially motor or impulsive” and as “passive,” waiting to be remolded or, in Dewey’s unkillable phrase, “socialized.” Notice how the two formulas contradict one another. On the one hand, the child is supposed, creatively and originally, to produce the “images” through which he will learn. On the other hand, the child must submit willy-nilly to a regime of “socialization,” which implies external agency acting on a pliable object. One last quotation from the “Creed” will aid in understanding why Weaver refers to modern educators as “Gnostics,” which at first blanch is a rather odd attribution. While recalling his atheism, we let Dewey speak: “I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”
Yes, Dewey invoked “the prophet of the true God” and “the true kingdom of God.” How to explain such hyperboles and grotesqueries? When Weaver sought the origins of the counter-intuitive propositions that education-reformers propound, the result of his search startled him. The rhetorical temerity with which he introduces his discovery attests his surprise. Weaver’s sense that “progressive education is a wholesale apostasy, involving the abandonment of fundamental and long-held beliefs about man and the world” directed him to the examination of historical apostasies. Among these he found only one that seemed to him “of a nature and magnitude to warrant comparison” modern pedagogic Messianism: “The Gnosticism of the first and second centuries A.D.”
Weaver gleaned the basic facts about Gnosticism from various Patristic texts and from the relevant chapters of Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), which he footnotes. Pedagogic Messianism, like ancient Gnosis, regards Creation as botched and imperfect, with the duty falling to man, who is more Godlike than the Creator, to fulfill it. The world, as either Pedagogic Messianism or ancient Gnosis sees it, including the entire human or cultural achievement, is an affront to man from which, bearing the spark of true divinity within him, man must escape; either that or destroy it so as to create again, this time perfectly. The Gnostics’ view of “the natural blessedness of man” and their rejection of any requirement for man to be redeemed by external agency made them, as Weaver writes, “antiauthoritarian.” Weaver remarks that such a notion “has a parallel in the attempts of our ‘progressive’ educationists to base everything on psychology,” quite as Dewey did. Weaver concludes that “the progressive educationists of our time, while not Gnostics in the sense of historical descent, are Gnostics in their thinking.” Furthermore, “their gnosticism exhibits the same kind of delusion, fantasy, unreality, and unacceptable metaphysics which the Church Fathers… challenged and put an end to.”
It is possible to add to Weaver’s description of the Gnostic attitude. Gnosticism, wherever it manifests itself, is only antiauthoritarian as a starting gesture; it invariably presents itself, once it has gained lodgment in an institution, as absolutely and incontrovertibly authoritative in status. It knows what it knows (the Greek gnosis means access to knowledge not vouchsafed to others) and it tolerates as a claim to knowledge only its own claim; it regards all other claims with implacable hostility. The original Gnosticism founded itself parasitically in received tradition, which it declared false while nominating itself as true; that resentment is the substructure of all Gnosis, whether of the ancient or modern varieties, is abundantly evident. A totally antithetic resentment is moreover totally dependent on what it anathematizes or resents; it produces nothing original. By way of compensation, as St. Augustine already observed of the Manichaeans, Gnosticism orders itself in a mockery of the hierarchy that it rejects, endows itself with ranks and distinctions, and congratulates itself on its dazzling achievements. It invents a special language, impermeable to outsiders, which it marks its users as an elect – all of which describes the innumerable contemporary Schools of Education to the proverbial “T.”
The specific crisis of education that Arendt and Weaver saw in common from their noticeably different perspectives is merely an instance of a larger crisis, a crisis of civilization as a whole through which the West has been passing perhaps since the Reformation but at least since the Eighteenth Century. This crisis is a revolt of those for whom the pressure of civilization is too great to bear, for whom therefore civilization is an unbearable burden. For the ego-in-revolt even so benign a thing as literacy is unbearable so that to it (the ego) and for it, literacy (and along with it literature) must together be sacrificed. Pictures please these people so pictures they shall retain; they are pretty and the mental challenge in them disturbs no one. Only through such sacrifices, and through such recursions to culturally primitive forms, will what Dewey brazenly called “the kingdom of God” be realized. It is best to have a clear view of the phenomenon, as grim as the prospect is.
00:34 Publié dans Ecole/Education, Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : hannah arendt, richard weaver, éducation, école, philosophie, pédagogie | |
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par Henri Levavasseur
Ex: http://metapoinfos.hautetfort.com
Nous reproduisons ci-dessous un texte d'Henri Levavasseur, cueilli sur le site de l'Institut Iliade et consacré à la réhabilitation d'une éthique de la tenue, en ces temps de relâchement et d'ensauvagement. Docteur en histoire et linguiste, l'auteur est spécialiste des cultures germaniques anciennes et de la protohistoire de l’Europe septentrionale.
Ouvert par le cataclysme de la Première Guerre Mondiale, le cycle du « sombre vingtième-siècle » a plongé l’Europe dans une crise de civilisation sans précédent, l’amenant à secréter elle-même, à travers les idéaux faisandés d’un universalisme ennemi des nations et des peuples, le poison du « grand effacement » qui menace de détruire jusqu’aux racines de son génie.
Rien, pourtant, n’est encore joué : il appartient aux jeunes Européens de ne pas se résigner et d’écrire une autre histoire, en accord avec les immenses potentialités d’une culture multimillénaire. C’est en puisant dans leur longue mémoire, en procédant au « grand ressourcement », qu’ils apprendront à se connaître eux-mêmes, à donner sens et forme à leur destin, afin de trouver les ressources morales permettant de relever les défis qui les attendent. Confrontés à la dissolution des institutions et de la cité dans le magma d’une société multiculturelle, multi-ethnique et multi-conflictuelle, cette jeunesse devra se rassembler sur son propre sol en communautés pérennes, organiques et soudées.
De telles communautés ne reposent pas seulement sur des liens de solidarité mutuelle, mais aussi sur la valeur individuelle, c’est-à-dire sur la capacité de chacun à recevoir, incarner et transmettre l’héritage commun.
Cette valeur ne se mesure pas seulement à l’aune des capacités intellectuelles et physiques, ou du talent artistique — même si ces qualités sont éminemment précieuses. Ici intervient la notion d’éthique, associée à celle de tenue, qui jouent toutes deux un rôle fondamental dans la vision européenne du monde.
Comme l’écrivait Pierre Drieu La Rochelle : « on est plus fidèle à une attitude qu’à des idées » (Gilles, 1939).
Que convient-il donc d’entendre par « éthique de la tenue » ? Quelles sont les formes spécifiques que revêt cette éthique dans l’histoire de la civilisation européenne ? Quels sont enfin les modes d’expression possibles, permettant aujourd’hui d’incarner cette éthique ?
Qu’est-ce que l’« éthique de la tenue » ?
Les dictionnaires contemporains définissent volontiers l’éthique comme une réflexion philosophique fondamentale, sur laquelle la morale établit ses normes, ses limites et ses devoirs.
Dans cette optique, le détail des prescriptions morales, fondées sur la distinction du bien et du mal, est susceptible de varier d’une société ou d’une religion à l’autre, tandis que l’éthique en appelle à la raison pour poser des principes universels, par de-là les contingences historiques et les particularismes de chaque civilisation.
Cette conception de l’éthique, propre à la tradition philosophique des Lumières, a naturellement peu à voir avec celle dont nous allons nous entretenir.
Revenons à l’origine du mot. Étymologiquement, éthique et morale renvoient, dans le monde antique, aux mêmes notions. Le mot français « morale » dérive du latin moralis, qui provient lui-même de mos, « mœurs », « coutume », « usage » — le mos majorum, « coutume ancestrale », fondant la morale du citoyen romain de l’époque classique. Le mot « éthique » trouve son origine dans le grec « ἦθος », qui présente les principales significations suivantes :
- « séjour habituel, lieux familiers, demeure » (employé au pluriel) : ἦθεα désigne dans l’Iliade les pâturages des chevaux, tout comme νομός (« part », « portion de territoire », « pâturage », qui prend ensuite le sens de « coutume, loi, usage », le verbe νέμειν, « attribuer, répartir, régler selon la coutume ») ;
- « disposition de l’âme, manière d’être, caractère » : notamment la célèbre formule d’Héraclite ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (« la manière d’être, pour l’homme, est empreinte divine ») ; la joie, le courage, la noblesse sont par exemple des ἤθη, que les différents arts s’efforcent d’imiter ;
- « coutume, usage, mœurs » (cf. également la forme ἔθος, « coutume, usage ») ; dans sa Théogonie, Hésiode évoque les νόμοι et les ἦθεα des immortels, c’est-à-dire les lois et les usages des dieux. L’ethos d’un peuple trouve ses racines dans la tradition et repose donc sur une transmission.
Dans le domaine de l’art oratoire, ἦθος prend en outre un sens particulier : les Grecs distinguent en effet entre le logos, qui renvoie à la logique, le pathos, qui renvoie à la sensibilité, et l’éthos qui correspond à ce que nous nommons le « style ».
On saisit d’emblée que l’ethos ne renvoie pas chez les Grecs à une quelconque morale universelle, fondée sur l’opposition du bien et du mal : il s’agit au contraire d’un concept évoquant le caractère propre d’un être donné, en lien avec le lieu où il séjourne et la manière dont il se comporte habituellement — d’où le sens de « coutume », d’« usage », que l’on retrouve également dans le latin mos.
Le mot ἔθος est d’ailleurs étymologiquement apparenté à ἔθνος (« famille, clan, peuple »), ainsi qu’à ἔθω (« personne familière », « les siens »). Ce dernier terme, lui même apparenté au latin sodalis (« compagnon », « ami »), dérive d’une racine de indo-européenne *su̯ē̆dh- (« faire sien », « se poser soi-même »), que l’on retrouve dans le sanscrit svádhā (« pouvoir personnel », « autorité naturelle », « usage », « coutume »), le vieil-haut-allemand sito ou l’allemand Sitte, « coutume », « mœurs ».
Au sens étymologique, l’éthique désigne donc la manière d’être au monde en conformité avec l’usage, la coutume, la tradition en un lieu donné. Elle est la manière dont les êtres se tiennent face au monde, dans leur séjour habituel. On retrouve d’ailleurs ce lien entre les notions de coutume, de séjour et de tenue dans la proximité étymologique entre les termes français « habitation, habitude, habit », apparentés au latin habitus, « manière d’être ».
