One of the constant themes of middle class thought in modern times is the insistence that it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too. It’s for this reason that middle class activists demand world peace while also demanding lifestyles that can only be maintained at the cost of constant war, and middle class idealists insist that all people should be equal while also insisting that their own class privilege be respected by everyone else. It’s long been fashionable to claim that this is pure hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is conscious, and this habit isn’t. The middle classes are distant enough from the brutal realities of life among the laboring classes, and the equally brutal power politics of the ruling classes, that they can stay comfortably situated in a Cloud-Cuckooland all their own, in which every triangle has four sides if you just want the fourth side badly enough.
For this reason, you can time the emergence of middle class culture in each part of Europe by noticing when the kind of thinking just described gets a foothold. In England that got under way in the seventeenth century, in France it arrived very early in the eighteenth, but in the fragmented German states of central Europe, middle class culture didn’t really find its feet until about the time that the eighteenth century gave way to the dawn of the nineteenth. It was in the bubbling cauldron of exciting if generally self-contradictory ideas that resulted that Ludwig Feuerbach emerged, and found an enthusiastic fan in the young Richard Wagner.
Feuerbach is probably the most influential modern thinker you’ve never heard of. He was one of those intellectuals whose ideas become so widespread, and become so unquestioned a basis for later thought, that his books end up seeming bland and clichéd to later readers. To understand why he became so popular in his day, and why he was so completely forgotten afterwards, it’s essential to put him in his context.
He was born in 1804 in the kingdom of Bavaria, the fourth of five sons of a distinguished legal scholar, Anselm von Feuerbach, and his relentlessly conventional wife Wilhelmine. Like so many German intellectuals of his time, he started out studying for the clergy, but veered away from that path in young adulthood. In Ludwig’s case it was philosophy that lured him away from the pulpit. A year at the University of Heidelberg, studying with disciples of Hegel, was all it took; for his later studies he went straight to Berlin, where Hegel himself was teaching.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel! He was the most influential thinker of modern times. This isn’t a compliment, because his influence was consistently, astoundingly bad. Much of the cascading dysfunction of modern times is quite frankly his doing. Choose a modern ideology that has left carnage in its wake, and far more often than not it can be traced straight back to Hegel. Mussolini’s pet philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, was a Hegelian. So, of course, were Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Pol Pot. So, to pass from tragedy to farce, is Francis Fukuyama, whose proclamation that the presidency of George Bush senior was the fulfillment of human history ranks well up there in the annals of intellectual idiocy. Hegel has a lot to answer for. He apparently never picked up his pen without coming up with at least one really bad idea.
To understand Hegel, and especially to get a clear sense of his influence on Feuerbach, it’s necessary to grasp the horrible predicament in which Immanuel Kant left philosophy as the nineteenth century dawned. Two centuries before, René Descartes set out to doubt everything that could reasonably be doubted. He didn’t succeed, but a trio of successors from the British Isles—John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume—pushed the same project much further than Descartes dreamed of going. Kant finished the job, showing with impeccable logic that the human mind can’t actually know much of anything for certain, and that even such basics as space, time, and causality are structures of human consciousness, not objective realities.
Every mature philosophical tradition gets to this realization eventually. The normal and healthy response is to shift gears from “What can we know about the universe?” to “How should we live in a universe we can’t really know?” That shift produced the great traditions of world philosophy—the Confucian and Taoist schools in China; the six classic schools of Indian philosophy; the Stoic, Epicurean, and Neoplatonist schools in Greco-Roman philosophy, and so on. Despite some noble efforts, Western philosophy by and large hasn’t gotten there yet. In Hegel’s day, certainly, the West was still too caught up in its own wildly overinflated sense of cosmic entitlement to consider giving up on the goal of knowing everything about the world, and science hadn’t yet taken over from philosophy as the fashionable mode of claiming universal knowledge.
Hegel was popular in that context precisely because he seemed to offer a way to set Kant’s dreadful insights aside. Two of his more impressively bad ideas served that purpose. First, like several other idealist philosophers of the time, Hegel argued that the human mind had a capacity for “intellectual intuition,” which allowed it to jump over the barriers to direct knowledge Kant had discussed and grasp the unalloyed truth about the universe. In practice, of course, “intellectual intuition” amounted to “I think it, therefore it must be true;” as a result, no two people got the same results out of their intellectual intuitions, and the whole thing came crashing down in the early twentieth century when too many people noticed just how underdressed the emperor of idealist philosophy actually was. At the time, however, it seemed very convincing—at least to those who wanted to be convinced.
