web analytics

Category: Will Durant

Categories
Ancient Rome Giorgio de Chirico Marcus Aurelius Miscegenation Will Durant William Pierce

The broken lyre

Or

Marcus Aurelius for dummies

 
Andrew Anglin was a fan of Stefan Molyneux’s videos, before YouTube cancelled Molyneux’s account. But Moly used the term ‘philosophy’ not in the academic sense of the term, but in the sense of free inquiry. Here I would like to talk about philosophy in the sense as it is studied in universities.

After I posted ‘Nietzsche for dummies’ I found out that there is a YouTube channel that collects other lectures by professor Michael Sugrue (see the 20-second introductory video: here). As we know, our point of view of are the 4 and 14 words—ethics and aesthetics. Therefore, for a priest so imprisoned in the most threatening hour in history for these words, what they usually call Western wisdom we call Western folly. For example, about an article on this site from 2013, which last November was translated into German, I said:

It is an important article. It exposes the quackery of all that Bertrand Russell called ‘wisdom of the West’ (in fact, Wisdom of the West is the title of one of Russell’s books I have read: an introduction to Western philosophy). But Russell et al weren’t wise. There is nothing wise about what philosophers have been saying for millennia if we start serious thinking from the darkest hour of the West. If the ‘philosophers’ had been wise since ancient Athens, they would have warned us about the danger of interbreeding with the mudbloods of the Mediterranean.

That same month I wrote an article under the title ‘Philosophy’ where I show that an Italian scholar lost his cool, in his philosophical dictionary, in his article ‘Racism’. It never ceases to amaze me how what is wise—say the race realism of the books published by American Renaissance—is seen as iniquitous by normie academics, and the cobwebs of a guy like Kant are seen as wisdom: an inversion of values. Earlier, in May 2018, speaking of Aristotle and Greek science I wrote:

But was it wisdom? The real ‘wisdom of the West’ only started with a politician like Hitler and, on the other side of the Atlantic, a white supremacist like Pierce. Ancient philosophers ignored the dangers involved in conquering non-white nations without the policy extermination or expulsion.

Sugrue’s lectureship I heard today was about Marcus Aurelius. One of the faults of academic philosophy is that, because Western history has been written by Christians and secular neochristians, instead of confronting the dogma of the age,the philosophy degree becomes scholasticism that rationalises the dogmas of the age. If we start from a different reading of history, for example, the stories we have reproduced here by the Spanish writer Evropa Soberana or the American William Pierce, this new contextualisation produces a radically different way of looking at Western thinkers.

Sugrue speaks of Marcus Aurelius without properly contextualising the good emperor in his own time. Once, unlike Sugrue and academic philosophers, our point of view is the sacred words, transvaluations occur: such as seeing the late imperial Romans as the bad guys and the invading Germans as the good guys.

The academy obscures from us the fact that many Romans of Marcus Aurelius’ time were no longer the pure Nordids who founded Rome. So many conquered people migrating to Rome made it the NY of the Ancient World: a melting pot (the 2000 Hollywood film Gladiator, depicting the time of Marcus Aurelius, reflects something of this). As a Nordic scholar wrote, Rome declined precisely because of miscegenation.

Sugrue speaks of none of this because, as a normie (Ridley Scott who filmed Gladiator is another normie), he is unable to see what was happening throughout the empire in the time of one of Rome’s two emperor-philosophers (the other being Julian the Apostate, sometime later). As blind as all mainstream scholars who have taught philosophy over the centuries, Sugrue is incapable of uttering anything like what Pierce said:

When Marcus Aurelius, the last Roman emperor able to inspire any real fear or respect in the Germans, tried to recruit troops to defend Rome’s Danubian border in 168, not even the threat of death induced Italians to enlist in the legions. The emperor finally resorted to conscripting all of Rome’s gladiators, most of whom were Celtic or German prisoners of war, into the army, whereupon the Roman masses, as addicted to their spectator sports as America’s masses are to their TV, threatened insurrection. ‘He deprives us of our amusements’, the populace cried out in anger against the emperor, ‘in order to make us philosophers like himself’. As they had become less martial, the Romans—or, rather, the Jews, Syrians, Egyptians and debased Greeks of the Empire who unworthily bore that once-honorable name—had grown ever more fond of the cruel blood sports of the Colosseum.