Très tôt, le mot « habit » est associé dans notre langue à l’idée de « maintien » de « tenue », au sens de « tenir sa place et son rang ».
Il est donc tout à fait pertinent de parler d’éthique de la tenue, dans la mesure où cette formule permet de définir une forme d’exigence tournée vers un idéal humain propre à notre civilisation, à nos mœurs, nos traditions et nos coutumes, indépendamment des formes universelles de morale, qu’elles soient d’essence religieuse ou laïque, c’est-à-dire fondées soit sur le dogme et la foi, soit sur une définition abstraite de la raison humaine, détachée de tout enracinement spécifique.
Comment définir l’éthique européenne de la tenue ? Comme toujours, à partir de l’étude des figures emblématiques que nous livre notre histoire depuis l’antiquité.
L’éthique de la tenue dans l’histoire européenne
Sans nier la valeur des exempla légués par la grande tradition classique, nous ne nous réfèrerons pas ici à telle ou telle anecdote édifiante, mais tenterons de saisir l’essence de notre tradition de manière à la fois plus générale et plus profonde, en évoquant quelques « figures archétypiques » qui dessinent les contours d’une éthique propre aux élites européennes.
Cette éthique renvoie à un certain idéal aristocratique, dont les traits principaux présentent une continuité étonnante depuis l’antiquité, en dépit des particularismes liés à tel ou tel peuple, et malgré les divers bouleversements sociaux, religieux et politiques qu’a pu connaitre l’Europe au fil des siècles.
Quatre types fondamentaux ont profondément marqué l’imaginaire européen, et constituent en quelque sorte les figures tutélaires auxquelles toute élite authentique doit se référer : le héros homérique, le citoyen romain, le chevalier médiéval, le gentilhomme.
Le héros homérique évolue dans un univers où le jugement porté sur l’homme ne repose pas sur la dualité du bien et du mal, en tant que critères moraux fondés sur la crainte de dieu, l’amour du prochain, la crainte du châtiment et l’espérance du salut éternel, mais sur la distinction du beau et du laid, de ce qui est honorable et de ce qui ne l’est pas, sur la nécessité de se montrer digne de l’estime de ses pairs, conformément à des règles de comportement fondées sur la coutume ancestrale.
L’idée de faute originelle est absente : le « bien » (ἀγαθόν, « ce qui bon ») est ce qui conforme au juste ordonnancement des choses et de l’univers (κόσμος, « ordre [de l’univers] », mais aussi « parure, ornement »). L’expression καλὸς κἀγαθός (« beau et bon »), à laquelle se conforme l’aristocratie athénienne, désigne un idéal de perfection humaine où la qualité du paraître rejoint celle de l’être : le philosophe Werner Jaeger évoque à ce propos, dans son ouvrage Paideia, consacré à la formation de l’homme grec, un « idéal chevaleresque de la personnalité humaine complète, harmonieuse d’âme et de corps, compétente au combat comme en paroles, dans la chanson comme dans l’action ».
A l’inverse, toute manifestation de démesure (ὕϐρις), chez les hommes comme chez les dieux, entraîne une catastrophe. Nous sommes ici aux antipodes de ce que le philosophe Heidegger décèle dans la modernité occidentale, à savoir la « métaphysique de l’illimité » — l’appétit du « toujours plus », auquel nous devons opposer la logique du « toujours mieux ».
Pour revenir aux textes d’Homère, « toute transgression de l’harmonie, de la mesure, de la conduite droite, se paie au prix fort, ainsi la funeste colère d’Achille, prétexte de l’Iliade. Homère ignore l’intériorisation d’une morale fondée sur la faute et la culpabilité. (…) Il met en action des vertus et leurs contraires, le courage et la lâcheté, l’honneur et la bassesse, la magnanimité et la rancune, la loyauté et la traîtrise. Il montre aussi des caractères, sans rien dissimuler de leurs contradictions, Hector et sa lucidité, Pénélope et sa féminité, Achille et sa vaillance, Ulysse et son habilité, Nestor et sa raison, Pâris et sa faiblesse, Hélène et son extrême sensualité. Les poèmes homériques ne parlent pas en formules conceptuelles ou dogmatiques. Ils donnent pourtant des réponses claires aux questions de la vie et de la mort » (D. Venner, Histoire et tradition des Européens, pp. 108–109).
Héritière du monde grec, mais aussi d’une tradition propre, fondée en grande partie sur un héritage indo-européen, la civilisation romaine nous a également légué un idéal aristocratique d’une grande valeur : celui du citoyen de l’époque classique. Ce dernier apparait constamment soucieux de sa dignitas, aussi bien personnelle que familiale. Pour la préserver, il est prêt à aller jusqu’au sacrifice de sa vie : la mort volontaire est à Rome un sort toujours préférable au déshonneur.
La dignitas s’enracine dans la virtus, non pas la vertu au sens chrétien du terme, mais la qualité qui distingue l’homme, vir : l’énergie morale, la force d’âme, la maîtrise de soi (gravitas), qui se situe au cœur de l’enseignement des Stoïciens.
Ces qualités sont indissociables de la pietas, c’est-à-dire du respect de la tradition (mos majorum), du devoir rendu aux dieux et à la famille, en particulier au père, devoirs auxquels s’ajoute le service de l’état. Avec la virtus, la clementia et la iustitia, la pietas est l’une des quatre vertus impériales reconnues à Auguste sur l’inscription du bouclier d’or (clipeus aureus) placé en son honneur dans la Curia Iulia. Comme chez les Grecs, l’idéal du citoyen romain se fonde sur l’unité de l’être et du paraître. C’est le sens de la formule de Juvénal : mens sana in corpore sano.
Scipion fait graver sur son tombeau la formule suivante « Ma vie a enrichi les vertus de ma race. J’ai engendré des enfants, j’ai cherché à égaler les exploits de mon père. J’ai mérité la louange de mes ancêtres, qui se sont réjouis de me voir né pour leur gloire. Ma dignitas a rendu fameuse ma race » (cité par D. Venner, id., p. 136).
La chevalerie médiévale reprend une partie de cet héritage, associé certes aux vertus chrétiennes, mais également au vieil idéal martial et à la conception de l’honneur répandus dans les sociétés celtiques et germaniques. Dominique Venner (id., pp. 178–179) qualifie l’éthique chevaleresque d’« éthique incarnée » : « prouesse, largesse et loyauté sont ses attributs que l’honneur résume. L’élégance de l’âme commande d’être vaillant jusqu’à la témérité ».
L’exigence de fidélité à la parole donnée pousse à tenir la foi jurée jusqu’à la mort, attitude magnifiquement exaltée dans la Chanson des Nibelungen, de telle sorte que l’idéal du sacrifice héroïque, présent dans toute la tradition épique du monde germanique, a sans doute contribué de façon décisive à l’acceptation du christianisme par les peuples du Barbaricum. Le poème saxon Heliand décrit d’ailleurs le Christ et ses disciples comme un prince germanique entourés de ses vassaux, tandis que les noces de Cana apparaissent comme un festin guerrier.
A l’époque moderne, la figure du gentilhomme représente la synthèse et l’aboutissement de ces divers héritages, à travers l’équilibre entre les talents de l’homme d’épée et de l’homme d’esprit, alliant élégance morale, distinction, courage et maîtrise de soi. Tel est l’idéal, largement partagé à travers toute l’Europe, que s’efforcent d’atteindre le Junker prussien et le gentleman britannique.
Une certaine forme de stoïcisme propre à l’homme d’action est commune aux quatre types que nous venons d’évoquer.
Est-ce à dire, cependant, que l’éthique de la tenue se trouve réservée à une élite sociale fondée exclusivement sur des règles de transmission héréditaire ? Si cette dernière a naturellement toujours joué un rôle central, il convient de rappeler l’importance d’autres formes d’institutions méritocratiques, reposant sur la notion de compagnonnage guerrier. Les concepts de noblesse et de chevalerie, par exemple, ne sont pas strictement identiques.
Comme le souligne Dominique Venner (Un samouraï d’Occident, p. 294), nos racines « ne sont pas seulement celles de l’hérédité, auxquelles on peut être infidèle, ce sont également celles de l’esprit, c’est-à-dire de la tradition qu’il appartient à chacun de se réapproprier ».
Quelles leçons concrètes la jeunesse européenne de notre temps, déterminée à s’engager sur la même voie, peut-elle toutefois recueillir de ces exemples si éloignés de notre quotidien ? En apparence, les modèles que nous venons d’évoquer semblent dépassés pour plusieurs raisons : l’environnement social, culturel et politique traditionnel, nécessaire à l’éducation d’une véritable élite, a aujourd’hui été en grande partie balayé ; la noblesse a cessé d’être une institution, d’assurer un rôle politique central et de « donner le ton » ; les valeurs dominantes sont au contraire celles de l’hédonisme individualiste et de l’égalitarisme, même si les inégalités économiques et sociales sont par ailleurs de plus en plus criantes ; la notion d’élite est largement dépréciée, ou se trouve associée à des types humains opposés à ceux de l’ancienne aristocratie européenne ; l’élitisme est même perçu comme un travers ; enfin, un grand nombre de ceux qui sont en mesure de réclamer, en tant qu’héritiers par le sang et par le nom, le patrimoine spirituel de l’ancienne aristocratie européenne, adoptent parfois des comportements assez éloignés des valeurs de leurs aïeux.
Médiocrité et vulgarité ne constituent pas nécessairement des tares nouvelles, propres à notre époque, mais elles font aujourd’hui l’objet d’une complaisance sans précédent, qui trouve son expression la plus achevée dans les « modèles » imposés aux populations sidérées par les loisirs de masse et le matraquage publicitaire : il s’agit d’une véritable inversion des canons esthétiques et éthiques. L’idéal aristocratique n’a pas nécessairement disparu, mais il ne structure plus la société.
Pourtant, chacun de nous peut encore choisir d’incarner une part de l’éthique aristocratique européenne, en la déclinant — au féminin comme au masculin — dans des situations et des engagements très divers.
Cette possibilité revêt une portée qui dépasse les seuls destins individuels. Dominique Venner le rappelle dans le Samouraï d’Occident (p. 296) : « Les ébranlements de notre temps ont des causes qui excèdent les seuls forces de la politique ou des réformes sociales. Il ne suffit pas de modifier des lois ou de remplacer un ministre par un autre pour construire de l’ordre là où sévit le chaos. Pour changer les comportements (…), il faut réformer les esprits, une tâche à toujours recommencer ».
