Here are a few paragraphs I selected:
I appreciate Greg Johnson, and I pay attention to what he writes because he is one of the more important figures in the new American reactionary right, but I do have issues with his *metaphysics*. It is not quite accurate to say that he is anti-Christian since he is aware that the Christian faction within reactionary and ultra-right ideation is now and will be essential to any further development of this *movement*, but I do find that many theorists, on both the Right and the Left, do not really understand Christianity and thus cannot understand both its power and resiliance as well as its weakness and defectiveness. In my own case the study of Christianity and Catholicism has become a central interest and the more that I understand the more I realize *the game is not over* by any means. (That ‘by the way’).“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.”
But a couple of comments on his notion of Providence. It seems to me that in order to understand Providence, and then also Christianity in its essence, one has to understand that Providence only exists for an ‘enlightened soul’. The essence of Christianity is in the descent of an *avatar* into a dead world, if ‘dead’ is taken to mean simply materialistic and ‘determined’. ‘Life’ in the Christian sense is an idea, if you will, that rises up as-against the ‘life’ of both Nature and biology. The Life of the Christian is really a sort of hyper-life, a quintessence, and the influence from a reality completely outside and beyond the ‘life’ of the planet and, in this sense, of the kosmos. If one does not grasp that, I suggest, one cannot grasp Christianity (in its essence).
The real question — as it pertains to Christianity — is to penetrate to its essence and not to get stuck within tired conventions or routine ways of understanding it. This is hard indeed since, obviously, doing that would involve a commitment of oneself at a *spiritual* level. And to commit at that level — that is, in depth and not merely *intellectually* — is actually to become a Christian. And that is the way that one would come to understand Providence and even to feel providence and to understand it operating in one’s life, mind, feelings, and heart.
Naturally, I find all the questions about Christianity quite interesting because, taken on the whole, it is ‘the Christian revelation’ that has been rejected by those who founded this forum. In my own case every strand, every element, every idea that they rejected I came to recognize as essential of being understood and preserved.
One of the things that I came to realize — again as a result of the time I spent on this Forum (I say this simply because it is true) — is how ‘desperation’ functions. I define desperation as coming face to face with an insurmountable wall in the face of which one’s will suffers an insurmountable blow. By nature, I assume, we have a sense or a feeling (understanding?) that at some essential level, despite appearances, we are not trapped and that there is a route that leads out of the ‘tragic’ condition of meaningless life. But again, to *know* that is to come into contact with a quintessential element: something that comes to one from outside of the tragic system, if you will. That is, of course, the meaning of the idea of the Avatar. It is a long-standing idea and is ‘foundational to consciousness’. But it seems to me that the Christian revelation — especially — has given (and can still give) a tremendous power to all Occidental forms and ideas that quite definitely distinguishes it from any other tradition. Here, of course, my own Eurocentrism comes to the fore: a decision, an act of the will, to locate and elevate that *quintessence* and to become willing to battle for it. That is the meaning of the Christian Warrior of course. And I mention this specifically in relation to this forum (and again because of the time I dedicated to it and the meaning this process had).“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.”
I really cannot say that I understand what Nietzsche’s *inner process* had been about even though I have read a good number of his works and been influenced by them. What I mean here is his rejection of Christianity at the metaphysical level (if indeed that is the case). I certainly understand his rejection of Christianity as an accretion of layers of ‘detritus’ and tarnish and the laying on of the ‘all too human’. But this is a symptom of the time, of his time and our time, to have ‘lost the thread of meaning’ and to have become unmoored from a metaphysical base that makes life livable and comprehensible.
It does seem true, and increasingly so, that events careen out of control and that we all seem destined to suffer to consequences of some sort of conflagration of world-scale. If that is so it is hard to imagine what trend-of-renovation might change the present. We certainly cannot ‘renew the world’ but we can renew ourselves within this world. But that is *spiritual work* and not particularly easy of attainment.
The crashing and ‘tragic’ failure of our Beloved Founders and their own revelation that they had, themselves, failed in their own path, is a very interesting outcome to analyze and to process. What does it mean for us?