For the context of this Pierce quote see: here. But even normie writers like Will Durant perceived that the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius already reflected the decline of the vital spirit of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Ten years ago, for example, I quoted some words of Durant’s that are worth reciting:

The Romans, coming to despoil Hellas in 146 b. c, found these rival schools dividing the philosophic field; and having neither leisure nor subtlety for speculation themselves, brought back these philosophies with their other spoils to Rome. Great organizers, as much as inevitable slaves, tend to stoic moods: it is difficult to be either master or servant if one is sensitive. So such philosophy as Rome had was mostly of Zeno’s school, whether in Marcus Aurelius the emperor or in Epictetus the slave; and even Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine’s Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded his stern gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic On the Nature of Things, follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise.

Imagine the exhilarating optimism of explicit Stoics like Aurelius or Epictetus. Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the Dissertations of the Slave, unless it be the Meditations of the emperor. ‘Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do; and you shall live prosperously’. No doubt one can in this manner dictate the future, and play royal highness to the universe.

Nations, too, like individuals, slowly grow and surely die. In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, —‘to look on all things with a mind at peace’. Here, clearly, the old pagan joy of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre.

If what Sugrue will say in other videos makes me react intellectually, I will confront this academic philosopher with the POV of the priest of the sacred words.

Categories
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Aristotle Philosophy Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 8

Aristotle and Greek science

 

Under Plato he studied eight—or twenty—years; and indeed the pervasive Platonism of Aristotle’s speculations, even of those most anti-Platonic, suggests the longer period. One would like to imagine these as very happy years: a brilliant pupil guided by an incomparable teacher, walking like Greek lovers in the gardens of philosophy. But they were both geniuses; and it is notorious that geniuses accord with one another as harmoniously as dynamite with fire. Almost half a century separated them; it was difficult for understanding to bridge the gap of years and cancel the incompatibility of souls.

On the same page Durant adds that Aristotle

was the first, after Euripides, to gather together a library; and the foundation of the principles of library classification was among his many contributions to scholarship. Therefore Plato spoke of Aristotle’s home as “the house of the reader, ” and seems to have meant the sincerest compliment; but some ancient gossip will have it that the Master intended a sly but vigorous dig at a certain book-wormishness in Aristotle.

After an unquoted paragraph Durant writes:

The other incidents of this Athenian period are still more problematical. Some biographers tell us that Aristotle founded a school of oratory to rival Isocrates; and that he had among his pupils in this school the wealthy Hermias, who was soon to become aristocrat of the city-state of Atarneus. After reaching this elevation Hermias invited Aristotle to his court; and in the year 344 b.c. he rewarded his teacher for past favours by bestowing upon him a sister (or a niece) in marriage. One might suspect this as a Greek gift; but the historians hasten to assure us that Aristotle, despite his genius, lived happily enough with his wife, and spoke of her most affectionately in his will. It was just a year later that Philip, King of Macedon, called Aristotle to the court at Pella to undertake the education of Alexander. It bespeaks the rising repute of our philosopher that the greatest monarch of the time, looking about for the greatest teacher, should single out Aristotle to be the tutor of the future master of the world.

You can imagine treating white women like barter today? But it was healthier than Western feminism.

Philip had no sympathy with the individualism that had fostered the art and intellect of Greece but had at the same time disintegrated her social order; in all these little capitals he saw not the exhilarating culture and the unsurpassable art, but the commercial corruption and the political chaos; he saw insatiable merchants and bankers absorbing the vital resources of the nation, incompetent politicians and clever orators misleading a busy populace into disastrous plots and wars, factions cleaving classes and classes congealing into castes: this, said Philip, was not a nation but only a welter of individuals—geniuses and slaves; he would bring the hand of order down upon this turmoil, and make all Greece stand up united and strong as the political centre and basis of the world. In his youth in Thebes he had learned the arts of military strategy and civil organization under the noble Epaminondas; and now, with courage as boundless as his ambition, he bettered the instruction. In 338 b.c. he defeated the Athenians at Chaeronea, and saw at last a Greece united, though with chains. And then, as he stood upon this victory, and planned how he and his son should master and unify the world, he fell under an assassin’s hand.