L’éthique de la tenue est l’expression individuelle et communautaire de cette réforme des esprits, prélude au nécessaire réveil de l’Europe en dormition. Elle est une voie d’excellence, dans laquelle la jeunesse européenne doit aujourd’hui réapprendre à s’engager.
L’éthique de la tenue pour les Européens d’aujourd’hui
S’il peut paraître difficile d’établir les critères objectifs de la « tenue », chacun sait instinctivement définir ce qu’il convient de rejeter : le débraillé, la vulgarité, le laisser-aller. Ce dernier peut prendre des formes diverses : laisser-aller du corps (avachissement ou exhibition vulgaire), laisser-aller du vêtement (le modèle « united colors », universel et « unisexe »), laisser-aller du comportement et de l’attitude (manque de maîtrise de soi, oubli des règles élémentaires de la courtoisie et du savoir-vivre), laisser-aller du langage (outrance, approximation ou vulgarité), laisser-aller de l’esprit et de l’intellect (paresse intellectuelle, conformisme), laisser-aller de l’âme (perte du sens de l’honneur et de la parole donnée, de la fidélité à ses principes et à son héritage, absence de courage).
A toutes ces formes d’abandon de soi-même, il faut précisément opposer la notion de « tenue ». Celle-ci constitue une ascèse — ce qui n’implique pas nécessairement une vie « ascétique » : au-delà de son acception religieuse, passée dans le vocabulaire chrétien par l’intermédiaire du latin chrétien asceta, le mot est apparenté au grec ἄσκησις (« exercice »), qui désigne à l’origine divers types d’activités artistiques ou physiques, en particulier l’athlétisme. L’ascèse est donc avant tout une discipline.
L’éthique de la tenue se fonde en définitive sur la volonté de vivre en européen, conformément à notre tradition. Fidèle à la « longue mémoire européenne », Dominique Venner nous rappelle à ce propos que « l’esthétique fonde l’éthique » (Un samouraï d’Occident, 2013), et nous incite à nous référer à ce qu’il nomme la « triade homérique » : « la nature comme socle, l’excellence comme but, la beauté comme horizon ».
La nature comme socle, c’est non seulement respecter l’ordre naturel et ses grands équilibres, d’un point de vue aussi bien écologique qu’anthropologique (à travers la polarité du masculin et du féminin), mais également assumer et transmettre les caractères spécifiques de notre patrimoine héréditaire européen. C’est savoir s’immerger régulièrement dans la splendeur de nos paysages et s’attacher à la dimension communautaire de nos traditions à travers la célébration des fêtes calendaires traditionnelles, associées au cycle annuel.
L’excellence comme but, c’est conserver le souci de l’élégance morale, pratiquer une certaine retenue et cultiver l’exigence envers soi-même ; c’est s’efforcer à l’adéquation de la pensée et de l’action, de l’être et du paraître, tendre à se dépasser plus qu’à rechercher son « épanouissement personnel » dans une perspective strictement hédoniste, se soumettre à une discipline librement consentie plus que de revendiquer une liberté totale ; c’est se savoir « maillon d’une chaîne », servir plus que se servir, se montrer exigeant dans le choix de ses pairs tout en étant capable d’affronter la solitude ; enfin et surtout, c’est transmettre cet ensemble d’exigences par l’exemple, en ne se reniant jamais soi-même au profit de la facilité, du confort ou de la sécurité. Le plus sûr moyen d’y parvenir est de construire ce que Dominique Venner appelle notre « citadelle intérieure », par la méditation quotidienne, la lecture, mais aussi la discipline du corps (notamment à travers la pratique sportive, afin d’entretenir le sens de l’effort et le goût de l’action).
La beauté comme horizon, c’est — à défaut de pouvoir « ré-enchanter » le monde par ses seules forces lorsque les dieux paraissent l’avoir déserté — ne jamais laisser la laideur avoir prise sur soi, se soustraire autant que possible à son emprise (en se gardant de l’accoutumance aux distractions « à la mode », alliant vulgarité, bêtise et inversion des valeurs) ; c’est rechercher au contraire toutes les occasions de nourrir son esprit par la contemplation du beau ; c’est aussi manifester, à la mesure de ses moyens, ce souci de la beauté et de l’élégance jusque dans les moindres occasions du quotidien, dans les objets qui nous entourent, la décoration de notre habitat comme dans la tenue vestimentaire, en conformité avec notre esthétique européenne. Tel est le plus sûr moyen de rayonner, d’éveiller et de transmettre, aux enfants comme aux adultes. L’éthique de la tenue est aussi une esthétique : se « tenir », c’est donner forme à son existence.
Dominique Venner a résumé l’ensemble de ces préceptes dans le Samouraï d’Occident (pp. 292, 296–297) : « Dans leur diversité, les hommes n’existent que par ce qui les distingue, clans, peuples, nations, cultures, civilisations, et non par ce qu’ils ont superficiellement en commun. Seule leur animalité est universelle (…). Quelle que soit votre action, votre priorité doit être de cultiver en vous, chaque jour, comme une invocation inaugurale, une foi indestructible dans la permanence de la tradition européenne ».
L’éthique de la tenue, c’est vivre en Européen !
Henri Levavasseur (Institut Iliade, 28 février 2018)
00:36 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, esthétique, tenue, style | |
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09:34 Publié dans Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : définitions, philosophie, philosophie politique, christianisme, chrétienté, catholicisme, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | |
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par Nicolas Bonnal
Ex; http://www.dedefensa.org
Tout le monde a oublié Henri Lefebvre et je pensais que finalement il vaut mieux être diabolisé, dans ce pays de Javert, de flics de la pensée, qu’oublié. Tous les bons penseurs, de gauche ou marxistes, sont oubliés quand les réactionnaires, fascistes, antisémites, nazis sont constamment rappelés à notre bonne vindicte. Se rappeler comment on parle de Céline, Barrès, Maurras ces jours-ci… même quand ils disent la même chose qu’Henri Lefebvre ou Karl Marx (oui je sais, cent millions de morts communistes, ce n’est pas comme le capitalisme, les démocraties ou les Américains qui n’ont jamais tué personne, Dresde et Hiroshima étant transmuées en couveuses par la doxa historique).
Un peu de Philippe Muray pour comprendre tout cela – cet oubli ou cette diabolisation de tout le monde :
« Ce magma, pour avoir encore une ombre de définition, ne peut plus compter que sur ses ennemis, mais il est obligé de les inventer, tant la terreur naturelle qu’il répand autour de lui a rapidement anéanti toute opposition comme toute mémoire. »
J’avais découvert Henri Lefebvre grâce à Guy Debord qui, lui, est diabolisé pour théorie de la conspiration maintenant ! Sociologue et philosophe, membre du PCF, Lefebvre a attaqué la vie quotidienne, la vie ordinaire après la Guerre, premier marxiste-communiste à prendre en compte la médiocrité de la vie moderne à la même époque qu’Henri de man (je sais, merci, fasciste-nazi-réac-technocrate vichyste etc.). Le plus fort est que Lefebvre attaque le modèle soviétique qui débouchait à la même époque sur le même style de vie un peu nul, les grands ensembles, le métro-boulot-dodo, le cinoche…
J’ai déjà évoqué Henri de Man dans mon livre sur la Fin de l’Histoire. Un bel extrait bien guénonien sans le vouloir :
« Tous les habitants de ces maisons particulières écoutaient en même temps la même retransmission. Je fus pris de cette angoisse … Aujourd'hui ce sont les informations qui jouent ce rôle par la manière dont elles sont choisies et présentées, par la répétition constante des mêmes formules et surtout par la force suggestive concentrée dans les titres et les manchettes. »
C’est dans l’ère des masses. On peut rajouter ce peu affriolant passage :
« L'expression sociologique de cette vérité est le sentiment de nullité qui s'empare de l'homme d'aujourd'hui lorsqu'il comprend quelle est sa solitude, son abandon, son impuissance en présence des forces anonymes qui poussent l'énorme machine sociale vers un but inconnu. Déracinés, déshumanisés, dispersés, les hommes de notre époque se trouvent, comme la terre dans l'univers copernicien, arrachés à leur axe et, de ce fait, privés de leur équilibre. »
Lefebvre dans un livre parfois ennuyeux et vieilli hélas (le jargon marxiste des sixties…) dénonce aussi cet avènement guénonien de l’homme du règne de la quantité. Il se moque des réactionnaires, mais il est bien obligé de penser comme eux (et eux ne seront pas oubliés, lui oui !) :
« Le pittoresque disparaît avec une rapidité qui n’alimente que trop bien les déclarations et les lamentations des réactionnaires…. »
Ici deux remarques, Herr professeur : un, le « pittoresque » comme vous dites c’est la réalité du paysage ancestral, traditionnel saboté, pollué et remplacé, ou recyclé en cuvette pour touristes sous forme de « vieille ville ». Deux, les chrétiens révoltés qui dénoncent cette involution dès le dix-neuvième ne sont pas des réacs sociologiques, pas plus que William Morris ou Chesterton ensuite.
Henri Lefebvre poursuit, cette fois magnifiquement :
« Là où les peuples se libèrent convulsivement des vieilles oppressions (nota : les oppressions coloniales n’étaient pas vieilles et furent remplacées par des oppressions bureaucratiques ou staliniennes pires encore, lisez Jacob Burckhardt), ils sacrifient certaines formes de vie qui eurent longtemps grandeur – et beauté. »
Et là il enfonce le clou (visitez les villes industrielles marxistes pour vous en convaincre :
« Les pays attardés qui avancent produisent la laideur, la platitude, la médiocrité comme un progrès. Et les pays avancés qui ont connu toutes les grandeurs de l’histoire produisent la platitude comme une inévitable prolifération. »
Les pays comme la Chine qui ont renoncé au marxisme orthodoxe aujourd’hui avec un milliard de masques sur la gueule, de l’eau polluée pour 200 millions de personnes et des tours à n’en plus finir à vingt mille du mètre. Cherchez alors le progrès depuis Marco Polo…
Matérialiste, Lefebvre évoque ensuite l’appauvrissement du quotidien, la fin des fêtes païennes-folkloriques (j’ai évoqué ce curieux retour du refoulé dans mon livre sur le folklore slave et le cinéma soviétique) et il regrette même son église enracinée d’antan (s’il voyait aujourd’hui ce que Bergoglio et les conciliaires en ont fait…). C’est la fameuse apostrophe de Lefebvre à son Eglise :
« Eglise, sainte Eglise, après avoir échappé à ton emprise, pendant longtemps je me suis demandé d’où te venait ta puissance. »
Eh oui cette magie des siècles enracinés eut la vie dure.
