“To be wrong is one thing; but to knowingly surrender one’s judgment to the herd for the sake of ‘happiness’ is far worse than merely being wrong; for a man, especially for a White man, it is worse than death. It is an undoing of his very Being.”
16th May 1944, evening
Research and instruction—State encouragement for free research—The two tasks of research worker and teacher—Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
The theory that independent research and instruction are two fields of activity which must be indissolubly related is false. Each has an entirely different function, each calls for men of a different type, and each must be approached by the State from a different angle.
Research must remain free and unfettered by any State restriction. The facts which it establishes represent Truth, and Truth is never evil. It is the duty of the State to support and further the efforts of research in every way, even when its activities hold no promise of immediate, or even early, advantage from the material or economic point of view. It may well be that its results will be of value, or indeed will represent tremendous progress, only to the generation of the future.
Instruction, on the other hand, should not, in my opinion, enjoy a like liberty of action. Its liberty is limited by the interests of the State, and can therefore never be totally unrestricted; it has not the right to claim that same degree of independence which I most willingly concede to research.
The attributes demanded of a successful teacher and a research worker are fundamentally different, and are seldom to be found together in the single individual. The man of research is by nature extremely cautious; he never ceases to work, to ponder, to weigh and to doubt, and his suspicious nature breeds in him an inclination towards solitude and most rigorous self-criticism.
Of quite a different type is the ideal teacher. He has little or no concern with the endless riddles of the infinite—with something, that is, which is so infinitely greater than himself. He is a man whose task it is to impart knowledge and understanding to men who do not possess them and who, therefore, are generally his intellectual inferiors; and in consequence he is a man who is often inclined to be pedantically dogmatic.
There are many men endowed with a genius for research who are useless as teachers, just as there are brilliant teachers who have no gift whatever for research and creative work; yet all of them, in their respective spheres, make contributions of outstanding value to the sum of human knowledge.
I do not agree with the idea that liberty of research should be restricted solely to the fields of natural science. It should embrace also the domain of thought and philosophy, which, in essence, are themselves but the logical prolongation of scientific research. By taking the data furnished by science and placing them under the microscope of reason, philosophy gives us a logical conception of the universe as it is. The boundary between research and philosophy is nebulous and constantly moving.
In the Great Hall of the Linz Library are the busts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the British, the French and the Americans have nothing to offer. His complete refutation of the teachings which were a heritage from the Middle Ages, and of the dogmatic philosophy of the Church, is the greatest of the services which Kant has rendered to us. It is on the foundation of Kant’s theory of knowledge that Schopenhauer built the edifice of his philosophy, and it is Schopenhauer who annihilated the pragmatism of Hegel. I carried Schopenhauer’s works with me throughout the whole of the First World War. From him I learned a great deal.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which springs partly, I think, from his own line of philosophical thought and partly from subjective feeling and the experiences of his own personal life, has been far surpassed by Nietzsche.
_____________________________
Consider obtaining a copy of the complete notes
published by Ostara Publications.
“This is your best piece of writing in WDH up to now, Chechar—at least that I’m aware of. I don’t think this is the sort of article that will have much appeal to average White Nationalists, obsessed as they are with the Joooos, Niggers and other perceived threats.
But until Whites grasp the deep mental roots of the their present malaise (specially as far as Christianity and its secular offshoot, Liberalism, are concerned) they will be like a man being attacked by a swarm of bees in the middle of a pitch-black night.”
— John Martínez
(See the rest of Martínez’s insightful article here.)
Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil.
Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato?
A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics. Finally, I recall—against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato—that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, “the woman”—one will never look in vain…
Excerpted from the prologue of Werner Ross’s Der ängstliche Adler
– Friedrich Nietzsches Leben (1980):
I
The two-volume work of Heidegger on Nietzsche begins with the lapidary phrase: “Nietzsche, the thinking man testifies to the content of his thought.” But in the following hundreds of pages he does not appear, only his philosophical activity.
Nietzsche had the misfortune to go down to posterity as a philosopher whereas he would have liked to do it as an apostle or officer of artillery; a lyric poet or composer; a revolutionary or reformer; ultimately, as a buffoon or a god.
Nietzsche argued against the claims of truthfulness of all doctrines, including his. He ardently sought for results: a reversal of all relations, the abolition of Christianity, the beginning of a new era. His aspiration was to divide the history of humanity with a single stroke into two halves. Instead, it has been classified with others; and in college textbooks his name appears next to Leibniz and Kant.
