Or:
Time to kick the philosophers in the balls
For Francis Bacon (1561-1626) the metaphysicians were like spiders that constructed their webs with a substance segregated from their insides, resulting in that their conclusions kept little if any connection to empirical reality. Here there are some chosen excerpts from Will Durant’s chapter on Bacon in his splendid book, The Story of Philosophy. Pay attention how Bacon differs from Buddha-like opinions on human desires:
At the age of twelve Bacon was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. He stayed there three years, and left it with a strong dislike of its texts and methods, a confirmed hostility to the cult of Aristotle, and a resolve to set philosophy into a more fertile path, to turn it from scholastic disputation to the illumination and increase of human good…
Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy had turned into premature death? And besides, it is an impossible philosophy; for instinct will out…
He does not admire the merely contemplative life; like Goethe he scorns knowledge that does not lead to action: “men ought to know that in the theatre of human life it is only for Gods and angels to be spectators”…
All through the years of his rise and exaltation he brooded over the restoration or reconstruction of philosophy, Meditor Instaurationem philosophiae. It was a magnificent enterprise, and—except for Aristotle—without precedent in the history of thought. It would differ from every other philosophy in aiming at practice rather than at theory, at specific concrete goods rather than at speculative symmetry… Here, for the first time, are the voice and tone of modern science.
Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy…
Philosophy has been barren so long, says Bacon, because she needed a new method to make her fertile. The great mistake of the Greek philosophy was that they spent so much time in theory, so little in observation. The predecessors of Socrates were in this matter sounder than his followers; Democritus, in particular, had a nose for facts, rather than an eye for the clouds. No wonder that philosophy has advanced so little since Aristotle’s day; it has been using Aristotle’s methods. Now, after two thousand years of logic-chopping with the machinery invented by Aristotle, philosophy has fallen so low that none will do her reverence. All these medieval theories, theorems and disputations must be cast out and forgotten…
Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives. The world as Plato describes it is merely a world constructed by Plato, and pictures Plato rather than the world…
Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges…
And when the great minds of the French Enlightenment undertook that masterpiece of intellectual enterprise, the Encyclopédie, they dedicated it to Francis Bacon.
34 replies on “On Francis Bacon”
“Time to kick the philosophers in the balls”
A more accurate title would be;
“An empirical philosopher kicks the scholastics in the balls”
Francis Bacon just lays the foundation for the british empiricists who were later to come, and rejects the scholastic fusion of christianity and aristotelian philosophy. Its forerunner can be claimed to be the discussion between the nominalists and the realists.
And the same sort of discussion was repeated later on between the empiricists and rationalist, and still later on between the phenomenologists and the logical positivists.
Philosophy has a tendency to repeat itself, but with new angles and twists.
I find this to be a good quote;
“Just as the pursuit of knowledge becomes scholasticism when divorced from the actual needs of men and life, so the pursuit of politics becomes a destructive bedlam when divorced from science and philosophy…”
When doing any sort of metapolitical activity, one cannot avoid thinking through first principles, without missing something very essential.
I pretty much agree with Will Durant on this point.
But that scholastic discussion was not what Bacon or I had in mind when trying to debunk these guys (what the Jungian commenter on de Chirico’s painting also wanted to debunk). What we try to say is something like my most recent post about Evola in this blog:
https://westsdarkesthour.com/2013/06/07/was-evola-one-of-us/
By the by, if I don’t reply so often as I did in the previous threads is because I don’t have time to do it, not because I’m running out of arguments. It takes a full-time job to be responding to any single critical comment.
I’ll let my entries and links talk by themselves.
Bacon most definitely had the scholastics in mind, and their dogmatic use of Aristotle. He was also criticizing rationalist philosophers like Descartes and his new speculative methods. He even criticized branches of the empiricist movement.
But remember, Bacon was just as Newton “standing on the shoulders of giants”, and was not rejecting Aristotle outright. No he was extending and developing his logic and metaphysics.