Hegel added another really bad idea to that argument, though, and this one was a true stroke of malign genius. He argued, on the basis of an unusually turgid set of metaphysical arguments, that it wasn’t just that human understandings differed: truth itself changed over time. What was true in one age was not necessarily true in another, because history was the process by which the Absolute expressed itself step by step, thesis by antithesis by synthesis, in the world of space and time. What that means, of course, was that you can never say to a Hegelian, “Okay, what happened the last time this was tried?” Nor can you point out that a stupid idea remains a stupid idea even if it’s wrapped up in the latest cutting-edge jargon. The Hegelian will simply give you a blank look, go on to make the same mistakes all over again, and get clobberred by the inevitable consequences.
So this was the heady intellectual atmosphere in which Ludwig Feuerbach came to intellectual maturity. After a couple of years, Feuerbach drifted away from Hegel himself and became a core member of the so-called Left Hegelians, who abandoned Hegel’s own more or less conservative politics to embrace the exciting new notions then being developed by Romantic political thinkers. Politics, though, had little appeal for Feuerbach. He remained obsessed by the Christianity he had rejected, and he set out in utterly typical middle-class fashion to come up with a way to have his cake and eat it too: to embrace some version of Christian faith without believing in anything that would offend the sensibilities of even the most diehard atheist.
He had plenty of help in that project. Undercutting Christianity was a popular sport in radical circles in those days, because the various statelets of German-speaking central Europe had all embraced and exploited some form of Christianity as a piece of crowd-control equipment. Depending on where you were, the government supported and manipulated either conservative Tridentine Catholicism or conservative Pietist Lutheranism as one of its basic instruments of dominion. Sermons pushing government policies resounded from every pulpit, and the practice of Christian virtues took a back seat to propping up a dysfunctional political status quo.
(It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is always what happens when a denomination becomes established as the official religion of a country. Clergy and believers embrace establishment because they think it means the government will be guided by their religion, but what inevitably happens is that their religion ends up controlled by the government. It was a stroke of real genius on the part of the founding fathers of the United States to protect churches from this fate by forbidding any establishment of religion; this clause of the Constitution has a very large role in the continuing vitality of Christianity in the United States as compared to Europe.)
Anyone who disagreed with the status quo in nineteenth-century Germany—and there was plenty to disagree with—accordingly turned against the established Christian churches. This is where, for example, the entire modern project of redefining Jesus of Nazareth in historical rather than theological terms came from. It was in 1835 that David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Christ, one of the first major works along these lines; the line of descent from there to the much-discussed “Jesus Project” of modern academia is impossible to miss.
Feuerbach, however, was too relentlessly middle-class to accept the scrapping of Christianity; once again, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. His major venture along these lines, The Essence of Christianity, was published in 1841 and became one of the most wildly popular books of its age. The basic argument of Feuerbach’s book will be instantly familiar to those of my readers who know their way around modern liberal Christianity. To Feuerbach, gods in the usual sense of the term—superhuman intelligent beings ruling the cosmos—did not and could not exist. To him, furthermore, human beings had no immortal souls, and the entire cascade of realities mapped out by mystics and theologians didn’t exist either.
What, then, was the point of religion? To Feuerbach, gods were the metaphors human beings created for their own highest potentials, and religion was the institution through which people revered those potentials. The gods of Greece, in his view, embodied the Greeks’ image of who they were and what humanity could be, and the temples of Greece were the homage the Greeks paid to their own sense of identity. In the same way, to Feuerbach, Jesus of Nazareth was simply the Western world’s vision of what humanity could be, its sense of its own potential and that of the human species, and the Christian churches had simply lost track of the fact that their real purpose was to give people a venue to worship themselves.
The potentials just mentioned, it’s worth mentioning here, did not belong to individuals. They were the exclusive property of humanity as a whole, and revealed themselves over time, in standard Hegelian form, in the onward march of human knowledge and collective social virtue. Individual men and women were finite and mortal, but humanity was infinite and eternal, capable of going forever forward toward some supposedly glorious destiny or other. “The knowledge of a single man is limited,” wrote Feuerbach, “but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind.”