II
At the height of his self-consciousness, of his “delusions of grandeur,” Nietzsche came to think that the mere dissemination of his doctrine would cause the disintegration of the tablets of the law and of our civilization as the trumpets of the Israelites had caused the collapse of the walls of Jericho. But the earth did not shake nor the sun darkened when, in early January 1889, he went crazy.
Obviously, great works take time. Nietzsche indeed contributed to the destruction of something that, at the time, many wanted ardently: “the fundamental values.” He was convinced that his ideas were dynamite, but all blasting is, ultimately, a child’s play compared to the persistent action of erosion. And if no revolution took place after Nietzsche, at least he caused a radical change in the general climate.
III
Nietzsche became famous overnight the same year he was admitted to an asylum. But the person immediately disappeared behind the work, behind the exposed and fought doctrine. This work moved the spirits and divided them in twain; it also marked the beginning of a new era, which provided mottos and slogans. The literature on Nietzsche, for and against, increased greatly…
IV
In the circle of collaborators responsible for the historical-critical edition of his complete works, whose first volume appeared in 1934, the project finally came to publish a full biography of Nietzsche. This was undertaken by Richard Blunck during the Second World War. The owner of the Archive [Nietzsche’s sister] had died in 1935; Hitler had already visited her before and had brought with him as a gift Nietzsche’s swab.
Blunck was unlucky: the whole edition of the first [biographical] volume, which was printed in early 1945, was destroyed during air raids. The volume did not appear until 1953. Blunck died in 1962, when he was working in the other volumes. Curt Paul Janz, a professional orchestra musician that had received a solid philological training at Basel, continued the work of Blunck. The result was the three-volume biography published in 1978-1979 by Hanser Verlag. This is a thorough study that collects all the facts and circumstances of the life of Nietzsche. My work has a lot to thank him.
For an easy reading,
you can read all of my excerpts
of Zweig’s essay on Nietzsche
at Ex libris (here).
Further to what I said yesterday.
A deeper response to the questions raised by Stubbs would imply reminding my readers that, at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that there are two universes: the empirical universe and the subjective universe. Karl Popper comments that he who doesn’t believe in the second universe would do well to think about his own death—it is so obvious that a whole universe dies when a human being dies!
What I find nauseating in today’s academia is that it is an institution that denies the existence of this second universe. One could imagine what would happen if a student of psychology or psychiatry tried to write a lyric essay about why Nietzsche lost his mind, like the one that Stefan Zweig wrote and I have been excerpting for WDH. (And wait for the next chapters where Zweig’s story reaches its climax…)
A proper response to Stubbs would require an absolute break from the epistemological error, a category error, so ubiquitous in the academia. That is to say, we must approach such questions as if they were questions for our inner worlds.
The best way to respond to Stubbs, following what I have said about psychoclasses, is imagining that few whites have touched the black monolith of the film 2001. Those who have touched it—and here we are talking of the “second” universe that the current paradigm barely acknowledges—know that the most divine creature on Earth, the nymph, must be preserved at all costs.
This is not the sphere of objective science. Since we are talking of the ideals of our souls, let me confess that I became a white nationalist in 2009 when I lived in the Spanish island Gran Canaria, near Africa. The big unemployment that started in 2008 affected me and, without a job and completely broke, I spent a great deal of time in the internet. When I learned that a demographic winter was affecting all of the white population on planet Earth I was watching a Harry Potter film featuring a blondest female teenager. I remember that I told to myself something to the effect that, henceforward, I would defend the race with all of my teeth and claws.
However, to understand this universe I would have to tell the (tragic) story of the nymph Catalina: a pure white rose who happened to live around my home’s corner decades ago, who looked like the girl in that Parrish painting. But I won’t talk about the tragedy (something of it is recounted in Hojas Susurrantes). Suffice it to say that since then my mind has been devoted to her beauty and, by transference, it is now devoted to protect all genotype & phenotype that resembles hers…
Once we are talking from our own emergent universe (emergent compared to the Neanderthals who have not touched the monolith), Stubb’s questions are easily answered if one only dares to speak out what lies within our psyches:
So let me think of some fundamental questions that need to be answered: Why does it matter if the White race exists, if the rest of the humans are happy?
Speaks my inner universe: Because the rest of humans are like Neanderthals compared to Cro-Magnon whites. Here in Mexico I suffer real nightmares imagining the fate of the poor animals if whites go completely extinct (Amerinds are incapable of feeling the empathy I feel for our biological cousins).
Why does it matter if the White race continues to exist if I personally live my life out in comfort?