I am simply sticking to the historical narrative here.
I find it quite paradoxical that you on the one hand consider the philosophy of science useless(except for Popper apparently), but then turn to praise one of the most imminent philosophers of science, who together with Galileo pioneered the scientific method.
With all due respect, but have you thought this through?
I wont comment on Evola directly, since I have read very little of his work. There is certainly room for critique regarding his stance on race, but I have a very hard time seeing how Bacon is particularly relevant here? Evola as a philosopher of religion is simply discussing different phenomena, although in a fashion which is not in the spirit of Bacon.
I actually have a question for you, and this goes back to Martinez earlier discussion
Seeing you are great fan of Adolf Hitler and “Mein Kampf”, do you think the development of his particular Weltanschaung would have been at all possible without the development of romantic philosophy and german idealism? This offcourse includes some of the “philosophical quacks” pictured in the previous article.
Have you ever considered that he in fact may have stood on the shoulders of (german) intellectual giants?
Just take your time to ponder the question, if you need several weeks to answer the qustion thats perfectly fine with me. There is no hurry.
It is a good question; I don’t deny it.
Fichte’s and Hegel’s nationalisms and even pan-Germanism obviously influenced them. But let me put it this way.
The obscure prose of Classical German Idealists corrupted Hitler et al. You see, his Mein Kampf is turgid, and the guy who wrote it (not Hitler) was subtly influenced by the opaque German prose of the previous century. When you reach Hitler’s Table Talks on the other hand you see unadulterated Hitler thought. Plain and simple and extremely good and fascinating reading.
So to answer your question I would say that had Classical German Idealists written in plain prose the book attributed to Hitler would have probably been written differently and reached more niches of people than what it did. Everybody bought a copy of it but very few read the two volumes from cover to cover. I blame the obscurantist, previous prose for this (even when Mein Kampf was not a philosophical work).
Jannik says:
That’s a preposterous argument. Why on Earth do you need to read Romantic and German Idealistic philosophy in order to be a racist, an anti-Semite and an anti-democrat?
I have always been a racist and I have long been an anti-Semite and an anti-democrat and I can assure you that these stands did not depend in the least upon such readings. All it takes to reach such conclusions is to take a look at the world around you with an open mind and try to understand it as it is instead of through the lenses of someone else’s pre-established prejudices (oops, “philosophies”, sorry) like you seem to be advocating the we should do, by adopting this or that philosopher’s view and then proceed to analyse things.
Moreover, if what you’re saying was true, at least part of the Austrian-German philosophical establishment would have supported the Hitler and the Nazis. Well, as far as I know, not a single important Austrian or German philosopher supported them in an unambiguous way, with the famous exception of Heidegger, but even he seems to have expressed regret for that in private later in life.
Keep your philosophers to yourself, pal. I don’t blame you. Some people need crutches to walk around, others don’t, that’s all.
Oh come on, now Heidegger doesn’t count? He’s the most famous hard-core NSDAP supporter in history who never recanted after the war. Even after he left his college he stayed a party member until it dissolved. He gave speeches in full party uniform. He had hundreds of opportunities after the war to publicly turn traitor and be “born again”, an act that would make him treated like a god in academia, win the good graces of all of his colleagues, and cost him nothing but his honesty. He never did it.
Lamenting in private that the whole ordeal was a headache for him hardly makes him into some sort of renegade. Was Himmler a fake Nazi because he and Hitler got into a fight at the end of the war? Was Goebbels a fake Nazi because he refused to take up the chancellorship after Hitler’s death? At that point who’s even left?
It is indeed true that almost none of Heidegger’s peers went alongside him. But Heidegger was in philosophical opposition to almost the entire discipline of metaphysics, so he was operating under a different system of thought. And defying almost his entire professional class should be to Heidegger’s credit.
And while I’m at it, what did poor Rosenberg do to wind up thrown to the bottom of a well? I mean come on, he worked his ass off to put together a philosophy of race and everyone seems to ignore him. Not just here, I don’t even see him mentioned on Counter-Currents or anywhere else. Is M20C just so long nobody wants to read it?