Durant ignored what I know about psychoclasses: different levels of childrearing from the point of view of empathy toward the child. It is disturbing to read, for example, that according to Plutarch, Olympias, Philip’s wife and the mother of Alexander, was a devout member of the orgiastic snake-worshiping cult of Dionysus. Plutarch even suggests that she slept with snakes in her bed. Although Oliver Stone’s film of Alexander is Hollywood, not a real biography, the first part of the film up to the assassination of Philip is not that bad as to provide an idea of the unhealthy relationship between Olympias and her son.

“For a while,” says Plutarch, “Alexander loved and cherished Aristotle no less than as if he had been his own father; saying that though he had received life from the one, the other had taught him the art of living.” (“Life,” says a fine Greek adage, “is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.”)

But was it wisdom? The real ‘wisdom of the West’ only started with a politician like Hitler and, on the other side of the Atlantic, a white supremacist like Pierce. Ancient philosophers ignored the dangers involved in conquering non-white nations without the policy extermination or expulsion.

Categories
Ancient Greece Arthur C. Clarke Pedagogy Philosophy Plato Socrates Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 7

To save the white race from extinction it is not enough to start using the Semitic words that our Christian parents instilled in us as insults to Neo-Christian Aryans. We also have to make a destructive critique of what we have inherited from the secular world in the West. I have said that, if theology has been the wicked party for the West (tomorrow I’ll resume Deschner’s chapter on St Augustine), philosophy has been the stupid party. On Plato, I have little to add about the stupidities of his philosophy to what has already been said in the previous article of this series. But I still would like to say something.
In the section of Durant’s book, ‘The Ethical Problem’, Plato puts Thrasymachus discussing with Socrates. I must confess that I find quite irritating the figure of Socrates, with his eternal questions always putting on the defensive his opponents. If I had walked on the streets of Pericles’ Athens, I would have told Socrates what Bill O’Reilly told Michael Moore when he met him on the street: that he would answer his questions to Moore as long as he in turn answered O’Reilly’s questions. Otherwise we are always on the defensive against Socrates/Moore.
On the next page, Durant talks about the Gorgias dialogue and says that ‘Callicles denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong’. In the next section of the same chapter Durant quotes the Protagoras dialogue: ‘As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them’. Some pages later Durant quotes one of the passages in which I completely agree with Plato:

The elements of instruction should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge.
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.

But several pages later Durant tells us that ‘the guardians will have no wives’ and about empowered women, he adds:

But whence will these women come? Some, no doubt, the guardians will woo out of the industrial or military classes; others will have become, by their own right, members of the guardian class. For there is to be no sex barrier of any kind in this community; least of all in education—the girl shall have the same intellectual opportunities as the boy, the same chance to rise to the highest positions in the state.

One would imagine that Durant would strenuously rebel against this feminism in ancient Athens, but no. In the final section of the chapter, devoted to Durant’s criticism of the philosopher, he wrote instead:

What Plato lacks above all, perhaps, is the Heracleitean sense of flux and change; he is too anxious to have the moving picture of this world become a fixed and still tableau…
Essentially he is right—is he not?—what this world needs is to be ruled by its wisest men. It is our business to adapt his thought to our own times and limitations. Today we must take democracy for granted: we cannot limit the suffrage as Plato proposed…
…and that would be such equality of educational opportunity as would open to all men and women, irrespective of the means of their parents, the road to university training and political advancement.

Will Durant, who wrote this book in the 1920s, was nothing but a normie. And compared with us, white nationalists are normies too: as they have not figured out that, in addition to Jewry, they have enemies in the very fabric of history, which is why Plato proposed a static state.
A dynamic society is not recommended because, as we have said elsewhere, the human being is not ready for Prometheus’ fire. Since the Industrial Revolution whites have done nothing but commit ethnic suicide for the simple fact that they are still children playing with matches who burn their own house. That is why, at the end of my ¿Me Ayudarás?, I recommend a static society as Arthur Clarke described it in Against the Fall of Night when writing about Lys, a novella later expanded into The City and the Stars: the utopia that I imagine with the paintings of Le Lorraine.