This seems important to me. You see it is as a result of ‘desperation’ in the sense I described above that we rush headlong into action — something! — that will give us a sense of alleviation. There is no way to avoid thes and we have, in different pathological ways, resorted to this manoeuvre. The conditions of the present force us to this. We either get wily and cunning and imagine that we have some Gnostic secret that no one else possesses (our dear Founders I think saw themselves in this way) or we fall victim (become ‘seduced’ as Diebert might say) by some attractive but pseudo-solution to our morass. But getting out of a civilizational morass is not in any sense easy! These are ‘metaphysical impasses’ and one has to live in them until a route is opened to one. That is where, I suggest, the notion of Provindence still has meaning: a consciousness greater than our own comes to the fore. This is a solid idea and not a mere convention insofar as a solution to the problem of the Creation must have arisen simultaneously to the Creation itself (if you catch my drift). That is, it seems to me, the hidden meaning of the notion of *metaphysics*.“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.”
The Nazi Era is magnificently meaningful, it seems to me, because we are still, quite essentially, in the midst of the reality of desperation. Not only might we take such Nazi-like steps but we live in a world that is dominated by forces and powers that have improved, dramatically, on the same desperate manoeuvres that set the National Socialists into motion. Americanism and the Americanopolis have to be deeply considered in this light. (And with this I make a reference to David and Dan’s defense of ‘liberalism’, which I prefer to label ‘hyper-liberalism’ or deviant liberalism. It is a disease but with what shall we oppose it?).
Yet the only ‘root’ for the ‘homeless’ and those suffering from nihilistic desperation can only be through recourse to certain ‘metaphysical truths’. That is, the same ‘truths’ that originated along with the manifest world as it was created. The puzzle is that getting toi, arriving at, embodying those ‘truths’ is not at all easy.“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.”
In order to take a stand against the ‘homelessness’ of our hyper-liberal present one has to be willing to really struggle to define many many different things. Unquestionably, the Radical and the Reactionary Right is very much on the right track if only in the sense that it gets to the *root* of the proper ideation. Spirituality and even religion are not in any sense liberal endeavors. They are radical and reactionary endeavors!
This is a very interesting statement because it is in many senses true. I think the Radical Right and the Reactionary Right senses that there is a *proper course* to follow that must turn counter-currents to the Present hyper-liberalism, but working to define this ‘turn’ immediately isolates one from 98% of the ideation of the present! You exit the realm of discourse and start down a rabbit hole into dangerous and difficult territory.“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.”
I find that statement ‘Christianity could not stand up to rational criticism’ especially interesting. This is true! But the way to *recover meaning* is to recover the way os stating meaning. It is, I think, a lingustic and a semantic issue. It is true that all metaphysical systems, couched as they are in ancient imagination and the forms that imagination gave to meaning, have become defunct. It is true as well that all we have left is the world of mindless matter in which *meaning* is not seen to exist. But this does not mean that *meaning* is dead, or that ‘God is dead’, but that we have lost or surrendered or had taken away from us a way-and-means to grasp the *core meaning* which is, as I say, a quintessence: it is beyond reason and,in a certain sense, ‘reason’ becomea a stumbling block to the required metaphysical flight.
It is not the *truly smart* that have brought us to a nihilistic present (a state of mind really) but those who have lost their connection with imagination (in the Thomistic sense).
In my view what is needed is the *truly smart* to come forward and turn back the tide by demonstrating what is possible. Nothing has ever ‘died’ and the Kosmos contains, now, all the meaning it ever held. The question is how to discover/rediscover it? I want to say that the *problem* is stupid people who have little imaginitive power. We know, beyond any doubt, that Our Present is one in which the vulgar and the half-mad have far too much power. But we must also accept (in my view) that our guiding intellectuals have lost the metaphysical track. This is inevitable in such a time of transition and disruption. And it is folly, in a sense, to imagine we have the Key to the cure, and yet the cure and the key must exist: they are part-and-parcel of the Creation itself.“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.”
Ouch!“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.”
This is a key point. But if something has to ‘grab’ us, it does seem quite important to arrive at a definition of what that shall be. It leads in a circle back to the essential question, and as it pertains to Occidental metaphysics, to the essential idea of a ‘quintessence’ that is part-and-parcel of the Creation.“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.”
A ‘dangerous mind’ is a desperate mind, according to my definitions. And a desperate mind is one susceptible to rash movement and especially impetuuous and, if I may say, immature movement. One must select a mature base for one’s choices and resist impetuosity. It is really in this precise sense that I have criticised the Founders of this forum. I do not blame them (though I would if they could only continue in that vein and not break through) and I only link them to the current of nihilism that has us all in its grip, in one way or another.“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.”