What’s M20C?
The Myth of the 20th Century. It is, admittedly, a very long book with a very long title, and while the first part is good it starts to repeat itself a lot as it goes through the middle. I think Hitler notably didn’t finish it, or at least gave up on it at one point, although he was also very busy at the time (he read tons of Schopenhauer straight through when he was younger, and that’s not any easier).
Pierce’s “Who We Are” is, to a large extent, an improved, modernized, and much easier to read version of the book. Still, I feel like no one gives Rosenberg credit for putting down the prototype. The amount of historical research put into it alone is staggering (and in fact much more than is sensible).
Obviously philosophy isn’t your main interest, but even among Far Right-ers who are generally concerned with it he’s pretty much abandoned, and I feel like he at least deserves some appreciation. For god sakes, he was actually hanged by the liberals for his work.
Actually come to think of it, he sounds like a philosopher you might actually like! Here’s the Metapedia entry for his work:
I didn’t know that author. I think that I must read him…
Argh! He was the official philosopher of the German Worker’s Party! One of the founding members! He took over the party while Hitler was in prison! He was the Reich Minister for occupied Russia!
Incidentally, I didn’t even know the last two facts until just now. The blackout on the guy just baffles me. I mean I know the liberals don’t want to talk about any sort of Nazi intellectual, but even our own side never talks about him.
I’ll caution against trying to read The Myth all the way through; like I said, it’s way too long and Pierce’s version was basically an all-around improvement.
Which brings me to another thought: I think reading any philosopher’s Magnum Opus is a bad idea. It’s always too long and complicated, and written more for them than for you. It’s like a bunch of notes they make to themselves and then sift back through over their career. They almost always publish some sorter essays that cover everything about their theory in 1/10 of the space later on, once they’ve simplified everything down.
I’ve been reading An Introduction to Metaphysics by Heidegger recently, and while not exactly easy to read it’s infinitely better than On Being and Time.
I’ve just printed the 14 pages of “The Life and Death of Alfred Rosenberg” by Peter Peel and tomorrow I’ll read it.
Chechar you actually red Mein Kampf? Rarely a book has argue so much that race = civillsation. Hitler comes even closer to the stature of (well no actually he is) a prophet when you read MK2. This is wonderful prophetic book, there is almost an exact prediction of what is going on right now in our world in every chapter, from the niggerisation of europe, to the downfall of a european community and to the jewish autodestruction of everything they lay their hands on, from the soviet union to the british empire. Parroting that someone else wrote the book is non sense based on nothing, the phrases in which the chapters of both books are constructed are the same methodology as used in his speeches. But indeed never his works were just mere pamphlets as you apparently wish philosophy or white nationalism to fall down to. Actually what else are you/we doing here than playing the WN salon philisophers?
Still, it’s not as readable as his Table Talks, not remotely.
@John Martínez
Offcourse you dont, but that was never my point. Many boneheads for instance have read very little and certainly hold these views as part of their new religion.
I am talking about the development of ideas, and from where Hitler got his inspiration. It is his particular worldview or philosophy(sorry about that word) i am talking about. But hey, if history of ideas is not your interest thats fine.
I dont for a second believe that. For example, if you dont have any knowledge of judaism and their complex history, you dont just “take a look at the world around you with an open mind”, and then conclude that the jooos play a major part in whats going on.
In fact if I had not read Kevin McDonalds trilogy on judaism, there are many aspects of judaism I never would have understood.
I on the contrary think its quite preposterous to assume that you can simply observe whats going on around you and then conclude that a racialist worldview is the solution. I dont buy that for a second.
Well as Stubbs mentions, Heidegger never recanted. And then there is offcourse Alfred Rosenberg and british Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But I dont know if that is enough for you.