Je vous laisse découvrir cet auteur et ce livre car je n’ai pas la force d’en écrire plus ; lui non plus n’est pas arrivé avec le panier à solutions rempli…
Penseur du crépuscule marxiste, Lefebvre m’envoûte comme son église parfois. Comme disait le penseur grec marxiste Kostas Papaioannou, « le capitalisme c’est l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme, et le marxisme le contraire » ! De quoi relire une petite révolte contre le monde moderne !
La révolution ? Le grand chambardement ? Sous les pavés la plage privatisée par les collègues de Cohn-Bendit ? Je laisserai conclure Henri Lefebvre :
« En 1917 comme en 1789, les révolutionnaires crurent entrer de plain-pied dans une autre monde, entièrement nouveau. Ils passaient du despotisme à la liberté, du capitalisme au communisme. A leur signal la vie allait changer comme un décor de théâtre. Aujourd’hui, nous savons que la vie n’est jamais simple. »
Et comme je disais que nos cathos réacs étaient les plus forts :
« La révolution… crée le genre d’homme qui lui sont nécessaires, elle développe cette race nouvelle, la nourrit d'abord en secret dans son sein, puis la produit au grand jour à mesure qu'elle prend des forces, la pousse, la case, la protège, lui assure la victoire sur tous les autres types sociaux. L'homme impersonnel, l’homme en soi, dont rêvaient les idéologues de 1789, est venu au monde : il se multiplie sous nos yeux, il n'y en aura bientôt plus d’autre ; c'est le rond-de-cuir incolore, juste assez instruit pour être « philosophe », juste assez actif pour être intrigant, bon à tout, parce que partout on peut obéir à un mot d'ordre, toucher un traitement et ne rien faire – fonctionnaire du gouvernement officiel - ou mieux, esclave du gouvernement officieux, de cette immense administration secrète qui a peut-être plus d'agents et noircit plus de paperasses que l'autre. »
C’était l’appel de Cochin, le vrai…
Henri Lefebvre – critique de la vie quotidienne, éditions de l’Arche
Henri de Man – L’ère des masses
René Guénon – la crise du monde moderne ; le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps
Chesterton – Orthodoxie ; hérétiques (Gutenberg.org)
Cochin – La révolution et la libre pensée
Nicolas Bonnal – Chroniques sur la fin de l’histoire ; le cinéma soviétique et le folklore slave ; Céline, le pacifiste enragé
Julius Evola – révolte contre le monde moderne
14:57 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : nicolas bonnal, philosophie, marxisme, henri lefebvre, vie quotidienne, philosophie politique, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques | |
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15:08 Publié dans Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : utilitarisme, philosophie politique, philosophie, théorie politique, yvan blot, politologie, sciences politiques | |
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Multipolarity and polycentricity
Ex: https://www.geopolitica.ru
The very term “multipolarity” is of American (Anglo-Saxon) origin, and in the third chapter we examined similar concepts that have been developed in other countries. As various scholars have indicated, varying interpretations of multipolarity have provoked certain conceptual dilemmas. For instance, a report on long-term global trends prepared by the Zurich Center for Security Studies in 2012 noted that:
The advantage of ‘multipolarity’ is that it accounts for the ongoing diffusion of power that extends beyond uni-, bi-, or- tripolarity. But the problem with the term is that it suggests a degree of autonomy and separateness of each ‘pole’ that fails to do justice to the interconnections and complexities of a globalised world. The term also conceals that rising powers are still willing to work within the Westernshaped world economic system, at least to some extent. This is why the current state of play may be better described as ‘polycentric’. Unlike ‘multipolarity’, the notion of ‘polycentricism’ says nothing about how the different centres of power relate to each other. Just as importantly, it does not elicit connotations with the famous but ill-fated multipolar system in Europe prior to 1914 that initially provided for regular great power consultation, but eventually ended in all-out war. The prospects for stable order and effective global governance are not good today. Yet, military confrontation between the great powers is not a likely scenario either, as the emerging polycentric system is tied together in ways that render a degree of international cooperation all but indispensable.
The Swiss scholars involved in this summation approached the issue from the standpoint of reviewing security issues in a globalized world and tried to find an adequate expression for contemporary trends. However, there also exist purely technical approaches and ideological theories which employ the term “polycentric”.
The concept of “polycentricity” had been used before to describe the functioning of complex economic subjects. Accordingly, if management theories are springboards for geopolitical practice, then this model’s basic elaborations already exist. In a literal sense, the term “polycentric” suggests some kind of spatial unit with several centers. However, the term does not specify what kind of centers are in question, hence the obvious need to review various concepts and starting points before discussing polycentrism.
Four levels of this concept can be discussed in the context of political-administrative approaches. The analytical-descriptive level is needed for describing, measuring, and characterizing the current state of a spatial object by means of precisely determining how long a country or capital can be “polycentric.” Secondly, this concept can be understood in a normative sense which might help, for example, in reorganizing the spatial configuration of an object, i.e., either to promote/create polycentrism or support/utilize an existing polycentric structure. Thirdly, when it comes to spatial entities, it is necessary to specify their spatial scale, i.e., at the city level, city-region, mega-regional level, or even on the national or transnational levels. Upon closer examination, the concept of polycentrism concept thus challenges our understanding of centers in urban areas, since such can concern either their roles and functional ties (relations) or their concrete morphological forms (the structure of urban fabric). This differentiation between the functional and morphological understandings of polycentrism constitutes the fourth dimension.
In the contemporary situation which features the presence of city-states and megalopoli that can easily compete with some states in the classical understanding in the most varied criteria (number of residents and their ethnic identity, length of external borders, domestic GDP, taxes, industry, transport hubs, etc.), such an approach seems wholly appropriate for more articulated geopolitical analysis. Moreover, in the framework of federal models of state governance, polycentrism serves as a marker of complex relations between all administrative centers. Regional cooperation also fits into this model since it allows subjects to “escape” mandatory compliance with a single regulator, such as in the face of a political capital, and cooperate with other subjects (including foreign ones) within a certain space.
To some extent, the idea of polycentrism is reflected in offshore zones as well. While offshores can act as “black holes” for the economies of sovereign states, on the other hand, they can also be free economic zones removing various trade barriers clearly within the framework of the operator’s economic sovereignty.
It should also be noted that the theory of polycentrism is also well known in the form of the ideological contribution of the Italian community Palmiro Togliatti as an understanding of the relative characteristics of the working conditions facing communist parties in different countries following the de-Stalinization process in the Soviet Union in 1956. What if one were to apply such an analysis to other parties and movements? For example, in comparing Eurosceptics in the EU and the conglomerate of movements in African and Asian countries associated with Islam? Another fruitful endeavor from this perspective could be evaluating illiberal democracies and populist regimes in various parties of the world as well as monarchical regimes, a great variety of which still exist ranging from the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy to the hereditary autocracy of Saudi Arabia which appeared relatively recently compared to other dynastic forms of rule. Let us also note that since Togliatti the term “polycentrism” has become popular in political science, urban planning, logistics, sociology, and as an expression for unity in diversity.
In 1969, international relations and globalization expert Howard V. Perlmutter proposed the conceptual model of EPG, or Ethnocentrism-Polycentrism-Geocentrism, which he subsequently expanded with his colleague David A Heenan to include Regionalism. This model, famously known by the acronym EPRG, remains essential in international management and human resources. This theory posits that polycentrism, unlike ethnocentrism, regionalism, and geocentrism, is based on political orientation, albeit through the prism of controlling commodity-monetary flows, human resources, and labor. In this case, polycentrism can be defined as a host country’s orientation reflecting goals and objectives in relation to various management strategies and planning procedures in international operations. In this approach, polycentrism is in one way or another connected to issues of management and control.
However, insofar as forms of political control can differ, this inevitably leads to the understanding of a multiplicity of political systems and automatically rejects the monopoly of liberal parliamentarism imposed by the West as the only acceptable political system. Extending this approach, we can see that the notion of polycentrism, in addition to connoting management, is contiguous to theories of law, state governance, and administration. Canada for instance has included polycentricity in its administrative law and specifically refers to a “polycentric issue” as “one which involves a large number of interlocking and interacting interests and considerations.” For example, one of Canada’s official documents reads: “While judicial procedure is premised on a bipolar opposition of parties, interests, and factual discovery, some problems require the consideration of numerous interests simultaneously, and the promulgation of solutions which concurrently balance benefits and costs for many different parties. Where an administrative structure more closely resembles this model, courts will exercise restraint.”
Polycentric law became world-famous thanks to Professor Tom Bell who, as a student at the University of Chicago’s law faculty, wrote a book entitled Polycentric Law in which he noted that other authors use phrases such as “de-monopolized law” to describe polycentric alternatives.
Bell outlined traditional customary law (also known as consolamentum law) before the establishment of states and in accordance with the works of Friedrich A. Hayek, Bruce L. Benson, and David D. Friedman. Bell mentioned the customary law of the Anglo-Saxons, ecclesiastical law, guild law, and trade law as examples of polycentric law. On this note, he suggests that customary and statutory law have co-existed throughout history, an example being Roman law being applied to Romans throughout the Roman Empire at the same time as indigenous peoples’ legal systems remained permitted for non-Romans.
Polycentric theory has also attracted the interest of market researchers, especially public economists. Rather paradoxically, it is from none other than ideas of a polycentric market that a number of Western scholars came to the conclusion that “Polycentricity can be utilized as a conceptual framework for drawing inspiration not only from the market but also from democracy or any other complex system incorporating the simultaneous functioning of multiple centers of governance and decision making with different interests, perspectives, and values.” In our opinion, it is very important that namely these three categories - interests, perspectives, and values - were distinguished. “Interests” as a concept is related to the realist school and paradigm in international relations, while “perspectives” suggests some kind of teleology, i.e., a goal-setting actor, and “values” are associated with the core of strategic culture or what has commonly been called the “national idea,” “cultural-historical traditions”, or irrational motives in the collective behavior of a people. For a complex society inhabited by several ethnic groups and where citizens identify with several religious confessions, or where social class differences have been preserved (to some extent they continue to exist in all types of societies, including in both the US and North Korea, but are often portrayed as between professional specialization or peculiarities of local stratification), a polycentric system appears to be a natural necessity for genuinely democratic procedures. In this context, the ability of groups to resolve their own problems on the basis of options institutionally included in the mode of self-government is fundamental to the notion of polycentrism.