Categories
Ancient Greece Athens Painting Philosophy Plato Sparta (Lacedaemon) Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant William Pierce

The Story of Philosophy, 6

The Republic

The last words of Will Durant in the previous entry of this series: ‘Let us study The Republic’. But in this post I will not quote any passage from Durant’s book. I will give my opinion on this classic work that bequeathed us historical Greece.
In the first place, it must be recognised that the race of the ancient Greeks was of the Nordic type. In The Fair Race there are two articles on the subject, one written by a Spaniard and another by an American. Since then civilisation has metamorphosed so much, especially in axiology, technology and demography, that what Plato wrote could only be valid after the extermination of all non-whites, as William Pierce put it at the end of The Turner Diaries. Sorry, but the Greeks of the ancient world were physically beautiful, says the article of the mentioned Spaniard. Hence, in our technological times with a demographic explosion that, because of Christianity, reversed the beautiful values of the classical world, only in an ethnically cleansed Earth what the ancient Greek philosophers discussed could become germane again.
The tragedy of the Aryans reminds me of the meaning of the One Ring in the tetralogy of Wagner, a symbol that Tolkien would pick up in his novel. It has been Aryan greed what blinded them to the fact that using non-whites as capital was suicide in the long term. That is the moral that emerges from the stories about the white race of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp. But even from the 19th century some Americans felt the danger, as shown in the paintings of Thomas Cole. A world with the destroyed Ring means, in many aspects, a return to the small cities: the subject matter not only for Plato but for Aristotle. For the latter, a Greek city should not exceed ten thousand inhabitants…
That is precisely the moral of my books in Spanish: after so many hells in ‘the Black Iron Age’ as I said as a teenager, I propose a return to the Shire so to speak. For the same reason, if there is something that hurts me when I see the sites of white nationalists, it is that they are cut off from their European past. I have spoken on this site about music, but not much about painting. The following is the oil canvas by Claude Le Lorrain (1600-1682) that appears at the top of my Facebook page:

On my most recent trip to London I saw some splendid canvases of Le Lorrain’s paintings in the National Gallery. Outside of London and the madding crowd, some English aristocrats of past centuries took Le Lorrain as a paradigm to mould their extensive lands, and even some buildings in the countryside. Some of this can even be seen in the movies of this century. In this very beautiful film of 2005 for example, when Mr Darcy declares his love to Elizabeth, I could not contain my admiration for that place: it seems to be taken from a canvas by my favourite painter (watch the last ten seconds of this YouTube clip)! Who of the contemporary racists has such contact with their visual past?
A true racist should reject any image of pop culture sold to us by American Jewry. But going back to Plato. Let us suppose, just suppose, that the white race will emerge alive from the coming apocalypse and that, in an Earth already without Orcs and (((Sauron))), they would reconstruct white civilization. In an unpopulated land and with only a few small cities, like the one seen in the painting above, the question would arise as to what kind of government is desirable. In this world, the survivor could be asked about Plato’s magnum opus, something like a second chance or a fresh start for the West. So let’s expose our views about the philosopher.
The first thing I could say is that the distortion that is taught in the academy about the classical world is such that we would have to change the title of The Republic for the simple fact that it is an invented title. The original in Greek was Politeia, whose translation would be ‘regime or government of the polis’, that is to say how to govern a small city-state. The title The Republic falsifies the mind of Plato already from the cover of the book we see in bookstores, inducing the popular notion that the author was an utopian. He was nothing of the sort. Politeia was the recipe of Plato to remedy the bad governments he saw in ancient Greece. His starting point had been the examination of the Greek cities of his time, not of a hazy future but the four regimes of Greece: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny.
Imagine a world à la Lorrain in which only whites inherit the Earth. The bookstores, this time with imprimaturs that do not admit anything from Semitic pens, would show Plato’s main work with the original title… But that does not mean that we should consider the disciple of Socrates a provider of laws, a new Lycurgus. At this stage of the historical game it is obvious that Plato did not see, nor could he see, the iniquity of the world; of men, of the Jewry that would invent Christianity, and the catastrophic industrial revolution.
For example, Plato does not speak of the need to keep Nordic blood pure, at least not with the lucidity the Nazis had. The closed polis of the Spartans complied more with the laws of nature than the open polis of the Athenians (in this Durant was fatally wrong). But not even the Spartans knew Pierce’s formula: to maintain an Aryan culture one must maintain the Aryan ethnicity: and that can only be done by exterminating or expelling all non-Aryans.
Plato’s missteps go further. Above I complained that the typical racist of today has no internal contact with the world of the great masters of painting. Another common ailment in those who have abandoned Christianity is that they keep infectious waste that puts the Aryans at a clear disadvantage compared to the Jewish quarter. One of these residues is the belief in post-mortem life. He who believes this doctrine will not fight as much in this life as the Jews are currently fighting, insofar as they believe they will have a second chance (either in the afterlife or reincarnated).
Jews do not masturbate their minds with unearthly hopes: one of their enormous advantages before us. But to be fair to Christianity I must say that even before Christianity Plato already masturbated his mind, and the minds of his male pupils, with such fantasies: what I have called in this series the root of the baobab. In fact, Plato finishes his great work sermonizing us: if we stick to what he says and believe in the immortal soul, we will be happy:

Thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and will be our salvation, if we believe that the soul is immortal, and hold fast to the heavenly way of Justice and Knowledge. So shall we pass undefiled over the river of Forgetfulness, and be dear to ourselves and to the Gods, and have a crown of reward and happiness both in this world and also in the millennial pilgrimage of the other.

As I observed in a previous entry, during the savage destruction of most of the books of the classical world by the Judeo-Christians, it survived a work that many consider a precursor of the Christian doctrine of the human soul. The Republic, to use the falsified title, is anachronistic in many other ways. In addition to his post-mortem masturbations, what is the point of praising Plato when he did not oppose the incipient miscegenation of Athens with the greatest possible vehemence?
Unlike every rabbi who practices intuitive eugenics, Plato did not even leave offspring. He was not a husband or father. In his case, no good genes passed to the next generation (where his sperm ended, I dare not speculate). Moreover, he believed that in his republic women could perform the same functions of the male, even the highest. Compare the feminism of this philosopher of 2,400 years ago with what the Orthodox Jews of New York teach today: they educate their women to behave like little red riding hoods!
Whoever complies with the laws of Nature survives and who violates them perishes. At present the Jews fulfil them and the Aryans violate them. The white race will not be saved unless it makes a destructive criticism of much of what passes for ‘wisdom of the West’, starting with the Greeks.

Categories
Philosophy Plato Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 5

The preparation of Plato


Plato’s meeting with Socrates had been a turning point in his life. He had been brought up in comfort, and perhaps in wealth; he was a handsome and vigorous youth—called Plato, it is said, because of the breadth of his shoulders; he had excelled as a soldier, and had twice won prizes at the Isthmian games. Philosophers are not apt to develop out of such an adolescence.

But Will: Had NS Germany been allowed to thrive, instead of the most serious crime of all History that your government perpetrated when you were of my age, some athletes would certainly be philosophers right now…

“I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of Socrates.”
He was twenty-eight when the master died; and this tragic end of a quiet life left its mark on every phase of the pupil’s thought. It filled him with such a scorn of democracy, such a hatred of the mob, as even his aristocratic lineage and breeding had hardly engendered in him; it led him to a Catonic resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by the rule of the wisest and the best.

Exactly what we must feel now about American democracy: delete it! By the way, ‘Catonic’ is an allusion to Cato’s Carthago delenda est.

We must be prepared to find in these dialogues much that is playful and metaphorical; much that is unintelligible except to scholars learned in the social and literary minutiae of Plato’s time.
[Plato] complains of the priests (who go about preaching hell and offering redemption from it for a consideration—cf. The Republic, 364),

The Republic, 364: ‘And mendicant prophets knock at rich men’s doors, promising to atone for the sins of themselves or their fathers in an easy fashion with sacrifices and festive games, or with charms and invocations to get rid of an enemy good or bad by divine help and at a small charge. They appeal to books professing to be written by Musaeus and Orpheus, and carry away the minds of whole cities, and promise to “get souls out of purgatory”, and if we refuse to listen to them, no one knows what will happen to us’.

but he himself is a priest, a theologian, a preacher, a super-moralist, a Savonarola denouncing art and inviting vanities to the fire. He acknowledges, Shakespeare-like, that “comparisons are slippery” (Sophist, 231), but he slips out of one into another and another and another; he condemns the Sophists as phrase-mongering disputants, but he himself is not above chopping logic like a sophomore.
The Dialogues remain one of the priceless treasures of the world. The best of them, The Republic, is a complete treatise in itself, Plato reduced to a book; here we shall find his metaphysics, his theology, his ethics, his psychology, his pedagogy, his politics, his theory of art. Here we shall find problems reeking with modernity and contemporary savor: communism and socialism, feminism…

You see? The damned baobab seeds…

“Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato,” says Emerson. Let us study The Republic.