Major philosophical movements at that time, in Austria and Germany, were the Frankfurt school and The Vienna circle. Both of them heavily influenced by jews, so it is really not that surprising that none of them supported NS is it?
Well thats all fine. But if you dont want to discuss these issues, where you risk that certain philosophers will be dragged in from time to time, then what the hell are you doing on this blog? If your such a strong and enlightened individual on racial matters, then why visit this place at all.
You allready have it all figured out, so why waste your time?
And for the record, I am most certainly not your pal.
Check the second paragraph of my comment you’re trying to rebutt. You’re trying to refute somenthing you apparently didn’t read.
Look up the meaning of the noun “IRONY” in a dictionary, pal. 🙂
Moreover, since my views about the frivolity of most “philosophical” discussions are basicaly the same as Chechar’s, the proprietor of the blog, perhaps you should be asking him in the first place, ” what the hell are you doing on this blog?”
How dare he Jannik? How does he have the nerve? If I were you, I would ban him and me from your blog.
Yes I do understand that you think that the field of philosophy in itself is worthless. But taking that stance to its logical conclusion, would entail that commenting on a philosopher like Francis Bacon is a waste of space. So why are you commenting on a thread dedicated to Francis Bacon?
Common sense and observing the world should be more than enough for you.
Ýes I am quite aware that you didnt mean it litterally. I was trying to hint that addressing someone as “pal” is not exactly constructive.
Please refrain from making this exchange personal.
I am only against spiders (the “great metaphysicians” or “great epistemologists”). Bacon was not a “spider” according to the above definition. On the contrary: he detected the nonsense of such quest. He is our friend.
@Chechar
Yes I agree, and I also think Herder had an influence. And he most likely heard of Marx, Darwin, Nietszche and several of the classic greek authors, and probably many more.
I havent read his table talks, but the format of the book is also quit different than Mein Kampf, since its made up of speeches and conversations. I also doubt that this type of medium(“table talks”) is adequate if you want to get at the intellectual bottom of things. And it most certainly would have been difficult to convey a personal story based on conversation and speeches alone.
Or maybe the lay reader was mainly interested in reading about the personal story of AH, the new prophet of NS, and less interested in profound analysis on race and history. And what is exactly Mein Kampf? I would describe it as a biography, political program and a philosophical work. Since it has all these elements contained in it.
Its clear that AH wanted to reach a wide audience, primarily the ordinary man on the street, but that he also wanted to appeal to the smaller group of the intellectually inclined.
I think that he perfectly well knew what the ordinary person would be interested in reading, and thats why the main focus was on the personal biography, his personal struggle.
This is also why I am not wholly convinced by your argument, that if he had dumbed down MK, more readers would have bought the book, or just read it.
I already think it was sufficently dumbed down for the lay reader, and he had already reached a very wide audience of millions in the beginning of the war. There is a reason it was considered a best seller.
I never said “dumbed down MK”, only write a more readable book. MK is turgid and long-winded and, with the exception of the biographical pages, boring and unreadable.
I agree that MK is turgid and long-winded. But I am in no way convinced that this necessarily was due to the author being inspired by the writing style of the german idealists, as the bulk of the book was comprised of his biography and future plans of the party, not metaphysics of race and nation.
Rather I think the book could have profited from having a more strict editor on board, reducing the book from 900 pages to say 500-600 pages in total.
I actually think that the most interesting chapters are the ones on race and nation. But I suppose this is also a question of personal preferences.
Not convinced? Whoever wrote MK even Alfred Rosenberg, one of the main ideologues of NS, was a fan of Kant, right?
I considered the most boring part of MK to be the geopolitical speculations and contemporary German politics. But that was probably much more interesting to people actually living in those times.
@Chechar
I am not sure what your point is? And I really dont know if Rosenberg considered himself a fan of Kant, but he most certainly was inspired by Schopenhauer and Nietszche.
Point is that Kant was “the enemy of the German-speaking poet” as an Austrian writer put it. (In their respective magnum opuses none of the two authors you mention wrote in understandable prose, The World as Will and Representation, especially its first 200 Kantian pages, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.)