Only relatively recently has polycentrism come to be used as an anti-liberal or anti-capitalist platform. In 2006, following the summit of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Michael Blanding from The Nation illustrated a confrontation between “unicentrism” characterized by imperial, neo-liberal, and neo-conservative economic and political theories and institutions, and people searching for an alternative, or adherents of “polycentrism.” As a point of interest, the World Social Forum itself was held in a genuinely polycentric format as it was held not only in Venezuela, but in parallel also in Mali and Pakistan. Although the forum mainly involved left socialists, including a large Trotskyist lobby (which is characteristic of the anti-globalist movement as a whole), the overall critique of neoliberalism and transnational corporations voiced at the forum also relied on rhetoric on the rights of peoples, social responsibility, and the search for a political alternative. At the time, this was manifested in Latin America in the Bolivarian Revolution with its emphasis on indigenism, solidarity, and anti-Americanism.
It should be noted that Russia’s political establishment also not uncommonly uses the word “polycentricity” - sometimes as a synonym for multipolarity, but also as a special, more “peace-loving” trend in global politics insofar as “polarity presumes the confrontation of poles and their binary opposition.” Meanwhile, Russian scholars recognize that comparing the emerging polycentric world order to historical examples of polycentricity is difficult. Besides the aspect of deep interdependence, the polycentricity of the early 21st century possesses a number of different, important peculiarities. These differences include global asymmetry insofar as the US still boasts overwhelming superiority in a number of fields, and a multi-level character in which there exist: (1) a military-diplomatic dimension of global politics with the evolution of quickly developing giant states; (2) an economic dimension with the growing role of transnational actors; (3) global demographic shifts; (4) a specific space representing a domain of symbols, ideals, and cultural codes and their deconstructions; and (5) a geopolitical and geo-economic level.
Here it is necessary to note that the very term “polycentricity” in itself harbors some interesting connotations. Despite being translated to mean “many”, the first part (“poly-“) etymologically refers to both “pole” and “polis” (all three words are of Ancient Greek origin), and the second part presupposes the existence of centers in the context of international politics, i.e., states or a group of states which can influence the dynamic of international relations.
In his Parmenides, Martin Heidegger contributed an interesting remark in regards to the Greek term “polis”, which once again confirms the importance and necessity of serious etymological analysis. By virtue of its profundity, we shall reproduce this quote in full:
Πόλις is the πόλоς, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way. The pole is the place around which all beings turn and precisely in such a way that in the domain of this place beings show their turning and their conditions. The pole, as this place, lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition. The pole does not produce and does not create beings in their Being, but as pole it is the abode of the unconsciousness of beings as a whole. The πόλις is the essence of the place [Ort], or, as we say, it is the settlement (Ort-schaft) of the historical dwelling of Greek humanity. Because the πόλις lets the totality of beings come in this or that way into the unconcealedness of its condition, the πόλις is therefore essentially related to the Being of beings. Between πόλις and “Being” there is a primordial relation.
Heidegger thus concludes that “polis” is not a city, state, nor a combination of the two, but the place of the history of the Greeks, the focus of their essence, and that there is a direct link between πόλις and ἀλήθεια (this Greek word is usually translated into Russian as “truth”) Thus, in order to capture polycentricity, one needs to search for the foci and distribution areas of the essence of the numerous peoples of our planet. Here we can once again mention strategic cultures and their cores.
Translated from Russian by Jafe Arnold.
Multipolarity is the best future for Europe
Iranian view on Multipolarity in the New World
South America In The Emerging Multipolar World Order
Prisoners of Friedman and Brzezinski: Neoliberal America vs. Multipolarity
18:44 Publié dans Définitions, Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : leonid savin, polycentricité, multipolarité, géopolitique, philosophie, philosophie politique, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, définition | |
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Reconnu pour son ouvrage La psychologie des foules prophétisant dès 1895 les mécanismes psychologiques sur lesquels se sont appuyés les régimes totalitaires du XXe siècle et les démocraties modernes, Gustave Le Bon s’est aussi intéressé aux racines historiques des psychologies collectives. Médecin et psychologue mais également anthropologue passionné par les civilisations orientales, ce penseur français était convaincu que chaque peuple est doté d’une âme propre, garante du maintien de son identité collective à travers les siècles.
Gustave Le Bon affirme que l’évolution des institutions politiques, des religions ou des idéologies n’est qu’un leurre. Malgré des changements superficiels, une même âme collective continuerait à s’exprimer sous des formes différentes. Farouche opposant du socialisme de son époque, Gustave Le Bon ne croit pas pour autant au rôle de l’individu dans l’histoire. Il conçoit les peuples comme des corps supérieurs et autonomes dont les cellules constituantes sont les individus. La courte existence de chacun s’inscrit par conséquent dans une vie collective beaucoup plus longue. L’âme d’un peuple est le résultat d’une longue sédimentation héréditaire et d’une accumulation d’habitudes ayant abouti à l’existence d’un « réseau de traditions, d’idées, de sentiments, de croyances, de modes de penser communs » en dépit d’une apparente diversité qui subsiste bien sûr entre les individus d’un même peuple. Ces éléments constituent la synthèse du passé d’un peuple et l’héritage de tous ses ancêtres : « infiniment plus nombreux que les vivants, les morts sont aussi infiniment plus puissants qu’eux » (lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples). L’individu est donc infiniment redevable de ses ancêtres et de ceux de son peuple.
Le psychologue français prétend que les événements historiques ne sont capables de modifier que les qualités accessoires d’un peuple mais n’altèrent pas son âme. Même soumis à des événements violents et de grande envergure, les peuples retournent inéluctablement à leurs aspirations profondes « comme la surface d’un lac après un orage ». Tant qu’elles ne s’attaquent pas à la substance même d’un peuple, les ruptures historiques ne sont donc que superficielles. Le système français jacobin s’est par exemple révélé tout autant centralisateur, autoritaire et despotique que la monarchie française qu’il prétendait détruire. Pour Gustave Le Bon, les institutions de la Révolution française se conformaient à la réalité de l’âme du peuple français, peuple majoritairement latin favorable à l’absorption de l’individu par l’état. Peuple également enclin à rechercher l’homme providentiel à qui se soumettre et que Napoléon incarna. D’une toute autre mentalité, le peuple anglais a construit son âme autour de l’amour de la liberté. Gustave Le Bon rappelle comment ce peuple anglais a refusé à travers les siècles les dominations et ingérences étrangères avec les rejets successifs du droit romain et de l’Eglise catholique. Ce goût de l’indépendance et du particularisme résonne jusqu’à nos jours à travers les relations conflictuelles qu’entretient l’Angleterre avec le continent européen. Ces réflexions amènent Le Bon à juger sévèrement l’idéal colonial de son temps en ce qu’il prône l’imposition d’institutions politiques et d’idéologies à des peuples qui y sont étrangers. S’opposant frontalement à l’héritage des penseurs des Lumières et à leur quête du système politique parfait et universel, il estime que de bonnes institutions politiques sont avant tout celles qui conviennent à la mentalité profonde du peuple concerné.
La dilution des religions dans l’âme des peuples
Pour l’essentiel, l’âme des peuples reste également insensible aux révolutions religieuses. La conversion d’un peuple à une nouvelle religion se traduit le plus souvent avec le temps par l’adaptation de celle-ci aux aspirations profondes du peuple converti. Fasciné par la civilisation indienne, Gustave Le Bon rappelle que l’islam, religion égalitaire, n’est jamais parvenu à remettre en question durablement le système des castes en Inde. L’islam encore n’a pas imposé la polygamie orientale aux populations berbères pourtant converties depuis des siècles. De même, le catholicisme s’est très largement laissé imprégner par les traditions païennes européennes, dissimulant souvent par une christianisation de forme les concessions faites aux croyances des peuples convertis. C’est encore par l’âme des peuples concernés que Gustave Le Bon explique la naissance du protestantisme en pays germaniques et les succès de la religion réformée dans le nord de l’Europe. Amoureux de liberté individuelle, d’autonomie et d’indépendance, ces peuples nordiques et germaniques étaient enclins à discuter individuellement leur foi et ne pouvaient accepter durablement la médiation de l’Eglise que la servilité latine était plus propice à accepter. Dans la civilisation de l’Inde, l’anthropologue français explique également comment le bouddhisme indien, issu d’une révolution religieuse, a peu à peu été absorbé par l’hindouisme, religion charnelle des peuples indiens et de leurs élites indo-iraniennes.
Chaque peuple fait apparaître les particularités de son âme dans des domaines différents. La religion, les arts, les institutions politiques ou militaires sont autant de terrains sur lesquels une civilisation peut atteindre l’excellence et exprimer le meilleur de son âme. Convaincu de la capacité instinctive des artistes à traduire l’âme d’un peuple, Gustave Le Bon accorde un intérêt particulier à l’analyse des arts. Il remarque que les romains ont peiné à développer un art propre mais se sont distingués par leurs institutions politiques et militaire et leur littérature. Cependant, même dans leur architecture largement inspirée par la Grèce, les romains exprimaient une part d’eux mêmes. Les palais, les bas reliefs et les arcs de triomphe romains incarnaient le culte de la force et la passion militaire. Gustave Le Bon admet bien sûr que les peuples ne vivent pas en autarcie et s’inspirent mutuellement, notamment dans le domaine artistique. Pourtant, il soutient que ces inspirations ne sont qu’accessoires. Les éléments importés ne sont qu’une matière brute que les aspirations profondes du peuple importateur ne manquent jamais de remodeler.