Speaks my inner universe: Because only pigs think like that. (Remember the first film of the Potter series, when Hagrid used magic to sprout a pig’s tail from Dudley’s fat bottom for gulping down Harry’s birthday cake.) We have a compromise with God’s creation even when a personal God does not exist.
Why should I be concerned with the White race if it only recently evolved from our ape-like ancestors, knowing that change is a part of the universe?
Speaks my inner universe: Because our mission is that we, not others, touch again the black monolith after four million years that one of our ancestors touched it.
Why should I be concerned with the existence of the White race if every White person is mortal, and preserving each one is futile?
Speaks my inner universe: It is a pity that no one has read The Yearling that I had been excerpting recently. I wanted to say something profound in the context of child abuse but that is a subject that does not interest WDH readers. Let me hint to what I thought after reading it.
To my mind the moral of the novel is not the moment when the father coerced his son to shoot Flag, but the very last page of Marjorie’s masterpiece. Suddenly Jody woke up at midnight and found himself exclaiming “Flag!” when his pet was already gone.
The poet Octavio Paz once said that we are mortals, yes: but those “portions of eternity,” as a boy playing with his yearling, are the sense of the universe. The empirical (now I am talking of the external) universe was created precisely to give birth to these simple subjective moments: figments that depict our souls like no other moments in the universe’s horizon of events.
Why should I be concerned with preserving the White race if all White people who live will suffer, some horribly, and none would suffer if they were wiped out?
Speaks my inner universe: The boy suffered horribly when his father obliged him to murder Flag, yes. But the moment of eternity, as depicted in Wyeth’s illustration, had to be lived. It will probably leave a mark if another incarnation of the universe takes place…
Below, some passages of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, translated by Anthony Ludovici:
§ There was not a single abortion that was lacking among them—no, not even the anti-Semite. Poor Wagner!
§ My whole life is essentially a proof of this remark. In vain have I sought among them for a sign of tact and delicacy towards myself. Among Jews I did indeed find it, but not among Germans. I am so constituted as to be gentle and kindly to every one—I have the right not to draw distinctions—, but this does not prevent my eyes from being open.
§ Above all, I have to direct an attack against the German people, who, in matters of the spirit, grow every day more indolent, poorer in instincts, and more honest, who, with an appetite for which they are to be envied, continue to diet themselves on contradictions, and gulp down “Faith” in company with science, Christian love together with anti-Semitism, and the will to power (to the “Empire”), dished up with the gospel of the humble, without showing the slightest signs of indigestion.
§ There is such a thing as the writing of history according to the lights of Imperial Germany; there is, I fear, anti-Semitic history—there is also history written with an eye to the Court, and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself. Quite recently an idiotic opinion in historicis, an observation of Vischer the Swabian aesthete, since happily deceased, made the round of the German newspapers as a “truth” to which every German must assent.
Let me prove that no other Western philosopher was “one of us.” Either do a contribution to the West’s Darkest Hour (see donate button at the sidebar) or, if you live in the US, go to your second-hand bookstore and purchase Matthew Stewart’s The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy. In second-hand bookstores a copy of this 1997 book must be just a couple of bucks and you can send it to me by regular mail. (From the country where I am living, Amazon Books’ shipping prices sometimes cost even more than a brand new copy!)
You won’t be disappointed by my chosen excerpts of Stewart’s hilarious book in a new series of posts that I might call “Debunking philosophy” or something like that. Presently I cannot quote it for this blog because I only own a Spanish translation of An Irreverent History of Philosophy, not the original in English.
Thank you for your support.
Cannot believe it. Just a cursory search on this guy adored by Greg Johnson and so many commenters at Counter-Currents—for God’s sake!: this is Wikipedia’s lead paragraph on Julius Evola—:
He was never a member of the Italian National Fascist Party (and thus rejected for not being a member), or the Italian Social Republic, and was furthermore engaged in constant criticism of fascism and declaring he was an anti-fascist. Evola regarded his position as that of a sympathetic right-wing intellectual…
One of his successes was in regards to the racial laws; his advocation of a spiritual consideration of race won out in the debate in Italy, rather than a solely materialist reductionism concept popular in Germany.
—and Evola looks, at first sight, like a typical coward conservative, not even a race realist of the kind of Jared Taylor.
“Spiritual consideration of race” rather than “the concept popular in Germany”? Jeez! Unless the wiki got this all wrong, this single piece of data corroborates what I said in my entry about this guy and the pompously called “Buddha,” and it also vindicates my putting one of his books into the trash can, where I guess other of his works also belong.
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.