Well anybody formulating their views in technical and highly abstract jargon will be an enemy of poetry. Who is in fact the poet in question?
The two mentioned authors most certainly are not exemplars of clearly written prose. And I also believe that their thoughts were not entirely coherent, but I put no blame on Kant for this.
It was Stefan Zweig, the only Jewish author that Hitler tolerated when Richard Strauss used Zweig’s libretto in one of his operas. In vivid pages (I believe in The World of Yesterday but not sure) Zweig said that the style of Kant contaminated most of the German prose; that it was a huge catastrophe from the lyric and literary viewpoint.
@Chechar
Well he is still doing philosophy of science and is considered a philosopher. Discussing the structure of causality in his “idols” is also doing metaphysics.
But offcourse its doing metaphysics in another tradition than the later german idealist tradition. I do understand that you are primarily critical of the the scholastics, the later rationalist school, the german idealists or the modern french poststructuralists, etc..
There is a reason why a philosophical split between the continental german-french, and the analytical anglo-american empiricists, arose in the first place.
And thats all fine, although I most certainly dont consider the german idealists as ideological “enemies”, quite on the contrary.
But precision here is key. Dismissing all philosophy in general as a waste of time, and substituting it with “common sense observation” or classical litterature is just hopelessly naive. You will never understand the ideological development of the west adequately, unless philosophical analysis is done occasionally.
My maxim is; pick and choose what is useful and discard the rest.
I never, ever said they were “enemies”. And you are right that any well-educated westerner must know the basics of philosophy. I even know some of the basics of Christian theology even if I am not a Christian for the simple reason that the influence of Christianity on the West has been enormous. I have been in theological libraries and seen the collected works of Augustine and Aquinas. But that does not mean of course that I have to spend my time reading them. A little of theological culture is enough.
The same with philosophy.
Well we are at least partly in agreement. And yes a small dose of theological and philosophical culture is a good thing for the lay reader.
But for the reader who is interested in both the historical and future development of ideas, especially political ideas, then it is not enough. If you actually want to be part of the development of new political ideologies, then you have to probe further. And this includes contemplating on the issues of race, nation, state and history.
And I consider the “monocausalism” discussion which has been very prominent on this blog as part of this project.
Offcourse if you think it is enough to just copy NS ideology as laid down in MK, and conclude that enough thinking has been done on the metaphysics of race, nation, etc., then it clearly is a waste of time to delve into these subjects. Since all that is now needed is political action.
I cannot subscribe to the above mentioned view, I am just not as firm a believer in classical NS, although I believe in white/european racial preservation.
Accepting NS at face value is just far to dogmatic for me, and I also believe the ideology has its flaws. So some improved version of NS is needed I believe. Besides, I am the type of person who no matter what, will keep on asking some of these fundamental questions.
But this implies that one needs to think more seriously about this subject, which includes some philosophical analysis. And since I dont believe that one can start form scratch, one is forced to look to at the philosophical tradition of the west, here you can choose and pick from what is useful.
We might disagree on what is useful in this endeavour, you seem to think that almost all traditional philosophy is useless, and here i probably disagree. But the point is, that common sense or fictional litterature is a poor substitute.
So although I see your project as at least partly constructive, towards the end of formulating a coherent ideology in the longer run , the “debunking western wisdom” part just comes across as excessive and to puritan in my view. And I am sorry, AHs writings, Kemps grand history and Peirces radio transmissions are just inadequate in this regard. So although I roughly agree with points 1-3, I think you are far to exclusive when asking “who is one of us?”.
All this does not imply that I instead am willing to accept Greg Johnsons “metapolitical” project. I think this project is far more flawed. For one, it just comes across as aimless, when articles are being published that stick in so many different directions. Who is the intellectual elite he is trying to reach exactly? I dont know.
Well just to put things in perspective, I agree with you on the major issues, but disagree on some specific points.