Ainsi, l’art de l’Egypte ancienne a irrigué la création artistique d’autres peuples pendant des siècles. Mais cet art, essentiellement religieux et funéraire et dont l’aspect massif et imperturbable rappelait la fascination des égyptiens pour la mort et la quête de vie éternelle, reflétait trop l’âme égyptienne pour être repris sans altérations par d’autres. D’abord communiqué aux peuples du Proche-Orient, cet art égyptien a inspiré les cités grecques. Mais Gustave Le Bon estime que ces influences égyptiennes ont irrigué ces peuples à travers le prisme de leur propre esprit. Tant qu’il ne s’est pas détaché des modèles orientaux, l’art grec s’est maintenu pendant plusieurs siècles à un stade de pâle imitation. Ce n’est qu’en se métamorphosant soudainement et en rompant avec l’art oriental que l’art grec connut son apogée à travers un art authentiquement grec, celui du Parthénon. A partir, d’un matériau identique qu’est le modèle égyptien transmis par les Perses, la civilisation indienne a abouti à un résultat radicalement différent de l’art grec. Parvenu à un stade de raffinement élevé dès les siècles précédant notre ère mais n’ayant que très peu évolué ensuite, l’art indien témoigne de la stabilité organique du peuple indien : « jusqu’à l’époque où elle fut soumis à la loi de l’islam, l’Inde a toujours absorbé les différents conquérants qui l’avaient envahie sans se laisser influencer par eux ».
Néanmoins, Gustave Le Bon admet que les idées puissent pénétrer un peuple en son âme. Il reconnaît aux idées religieuses une force particulière, capable de laisser une empreinte durable dans la psychologie collective même si elles ne sont le plus souvent qu’éphémères et laissent ressurgir le vieux fonds populaire. Seul un nombre infime d’idées nouvelles a vocation à modifier l’âme d’un peuple et ces idées nécessitent pour cela beaucoup de temps. Elles sont d’abord défendues par un petit nombre d’individus ayant développé une foi intense en elles. Estimant que « les foules se laissent persuader par des suggestions, jamais par les démonstrations », Gustave Le Bon explique que ces idées se propagent par le prestige de leur représentants ou par les passions collectives que ceux-ci savent attiser. Après avoir dépassé le stade intellectuel, trop fragile, pour se muer en sentiments, certaines idées accèdent au statut de dogmes. Elles sont alors solidement ancrées dans les mentalités collectives et ne peuvent plus être discutées. Gustave Le Bon estime que les civilisations ont besoin de cette fixité pour se construire. Ce n’est que lors des phases de décadence que les certitudes d’un peuple pourront être remises en question.
La genèse des peuples
Gustave Le Bon n’élude pas la question de la naissance des peuples et de l’âme qu’ils incarnent. Loin de tout dogmatisme, l’anthropologue français souligne que c’est la dynamique de l’histoire qui accouche des peuples. Seuls des peuples marginaux vivant retirés du monde pourraient prétendre ne pas être le fruit de l’histoire et des brassages de populations. Les peuples historiques, tels qu’ils existent aujourd’hui, se sont édifiés avec le temps par de lentes accumulations héréditaires et culturelles qui ont homogénéisé leurs mentalités. Les périodes historiques produisant des fusions de populations constituent le meilleur moyen de faire naître un nouveau peuple. Cependant, leur effet immédiat sera de briser les peuples fusionnés provoquant ainsi la décadence de leurs civilisations. Le Bon illustre ses propos par l’exemple de la chute de l’empire romain. Pour lui, celle-ci eut pour cause première la disparition du peuple romain originel. Conçues par et pour ce peuple fondateur, les institutions romaines ne pouvaient pas lui survivre. La dilution des romains dans les populations conquises aurait fait disparaître l’âme romaine. Les efforts déployés par les conquérants pour maintenir les institutions romaines, objet de leur admiration, ne pouvaient donc qu’être vains.
Ainsi, de la poussière des peuples disparus, de nouveaux peuples sont appelés à naître. Tous les peuples européens sont nés de cette façon. Ces périodes de trouble et de mélange sont également des périodes d’accroissement du champ des possibles. L’affaiblissement de l’âme collective renforce le rôle des individus et favorise la libre discussion des idées et des religions. Les événements historiques et l’environnement peuvent alors contribuer à forger de nouvelles mentalités. Cependant, privées de tout élan collectif et freinées par l’hétérogénéité des caractères, de telles sociétés décadentes ne peuvent édifier que des balbutiements de civilisation. En décrivant ainsi la genèse et la mort des peuples, Gustave Le Bon révèle que sa théorie des civilisations repose sur l’alternance du mouvement et de la fixité. A la destruction créatrice provoquée par des mélanges de populations succèdent des périodes de sédimentation qui laissent une place conséquente à l’histoire et parfois aux individus. Ce n’est qu’après l’achèvement de cette sédimentation que la fixation des mentalités collectives permettra d’édifier une nouvelle âme, socle d’une nouvelle civilisation. Tant que cette âme n’aura pas été détruite, le destin de son peuple dépendra étroitement d’elle.
Le psychologue français défend également le rôle du « caractère » dans le destin d’un peuple. Contrairement à l’âme qui est fixe, le caractère d’un peuple évolue selon les époques. Le caractère se définit par la capacité d’un peuple à croire en ses dogmes et à s’y conformer avec persévérance et énergie. Tandis que l’âme incarne le déterminisme collectif des peuples et alors que l’intelligence est une donnée individuelle inégalement répartie au sein d’un même peuple, le caractère est le fruit d’une volonté collective également répartie au sein d’un peuple. La teneur du caractère détermine la destinée des peuples par rapport à leur rivaux : « c’est par le caractère que 60.000 Anglais tiennent sous le joug 250 millions d’Hindous, dont beaucoup sont au moins leurs égaux par l’intelligence, et dont quelques uns les dépassent immensément par les goûts artistiques et la profondeur des vues philosophiques ». Admiratif du caractère des peuples anglais et américain de son époque, Gustave Le Bon affirme qu’ils sont parmi les seuls à égaler celui du peuple romain primitif.
Archétype de l’intellectuel généraliste du XIXe siècle, Gustave Le Bon a développé une réflexion originale de la notion de peuple. Irriguée par une solide culture historique, sa pensée se distingue tant de l’idéalisme abstrait des Lumières que d’un matérialisme darwinien. L’âme et le caractère sont chez lui des notions qui mêlent hérédité et histoire en laissant également sa place à la volonté collective.
12:48 Publié dans Philosophie, Psychologie/psychanalyse, Sociologie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie politique, sociologie, gustave le bon, psychologie, psychologie des foules, psychologie des peuples | |
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Mika Ojakangas, On the Origins of Greek Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower
London and New York: Routledge, 2016
Mika Ojakangas is a professor of political theory, teaching at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He has written a succinct and fairly comprehensive overview of ancient Greek thought on population policies and eugenics, or what he terms “biopolitics.” Ojakangas says:
In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics (sexual intercourse, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, public health, education, birthrate, migration, immigration, economy, and so forth) from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. At issue is not only a politics for which “the idea of governing people” is the leading idea but also a politics for which the question how “to organize life” (tou zên paraskeuên) (Plato, Statesman, 307e) is the most important question. (6)
The idea of regulating and cultivating human life, just as one would animal and plant life, is then not a Darwinian, eugenic, or Nazi modern innovation, but, as I have argued concerning Plato’s Republic, can be found in a highly developed form at the dawn of Western civilization. As Ojakangas says:
The idea of politics as control and regulation of the living in the name of the security, well-being and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as Western political thought itself, originating in classical Greece. Greek political thought, as I will demonstrate in this book, is biopolitical to the bone. (1)
Greek thought had nothing to do with the modern obsessions with supposed “human rights” or “social contracts,” but took the good to mean the flourishing of the community, and of individuals as part of that community, as an actualization of the species’ potential: “In this biopolitical power-knowledge focusing on the living, to repeat, the point of departure is neither law, nor free will, nor a contract, or even a natural law, meaning an immutable moral rule. The point of departure is the natural life (phusis) of individuals and populations” (6). Okajangas notes: “for Plato and Aristotle politics was essentially biopolitics” (141).
In Ojakangas’ telling, Western biopolitical thought gradually declined in the ancient and medieval period. Whereas Aristotle and perhaps Plato had thought of natural law and the good as pertaining to a particular organism, the Stoics, Christians, and liberals posited a kind of a disembodied natural law:
This history is marked by several ruptures understood as obstacles preventing the adoption and diffusion of the Platonic-Aristotelian biopolitical model of politics – despite the influence these philosophers have otherwise had on Roman and Christian thought. Among these ruptures, we may include: the legalization of politics in the Roman Republic and the privatization of everyday life in the Roman Empire, but particularly the end of birth control, hostility towards the body, the sanctification of law, and the emergence of an entirely new kind of attitude to politics and earthly government in early Christianity. (7)
Ojakangas’ book has served to confirm my impression that, from an evolutionary point of view, the most relevant Western thinkers are found among the ancient Greeks, with a long sleep during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, a slow revival during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and a great climax heralded by Darwin, before being shut down again in 1945. The periods in which Western thought was eminently biopolitical — the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and 1865 to 1945 — are perhaps surprisingly short in the grand scheme of things, having been swept away by pious Europeans’ recurring penchant for egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideologies. Okajangas also admirably puts ancient biopolitics in the wider context of Western thought, citing Spinoza, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, and others, as well as recent academic literature.
At the core of the work is a critique of Michel Foucault’s claim that biopolitics is a strictly modern phenomenon growing out of “Christian pastoral power.” Ojakangas, while sympathetic to Foucault, says the latter’s argument is “vague” (33) and unsubstantiated. Indeed, historically at least, Catholic countries with strong pastoral power tended precisely to be those in which eugenics was less popular, in contrast with Protestant ones.
It must be said that postmodernist pioneer Foucault is a strange starting point on the topic of biopolitics. As Ojakangas suggests, Foucault’s 1979 and 1980 lecture courses The Birth of Biopolitics and On the Government of the Living do not deal mainly with biopolitics at all, despite their titles (34–35). Indeed, Foucault actually lost rapidly lost interest in the topic.
Okajangas also criticizes Hannah Arendt for claiming that Aristotle posited a separation between the familial/natural life of the household (oikos) and that of the polis. In fact: “The Greek city-state was, to use Carl Schmitt’s infamous formulation, a total state — a state that intervenes, if it so wishes, in all possible matters, in economy and in all the other spheres of human existence” (17). Okajangas goes into some detail citing, contra Arendt and Foucault, ancient Greek uses of household-management and shepherding as analogies for political rule.