Categories
Ancient Greece Philosophy Plato Socrates Story of Philosophy (book) Voltaire Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 4

Socrates

If we may judge from the bust that has come down to us as part of the ruins of ancient sculpture, Socrates was as far from being handsome as even a philosopher can be. A bald head, a great round face, a deep-set staring eyes, a broad and flowery nose that gave vivid testimony to many a Symposium—it was rather the head of a porter than that of the most famous of philosophers.

This should alert us. Ugliness in ancient Greece was almost a refutation (cf. the articles about ancient Greece in The Fair Race). Now that we have been seeing that, throughout the centuries after Constantine, the Christians burned down every library from the ancient world they found, why did the Platonic vision of Socrates was spared?

They were a motley crowd, these youths who flocked about him and helped him to create European philosophy. There were rich young men like Plato and Alcibiades, who relished his satirical analysis of Athenian democracy; there were socialists like Antisthenes, who liked the master’s careless poverty, and made a religion of it; there was even an anarchist or two among them, like Aristippus, who aspired to a world in which there would be neither masters nor slaves, and all would be as worrilessly free as Socrates.

This should also alert us and for the same reasons. Why did it have to be precisely a preamble to Christian ethics what came to us from the classical world as ‘ancient wisdom’?

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how those cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself.

But no philosopher ever knew himself. No one! As a professional autobiographer I can say this without blushing. As I quoted a certain writer in the first of my autobiographical volumes:
‘Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts’.

There had been philosophers before him, of course: strong men like Thales and Heraclitus, subtle men like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles; but for the most part they had been physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?

The old distinction between science and philosophy. But Socrates provided the baobab seeds that, after Christianity, grew to cover the Western planet for centuries, as we will see in my next comment.

How could a new and natural morality be developed in Athens, and how could the state be saved?
It was his reply to these questions that gave Socrates death and immortality. The older citizens would have honored him had he tried to restore the ancient polytheistic faith; if he had led his band of emancipated souls to the temples and the sacred groves, and bade them sacrifice again to the gods of their fathers. But he felt that it was a hopeless and suicidal policy, a progress backward, into and not “over the tombs”. He had his own religious faith: he believed in one God, and hoped in his modest way that death would not quite destroy him; but he knew that a lasting moral code could not be based upon so uncertain a theology. [1]

There is no doubt about it: Nietzsche was right in his first book, which was so liked by Wagner, by claiming that Western thought had suffered a deformation since Socrates! If there is anything historical about Durant’s appreciation, where on earth did Socrates get his monotheism? Wherever he got it, there is no doubt that the Christians, who imposed a Semitic monotheism upon us, took advantage of this wandering philosopher, who ‘never worked’ as Durant tells us, and who ‘neglected his wife and children’.
 
_______________
[1] Cf. Voltaire’s story of the two Athenians conversing about Socrates: “That is the atheist who says there is only one God” – Philosophical Dictionary, art. “Socrates.”

Categories
Athens Philosophy Sparta (Lacedaemon) Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 3

The context of Plato

In 490-470 B. C. Sparta and Athens, forgetting their jealousies and joining their forces, fought off the effort of the Persians under Darius and Xerxes to turn Greece into a colony of an Asiatic empire. In this struggle of youthful Europe against the senile East, Sparta provided the army and Athens the navy. The war over, Sparta demobilized her troops, and suffered the economic disturbances natural to that process; while Athens turned her navy into a merchant fleet, and became one of the greatest trading cities of the ancient world. Sparta relapsed into agricultural seclusion and stagnation, while Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races of men and of diverse cults and customs, whose contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis and thought.