But what about Pierce’s Who We Are?
Moreover, white nationalism is a baby for the moment. You cannot expect mature philosophical, historical or hermeneutical literature in every area of the movement (with the exception perhaps of MacDonald’s study on Jewry).
Also, studying these authors you mention requires a whole career. Kolakowski did his homework to debunk Marxism: learning foreign languages, reading all the rich “dialectical” literature of the ancient philosophers all the way to Hegel, and still he very much disliked the style of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Surely reading secondary sources (like Kolakowski’s study on Marxism) is enough for educated laymen like us, right?
My point is clear: Wasting months of your life trying to decipher, say, Hegel’s Logic is a grotesque waste of time.
@Chechar
To be fair, I havent looked in to the book, but now i probably will. But I probably need a whole lot of more intellectual calories to keep me satisfied. And I am quite convinced that you feel the same way.
You are probably right. But this also implies that you need to read a range of different stuff. Not just in philosophy, but especially in history, and in various subjects in the social sciences. And you are also correct that not enough has been done in the area of ethnic nationalism, or nationalism in general, in the philosophical area.
But the same goes for many other academic areas.
And yes, I also consider Kevin Macs trilogy to be mature work.
Im most circumstances, yes.
Yes, unless you plan on becoming a professional philosopher or a specialist in certain strands of political ideology. But these are clearly rare exceptions.
On the other hand, the WN movement clearly needs specialists in these different fields. And this includes philosophers, historians, economists, psychologists, etc.
It all boils down to the tradeoffs involved in how you spend your time. Once you get past some point, the marginal payoff to further time invested diminishes rapidly. When this point is reached is debateable though.
Just remember, that the point of enlightenment you have reached at the present moment, has cost a lot of sweat and tears. And has also included alot of time wasted on “non-useful” literature. None of us would be able to discuss these finer points on the utility of philosophy to the white cause, without hundreds of hours devoted to reading obscure prose.
Many other people are stuck in a completely different trajectory. Many people will never read anything, but might still end up as WN. Just as many illiterate young white people (sadly)end up becoming ANTIFAs.
But for the intellectually inclined people who visit this type of site, or CC or some other traditionalist or WN site, coherent ideology and history is important.
So my point is, there is probably not one size that fits all.
Well, yes: of course. But my original point in my original post where I started this debate (the entry with the image of book Anti-Freud) still stands: in theory metaphysical treatises could have been written in clear prose, but they weren’t. The objective to obscure language has more to do with an endeavor to gather adepts (“base rhetoricians”) than with genuine, Socratic philosophizing (“noble rhetoricians”). I cannot demonstrate this point thru academic sources, but it is a Szasz criticism of the proper uses of language that I happen to subscribe.
Chechar:
Probably, but this isn’t really an issue with philosophy per se, is it?
I mean I don’t ever intend to read On the Origin of Species, even though Darwin’s theories are vital to my understanding of the human organism. In fact, I don’t think many people read any of the big scientific theses that they nonetheless depend on for their understanding of the world.
We have so much information flooding our minds these days that we have start stripping things down to the basics. Less prose more bullet-points. That goes against the writing style for most of history, not just in philosophy.
Also, Marxism was hugely successful in its use of Hegel’s ideas, even though hardly any Marxists actually read Hegel. Christianity has been described as “Platonism for the masses”, and was also extremely successful among people who couldn’t read a word of Greek. Simplified and mythologized metaphysics seem like they can actually be very powerful, you just need artists and propagandists in addition to the philosophers themselves.
Jannik:
Dogmatism is cool! “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
But we do need to distill things, and order them. This will be the largest upset in our race since the fall of Rome and the ascendency of Christianity. We need to make sure that our dogma checks out at all points, can be simplified enough for most people to feel it in their gut, and is comprehensive and translatable enough to cover all of our bases, now and in the future. In that respect, taking survey of what we’ve got so far is a good idea.
Not that we have to read through giant German manuscripts or anything like that.