Aristotle appears as a genuine forerunner of modern scientific biopolitics in Ojakangas’ account. Aristotle’s politics was at once highly conventional, really reflecting more widespread Greek assumptions, and his truly groundbreaking work as an empirical scientist, notably in the field of biology. For Aristotle “the aim of politics and state administration is to produce good life by developing the immanent potentialities of natural life and to bring these potentialities to fruition” (17, cf. 107). Ojakangas goes on:
Aristotle was not a legal positivist in the modern sense of the word but rather a representative of sociological naturalism, as for Aristotle there is no fundamental distinction between the natural and the social world: they are both governed by the same principles discovered by empirical research on the nature of things and living beings. (55–56)
And: “although justice is based on nature, at stake in this nature is not an immutable and eternal cosmic nature expressing itself in the law written on the hearts of men and women but nature as it unfolds in a being” (109).
This entailed a notion of justice as synonymous with natural hierarchy. Okajangas notes: “for Plato justice means inequality. Justice takes place when an individual fulfills that function or work (ergon) that is assigned to him by nature in the socio-political hierarchy of the state — and to the extent that everybody does so, the whole city-state is just” (111). Biopolitical justice is when each member of the community is fulfilling the particular role to which he is best suited to enable the species to flourish: “For Plato and Aristotle, in sum, natural justice entails hierarchy, not equality, subordination, not autonomy” (113). Both Plato and Aristotle adhered to a “geometrical” conception of equality between humans, namely, that human beings were not equal, but should be treated in accordance with their worth or merit.
Plato used the concepts of reason and nature not to comfort convention but to make radical proposals for the biological, cultural, and spiritual perfection of humanity. Okajangas rightly calls the Republic a “bio-meritocratic” utopia (19) and notes that “Platonic biopolitico-pastoral power” was highly innovative (134). I was personally also extremely struck in Plato by his unique and emphatic joining together of the biological and the spiritual. Okajangas says that National Socialist racial theoriar Hans F. K. Günther in his Plato as Protector of Life (1928) had argued that “a dualistic reading of Plato goes astray: the soul and the body are not separate entities, let alone enemies, for the spiritual purification in the Platonic state takes place only when accompanied with biological selection” (13).[1]
Okajangas succinctly summarizes the decline of biopolitics in the ancient world. Politically this was related to the decline of the intimate and “total” city-state:
It indeed seems that the decline of the classical city-state also entailed a crisis of biopolitical vision of politics. . . . Just like modern biopolitics, which is closely linked to the rise of the modern nation-state, it is quite likely that the decline of biopolitics and biopolitical vision of politics in the classical era is related to the fall of the ethnically homogeneous political organization characteristic of the classical city-states. (118)
The rise of Hellenistic and Roman empires as universal, cultural states naturally entailed a withdrawal of citizens from politics and a decline in self-conscious ethnopolitics.
While Rome had also been founded as “a biopolitical regime” and had some policies to promote fertility and eugenics (120), this was far less central to Roman than to Greek thought, and gradually declined with the Empire. Political ideology seems to have followed political realities. The Stoics and Cicero posited a “natural law” not deriving from a particular organism, but as a kind of cosmic, disembodied moral imperative, and tended to emphasize the basic commonality of human beings (e.g. Cicero, Laws, 1.30).
I believe that the apparently unchanging quality of the world and the apparent biological stability of the species led many ancient thinkers to posit an eternal and unchanging disembodied moral law. They did not have our insights on the evolutionary origins of our species and of its potential for upward change in the future. Furthermore, the relative commonality of human beings in the ancient Mediterranean — where the vast majority were Aryan or Semitic Caucasians, with some clinal variation — could lead one to think that biological differences between humans were minor (an impression which Europeans abandoned in the colonial era, when they encountered Sub-Saharan Africans, Amerindians, and East Asians). Missing, in those days before modern science and as White advocate William Pierce has observed, was a progressive vision of human history as an evolutionary process towards ever-greater consciousness and self-actualization.[2]
Many assumptions of late Hellenistic (notably Stoic) philosophy were reflected and sacralized in Christianity, which also posited a universal and timeless moral law deriving from God, rather than the state or the community. As it is said in the Book of Acts (5:29): “We must obey God rather than men.” With Christianity’s emphasis on the dignity of each soul and respect for the will of God, the idea of manipulating reproductive processes through contraception, abortion, or infanticide in order to promote the public good became “taboo” (121). Furthermore: “virginity and celibacy were as a rule regarded as more sacred states than marriage and family life . . . . The dying ascetic replaced the muscular athlete as a role model” (121). These attitudes gradually became reflected in imperial policies:
All the marriage laws of Augustus (including the system of legal rewards for married parents with children and penalties for the unwed and childless) passed from 18 BC onwards were replaced under Constantine and the later Christian emperors — and even those that were not fell into disuse. . . . To this effect, Christian emperors not only made permanent the removal of sanctions on celibates, but began to honor and reward those Christian priests who followed the rule of celibacy: instead of granting privileges to those who contracted a second marriage, Justinian granted privileges to those who did not (125)
The notion of moral imperatives deriving from a disembodied natural law and the equality of souls gradually led to the modern obsession with natural rights, free will, and social contracts. Contrast Plato and Aristotle’s eudaimonic (i.e., focusing on self-actualization) politics of aristocracy and community to that of seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
I know that in the first book of the Politics Aristotle asserts as a foundation of all political knowledge that some men have been made by nature worthy to rule, others to serve, as if Master and slave were distinguished not by agreement among men, but by natural aptitude, i.e. by their knowledge or ignorance. This basic postulate is not only against reason, but contrary to experience. For hardly anyone is so naturally stupid that he does not think it better to rule himself than to let others rule him. … If then men are equal by nature, we must recognize their equality; if they are unequal, since they will struggle for power, the pursuit of peace requires that they are regarded as equal. And therefore the eighth precept of natural law is: everyone should be considered equal to everyone. Contrary to this law is PRIDE. (De Cive, 3.13)
It does seem that, from an evolutionary point of view, the long era of medieval and early modern thought represents an enormous regression as compared with the Ancients, particularly the Greeks. As Ojakangas puts it: “there is an essential rupture in the history of Western political discourse since the decline of the Greek city-states” (134).
Western biopolitics gradually returned in the modern era and especially with Darwin, who himself had said in The Descent of Man: “The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”[3] And: “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.”[4] Okajangas argues that “the Platonic Aristotelian art of government [was] more biopolitical than the modern one,” as they did not have to compromise with other traditions, namely “Roman and Judeo-Christian concepts and assumptions” (137).
Okajangas’ book is useful in seeing the outline of the long tradition of Western biopolitical thinking, despite the relative eclipse of the Middle Ages. He says:
Baruch Spinoza was probably the first modern metaphysician of biopolitics. While Kant’s moral and political thought is still centered on concepts such as law, free will, duty, and obligation, in Spinoza we encounter an entirely different mode of thinking: there are no other laws but causal ones, the human will is absolutely determined by these laws, freedom and happiness consist of adjusting oneself to them, and what is perhaps most essential, the law of nature is the law of a self-expressing body striving to preserve itself (conatus) by affirming itself, this affirmation, this immanent power of life, being nothing less than justice. In the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, this metaphysics of biopolitics is brought to its logical conclusion. The law of life is nothing but life’s will to power, but now this power, still identical with justice, is understood as a process in which the sick and the weak are eradicated by the vital forces of life.
I note in passing that William Pierce had a similar assessment of Spinoza’s pantheism as basically valid, despite the latter’s Jewishness.[5]
The 1930s witnessed the zenith of modern Western biopolitical thinking. The French Nobel Prize winner and biologist Alexis Carrel had argued in his best-selling Man the Unknown for the need for eugenics and the need for “philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity.” Yet, as Okajangas points out, “if we take a look at the very root of all ‘philosophical systems,’ we find a philosophy (albeit perhaps not a system) perfectly in agreement with Carrel’s message: the political philosophy of Plato” (97).
Okajangas furthermore argues that Aristotle’s biocentric naturalist ethics were taken up in 1930s Germany:
Instead of ius naturale, at stake was rather what the modern human sciences since the nineteenth century have called biological, economical, and sociological laws of life and society — or what the early twentieth-century völkisch German philosophers, theologians, jurists, and Hellenists called Lebensgesetz, the law of life expressing the unity of spirit and race immanent to life itself. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, attacked the Roman lex [law] in the name of the Greek nomos [custom/law] — whose “original” meaning, although it had started to deteriorate already in the post-Solonian democracy, can in Schmitt’s view still be detected in Aristotle’s Politics. Cicero had translated nomos as lex, but on Schmitt’s account he did not recognize that unlike the Roman lex, nomos does not denote an enacted statute (positive law) but a “concrete order of life” (eine konkrete Lebensordnung) of the Greek polis — not something that ‘ought to be’ but something that “is”. (56)
Western biopolitical thought was devastated by the outcome of the World War II and has yet to recover, although perhaps we can begin to see glimmers of renewal.
Okajangas reserves some critical comments for Foucault in his conclusion, arguing that with his erudition he could not have been ignorant of classical philosophy’s biopolitical character. He speculates on Foucault’s motivations for lying: “Was it a tactical move related to certain political ends? Was it even an attempt to blame Christianity and traditional Christian anti-Semitism for the Holocaust?” (142). I am in no position to pronounce on this, other than to point out that Foucault, apparently a gentile, was a life-long leftist, a Communist Party member in the 1950s, a homosexual who eventually died of AIDS, and a man who — from what I can make of his oeuvre — dedicated his life to “problematizing” the state’s policing and regulation of abnormality.
Okajangas’ work is scrupulously neutral in his presentation of ancient biopolitics. He keeps his cards close to his chest. I identified only two rather telling comments:
The latter’s odd phrasing strikes me as presenting an ostensibly left-wing point to actually make a taboo right-wing point (a technique Slavoj Žižek seems to specialize in).