This is the common way among normies to see Sparta unaware that, unlike the Athens that was in process of miscegenation, thanks to the closed, collectivist society of the Spartans (and apparently the Thebans), they kept the Aryan race for centuries to such a degree that the beautiful female Spartans did not need makeup. Durant here inverts the values so to speak. But we must understand that secular neo-Christians like Durant share the ethnosuicidal, universalist ideals of the Christian. Regarding the first philosophers, Durant adds:

They asked questions about anything; they stood unafraid in the presence of religious or political taboos; and boldly subpoenaed every creed and institution to appear before the judgment-seat of reason. In politics they divided into two schools. One, like Rousseau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions; and that law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak. Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

Here it is clear that the weed of egalitarianism appeared without Judeo-Christian influence, although in the days of Athenian youth it was easy to purge weeds.
Since I was a child I liked Le Petit Prince, where the little blond had to constantly be weeding his planet, so that the weed would not grow in baobab as happened in other neighbouring planets. When I was in Grammar School and read the story of Saint-Exupéry, everything I saw in movies and television seemed like positive messages for the West and the race of little blonds. I never would have imagined that the weed would grow in my lifetime until the planet split in pieces.
Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too many, they split it in pieces…
Children, I say plainly, ‘watch out for the baobabs!’

Categories
Cicero Deranged altruism Destruction of Greco-Roman world Eschatology Friedrich Nietzsche Hegel Immanuel Kant Philosophy René Descartes Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 2

On the uses of philosophy

There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.
Some ungentle reader will check us here by informing us that philosophy is as useless as chess, as obscure as ignorance, and as stagnant as content. “There is nothing so absurd,” said Cicero, “but that it may be found in the books of the philosophers.” Doubtless some philosophers have had all sorts of wisdom except common sense; and many a philosophic flight has been due to the elevating power of thin air. Let us resolve, on this voyage of ours, to put in only at the ports of light, to keep out of the muddy streams of metaphysics and the “many-sounding seas” of theological dispute.
But is philosophy stagnant? Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science—problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.
So let us listen to these men, ready to forgive them their passing errors, and eager to learn the lessons which they are so eager to teach, “Do you then be reasonable,” said old Socrates to Crito, “and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of Philosophy herself. Try to examine her well and truly; and if she be evil, seek to turn away all men from her; but if she be what I believe she is, then follow her and serve her, and be of good cheer.”
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s comment:
All this sounds very nice. I will never have a command of the English language as Durant had it. But I had to celebrate more than fifty springs to begin to understand things I did not see when, as a teenager, I wanted to pursue a philosophy course. Now I see things that not only an adolescent is incapable of seeing on his own, but that even when doing a philosophy career the ‘mature’ academic usually doesn’t see.
With elementary knowledge of the central tragedy of the West—the takeover by the Judeo-Christians that destroyed the classical world—, Durant’s exposition seems ignorant. Although he does not devote whole chapters to the scholasticism that he so despises, he does not seem to notice, as Ferdinand Bardamu realised in an entry reproduced this month, that the ‘secular’ liberals, socialists and utopians were influenced by the Christian ethic in an extraordinary way.
But long before I read Bardamu I was extremely irritated by the philosophy of the back doors of Kant and Descartes (and I don’t forget the chapter on ‘The New Understanding of God’ in Does God Exist? by Hans Küng and in his erudite study on Hegel). Descartes alleged that he began his philosophical system in tabula rasa but, as soon as he reached the conclusions he wanted, he immediately went to the church to thank Providence. The self-deception not only of Kant and Descartes but of other modern philosophers is truly overwhelming: everything opposite to the ‘Know Thyself’ that was recorded in the Oracle of Delphi before the damned Christians destroyed it.
Now I see from another point of view what in the academy is called philosophy. The transition from Christianity to an authentic secularism is so traumatic that the so-called modern philosophers were stuck in a sort of chess for the sophisticate: epistemologies and metaphysics, instead of using their minds to culminate the apostatising process from Christianity.
Only Nietzsche started to succeed from the viewpoint of this new understanding of philosophy. Keep in mind that not even the vast majority of secular white nationalists have apostatised altogether, as seen in the fact that they continue to preach love for the Jews, whom they want to deport to Israel. Compare such love with the hatred the Jews feel for the Aryans—no ethnic state for them until they become extinct—and we will see how ‘Neo-Christians’ are still those atheists among contemporary racists. The love that these ‘racists’ feel for the Jews and other races is something that the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world would not have understood. Comparing it to chess again, those who have the white pieces but hold Semitic malware in their minds and ‘love their enemies’, the coloured pieces, are doomed to lose the battle.
In the previous entry about Durant’s book I said that philosophy did not exist. I exaggerated and would like to correct myself. We can rescue the term philosophy as long as we apply it to the thinkers of the Greco-Roman world. There has not been, nor will there be again, philosophy in the West until the day when all the churches that have installed Semitic malware on the Aryan psyche have been brought down by a triumphant Fourth Reich.
As I said a couple of days ago, the message on this site is the very opposite of what Andrew Fraser recently wrote in The Occidental Observer.

Categories
Newspeak Philosophy Story of Philosophy (book) Will Durant

The Story of Philosophy, 1

Stupid and evil intellectuals
Just as the American Democratic and Republican parties have been described as ‘the evil party and the stupid party’, in my humble opinion theologians are evil and western philosophers stupid. Next week I will resume Deschner’s chapter about three evil theologians among the Church Fathers. But concurrently I’d like to start a new series about what in the academia is labelled ‘philosophy’.
As I tried to tell Greg Johnson, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, in a comment he did not let pass six years ago, ‘No single so-called great philosopher of the Western tradition that I know figured out that all the great events of history have a racial basis’. Responding in my site to Johnson’s censorship, and having in mind the artificially obscure language of German philosophers I added: ‘Know my golden rule before I decide whether or not I’ll spend precious time reading a heavy intellectual or a heavy philosopher: If he writes in opaque prose, forget it; he probably is a base rhetorician!’ (for an explanation of the term ‘base rhetorician’ see my full response).
A critical series on a popular introduction to the field of philosophy, for example Will Durant’s 1926 The Story of Philosophy, will reveal that the so-called great philosophers have been stupid, insofar as they largely ignored the hard fact of western racial and cultural preservation—race.
Durant himself was a normie. Had philosophy made Durant wise, he would have written about eugenicist Madison Grant and historian Lothrop Stoddard, and later about the Jewish Question, National Socialism, and the Hellstorm Holocaust. Instead, when Hitler moved to Germany he married Ariel Durant, born in Ukraine as Chaya Kaufman to Jewish parents…
I would say that philosophy (from Greek, philosophia, literally ‘love of wisdom’) does not exist. What exists is the pretention of some academics to love wisdom. However, Durant, who lived from 1885 to 1981, was a highly gifted writer. Some of his observations in The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers are worth quoting. In the preface to the second edition he made astute observations against the obscurantists of language. But the windy verbiage in philosophy is only one of the features among western philosophers that moves me to call them stupid:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
No apology is offered for the neglect of epistemology. That dismal science received its due in the chapter on Kant, where for forty pages the reader was invited to consider the puzzles of perception. This chapter should have pleased the young pundit, for it came very near to obscurity. (However, one professor of philosophy, in a Midwest university, sent in the information that he had been teaching Kant for fifteen years, and had never understood Kant’s meaning until he read this elementary chapter.) For the rest, the book suggested unamiably that the nature of the knowledge process was but one of the many problems of philosophy; that this single problem was unfit to absorb the attention which the savants and the Germans had lavished upon it; and that its weary exploitation was largely responsible for the decadence of philosophy. The French have never yielded to this craze for epistemology to the exclusion of moral and political, historical and religious philosophy; and today even the Germans are recovering from it…
The Chinese philosophers were not only averse to epistemology, they had an almost Gallic disdain for prolonged metaphysics. No young metaphysician could admit that Confucius is a philosopher, for he says nothing about metaphysics, and less about epistemology; he is as positivistic as Spencer or Comte; his concern is always for morals and the state. Worse than that, he is disreputably intelligible; and nothing could be so damaging to a philosopher. But we “moderns” have become so accustomed to windy verbiage in philosophy that when philosophy is presented without the verbiage we can with difficulty recognize it. One must pay a penalty for having a prejudice against obscurity.
The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other. But this appears to have displeased the pundits; nothing so hurt the book with them as its smiles. A reputation for humor is disastrous to statesmen and philosophers: Germany could not forgive Schopenhauer his story of Unzelmann, and only France has recognized the depth behind the wit and brilliance of Voltaire.

Categories
St Paul Will Durant

Durant on Paul

‘Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ… Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ’.

—Will Durant