In any event, I take Ojakangas’ work as a confirmation of the utmost relevance of ancient political philosophy for refounding European civilization on a sound biopolitical basis. The Greek philosophers, I believe, produced the highest biopolitical thought because they could combine the “barbaric” pagan-Aryan values which Greek society took for granted with the logical rigor of Socratic rationalism. The old pagan-Aryan culture, expressed above all in the Homeric poems, extolled the values of kinship, aristocracy, competitiveness, community, and manliness, this having been a culture which was produced by a long, evolutionary struggle for survival among wandering and conquering tribes in the Eurasian steppe. This highly adaptive traditional culture was then, by a uniquely Western contact with rationalist philosophy, rationalized and radicalized by the philosophers, untainted by the sentimentality of later times. Plato and Aristotle are remarkably un-contrived and straightforward in their political methods and goals: the human community must be perfected biologically and culturally; individual and sectoral interests must give way to those of the common good; and these ought to be enforced through pragmatic means, in accord with wisdom, with law where possible, and with ruthlessness when necessary.
[1]Furthermore, on a decidedly spiritual note: “ rather than being a Darwinist of sorts, in Günther’s view it is Plato’s idealism that renders him a predecessor of Nazi ideology, because race is not merely about the body but, as Plato taught, a combination of the mortal body and the immortal soul.” (13)
[2] William Pierce:
The medieval view of the world was that it is a finished creation. Since Darwin, we have come to see the world as undergoing a continuous and unfinished process of creation, of evolution. This evolutionary view of the world is only about 100 years old in terms of being generally accepted. . . . The pantheists, at least most of them, lacked an understanding of the universe as an evolving entity and so their understanding was incomplete. Their static view of the world made it much more difficult for them to arrive at the Cosmotheist truth.
William Pierce, “Cosmotheism: Wave of the Future,” speech delivered in Arlington, Virginia 1977.
[3] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton and Company, 1882), 134.
[4]Ibid., 617. Interestingly, Okajangas points out that Benjamin Isaac, a Jewish scholar writing on Greco-Roman “racism,” believed Plato (Republic 459a-b) had inspired Darwin on this point. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 128.
[5]Pierce, “Cosmotheism.”
00:05 Publié dans Livre, Livre, Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : eugénisme, darwinisme, grèce antique, antiquité grecque, biopolitique, philosophie politique, théorie politique, cité grecque, sciences politiques, politologie | |
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par Juan Asensio
Ex: http://www.juanasensio.com
09:56 Publié dans Livre, Livre, Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, philosophie politique, bernard charbonneau, livre, juan asensio | |
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Suele repetirse de manera obstinada que "España no es un país filosófico". Yo mismo me he sorprendido soltando tal lugar común en las aulas. Ciertamente, la filosofía moderna, la que se cultiva desde el siglo XVII, es una filosofía que viene envuelta en banderas e idiomas nacionales. La propia concepción de la Modernidad incluye la existencia de "naciones". No tiene mucho sentido hablar de un pensador escolástico medieval en términos nacionales. El gran Santo Tomás era "italiano" en un sentido muy atenuado del término. En el siglo XIII, se era más católico que "italiano" en cuestión filosófica y teológica. En cambio, otro escolástico, muy nuestro, como lo fue el Padre Suárez (1548-1617), ya era, además de católico (vale decir, "universal"), español en el sentido más moderno del término. La filosofía moderna se desprenderá paulatinamente del latín –lengua universalista- e irá conformándose como una filosofía no escolástica, hecha bajo banderas nacionales, precisamente por medio del empleo de las grandes lenguas nacionales: el empirismo de los británicos (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), el racionalismo de los franceses (Descartes, Malebranche) o el idealismo de los alemanes (Leibniz, Kant, etc.).
El latín oficial de la Academia no desaparecerá hasta muy tarde, pero será simultaneado por las grandes lenguas vernáculas de Europa, lenguas cuya estructura y léxico darán forma específica al saber filosófico moderno de las distintas patrias, saber muy distinto ya del griego antiguo, pero siempre deudor de éste.
Y he aquí que por encima de la Filosofía española sigue actuando una suerte de "leyenda negra", que yo mismo me he creído en tiempos y que es preciso, cuando menos, matizar. Dicha leyenda dice, más o menos así: "España, pueblo de curas y soldados, es congénitamente incapaz para el pensamiento. En vez de Filosofía, floreció en ella la Teología, y de entre ésta, la más reaccionaria. Y el fanatismo de los frailes hispanos es hermano del de sus guerreros, que por no tomar la azada tomaban la espada, y regaban con sangre los campos que no sabían o no querían labrar". Sea caricatura extrema o no, esta es la idea que los propios profesores de filosofía modernos y de nuestra misma nacionalidad han ido introduciendo en las aulas, acomplejados ellos. De mis tiempos estudiantiles conocí, como tantos, esas labores de "agentes de importación" que muchos docentes de la filosofía han aprovechado. Igual que los bazares orientales nos introducen a precio de euro las más variadas baratijas fabricadas en ultramar, hundiendo nuestra propia industria, los filósofos "analíticos" nos importaban baratijas anglosajonas y wittgensteinianas. Desde Francia o desde la extinta URSS venían numerosas gangas marxistas. Desde el propio París, curia y sede de la gauche divine, venían las herejías neomarxistas y postmodernas, hermenéuticas o estructuralistas. Antes de todo eso, el propio Ortega, conocedor del alemán y de la filosofía centroeuropea, empezó su labor de agente de importación, impagable, con lo mejor de cuanto allí se hacía (idealismo, fenomenología, Spengler, vitalismo). No quiero decir que la labor de importador y traductor de filosofías extranjeras no sea necesaria, pero veo claro que lo que en tiempos de Ortega era una necesidad apremiante, a fines del siglo XX ya sólo era indicio de provincianismo y complejo hispánico de inferioridad.
Porque a fines del siglo XX España podía presumir de poseer su propia tradición filosófica. Y no lo queríamos ver. Desde sus aulas de Oviedo yo tuve el privilegio de aprender de don Gustavo Bueno que la lengua castellana era tan buena como la que más, buena para el cultivo de la filosofía. De mi maestro aprendí que había que rebajar ínfulas al predominio editorial y académico del inglés, del francés o del alemán.
España no tiene por qué resignarse a ser colonia de nadie, tampoco en Filosofía. Ahora bien, de una forma aún más explícita, otro antiguo profesor mío, cuya obra sigo atentamente, hablo de don Manuel Fernández Lorenzo, lleva ya unos años diciendo algo todavía más importante, algo que no quiere ser atendido en esta acomplejada "piel de toro". No sólo el país y la lengua común española tienen condiciones y posibilidades sobradas para hacer buena filosofía, como nos decía Bueno. Es que esa filosofía durante el siglo XX ya ha sido hecha, y ha sido hecha a la altura de las grandes filosofías sistemáticas nacionales de esta época. Fernández Lorenzo se remonta a Unamuno y su pensamiento vitalista, pero mucho más al raciovitalismo de Ortega y Gasset, como autores que inauguraron un nuevo estilo anti-escolástico (contrario al escolástico, estilo del que Jaime Balmes, en el s. XIX sería el último, pero ya muy "moderno" representante).
Tras la muerte de Ortega, la segunda mitad del siglo contó con buenas figuras académicas en el campo –menos original- de la traducción y adaptación de corrientes extranjeras. Pero la verdadera filosofía original y española de raíz, existió y brilló con luz propia. Son imponentes las obras de autores como Gustavo Bueno o Eugenio Trías. En el primer caso me consta, por la prensa y por testimonios personales, que hay mucho material inédito pero, con sólo la ingente cantidad de libros y textos publicados, ya se puede hablar de una monumental aportación a la filosofía sistemática. Su Teoría del cierre Categorial, su Ontología, su filosofía política y de la religión… darán materia de estudio y revisión para largas décadas. Frente al "ensayismo" de Unamuno y Ortega, en Bueno hallamos un portento de sistematismo filosófico si bien, como ocurre con las catedrales medievales, hay partes hipertróficas y otras de muy menguado desarrollo, a mi modesto parecer.
En el caso de Trías, y su "filosofía del límite" también contamos con una expresión del quehacer filosófico español de gran calidad, de enorme altura, aunque muy distinta de la obra buenista en formato, lenguaje y preocupaciones si la comparamos con la obra de Bueno. Triunfa el Arte y la Metáfora como recursos y temas en el pensador barcelonés, mientras que la Lógica y la Ciencia son ineludibles en el ovetense. Pero, como no hay espacio ni ocasión para analizar a estos dos gigantes, no quiero cerrar mi reflexión, sin conducir la mirada del lector hacia el tercer sistema filosófico que ahora, muy acallado por los medios, viene lanzando a la palestra hispana el profesor Fernández Lorenzo.
Uno de los nombres que él mismo ha dado a su criatura es éste: "Pensamiento Hábil". Partiendo de una interpretación heterodoxa del materialismo filosófico de Bueno, y corrigiendo el error de considerar que éste sistema filosófico gestado en Oviedo sea (y tenga que ser) un materialismo, don Manuel pone el énfasis de su sistema en la capacidad operatoria manual del sujeto. Retomando las tradiciones espiritualistas y vitalistas que hacen del "hábito" la base desde la cual erigir un sistema filosófico, pasando por la filosofía como saber estricto (Fichte, Husserl) y positivo (Comte, Schelling, Piaget), este profesor de la Universidad de Oviedo remueve los prejuicios metafísicos que todavía lastran el sistema de Bueno (escolásticos, wolffianos, marxistas) y anuncia un nuevo sistema –la Operatiología- sobre bases que parecen muy renovadoras.
Yo coincido con él en que España, pese a su tremenda decadencia moral y educativa, está viviendo una verdadera Edad de Oro filosófica. Este tipo de contradicciones ya las hemos vivido, y de resolverlas dependerá nuestra supervivencia como nación civilizada y civilizadora.
00:07 Publié dans Philosophie | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : philosophie, espagne | |
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par Juan Asensio
Ex: http://www.juanasensio.com
«En effet, même si elle n’est ni nécessité, ni caprice, l’histoire, pour le réactionnaire, n’est pourtant pas une dialectique de la volonté immanente, mais une aventure temporelle entre l’homme et ce qui le transcende. Ses œuvres sont des vestiges, sur le sable labouré par la lutte, du corps de l’homme et du corps de l’ange. L’histoire selon le réactionnaire est un haillon, déchiré par la liberté de l’homme, et qui flotte au vent du destin.»
10:25 Publié dans Judaica, Livre, Livre, Philosophie, Révolution conservatrice, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : théologie, théologie politique, philosophie, philosophie politique, révoltuion conservatrice, judaica, judaïsme, jacob taubes, carl schmitt, théorie politique, eschatologie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, allemagne | |
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