That is to say, Feuerbach contributed mightily to the process by which the modern Western world got burdened with the whole steaming mass of pretentious drivel about Man the Conqueror of Nature, Man the Summit of Creation, Man the Measure of All Things, and all the rest of it. Feuerbach wasn’t the first person to propose ideas like these, of course, but he did it in a way that caught the European imagination, and thus did much to launch the process by which the Western world embraced its present absurdly overinflated notions of its own universal importance and grandiose cosmic destiny.
His effect on religion was even more specific. If you go for a walk in the church district of any reasonably liberal American city, and look at the titles of next Sunday’s sermons on the reader boards outside each church, odds are you’ll find very few that mention anything so dowdy as God, or Jesus, or the salvation of souls. What you’ll find instead are enthusiastic pledges of allegiance to the latest social, cultural, and political trends, usually wrapped up in the kind of verbiage that would seem unusually facile on a cheap greeting card. That’s Feuerbach’s legacy: a vast range of religious denominations that rarely if ever get around to talking about God.
It’s also why, when I went back to finish my college degree in 1991 and took an introductory course on religious studies, that course examined pretty much every conceivable way of thinking about religion except the one that actually motivates religious people to practice their faiths: that is to say, the viewpoint that gods exist and religion is the traditional lore we have for dealing with them. The professor chattered on endlessly about the social dimension of religion, the psychological dimension of religion, the political dimension of religion, the linguistic dimension of religion—anything and everything except, of course, the religious dimension of religion.
He bristled quite fetchingly when I pointed this out. It probably didn’t help that I noted that all this handwaving was like an attempt to understand hunting that started from the assumption that edible animals did not and could not exist, and went through the most ornate contortious trying to explain what it was that sent people into the forest with bows and guns during that strange ritual period known as “deer season.” I’m sure you can imagine how that went over. I hadn’t heard about Feuerbach yet, and I’m quite sure the professor in question was just as innocent on that subject as I was, yet Feuerbach’s phantom hovered in the classroom as we spoke—and it haunts the modern Western world’s entire attitude toward religion to this day.
It also pervades The Nibelung’s Ring. Wagner, as I noted earlier, was among the vast number of European intellectuals who were bowled over by Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Unlike most of his peers, he wasn’t satisfied to use it to come up with an excuse to go to church for social reasons why dismissing all of Christian theology out of hand. He was a dramatist, and the surviving ancient Greek tragedies were among the many dramatic works that attracted his rapt attention. Feuerbach provided him with the lens he needed to interpret the gods and goddesses who play so important a part in the old Greek drama—and it inspired him to see the gods and goddesses of ancient Germanic myth in the same light.
That’s the thing that makes The Nibelung’s Ring so fascinating. To Wagner, Wotan, Fricka, Loge, and the other gods and goddesses of Valhalla aren’t superhuman persons, as they are to believers in Heathen religion. Nor are they archetypes—it was another century before Jung pursued the images of the gods into the deep places of the psyche and came up with that theory—or mere dramatic characters. They are personifications of the essential principles of Western civilization. To Wagner, as a German-speaking European, it was self-evident that since all the cultures of western and central Europe had been founded by Germanic barbarians, the old Germanic gods and goddesses were the clearest possible expressions of what post-Roman European humanity was and was capable of becoming.
Nor did he limit that status to deities. To Wagner, all the characters in the old myths of Siegfried and Brunnhilde, Gunther and Hagen, and the magic golden hoard that ended up in the depths of the Rhine, were lenses through which the nature, history, and destiny of the modern Western world could be seen with utter clarity. The gods and goddesses, in his vision, were the legacies of the past. The heroes and villains of the first generation of the story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs embodied the present, and Siegfried and Brunnhilde—they were the humanity of the future, a future that in his wholly Feuerbachian vision extended upward and onward into limitless vistas of liberty, light, and love.
That was what inspired Wagner in his first outline of the Nibelung story, “The Nibelung Mythos as Sketch for a Drama,” and it guided him straight through the writing of the librettos for the four operas. The writing process was made a little more complicated than it might have been by the fact that he didn’t originally plan on writing four operas. His first draft was for a single opera, Siegfried’s Death. By the time he’d gotten partway into that, he realized that it would require a second opera, The Young Siegfried, to explain to the audience what was going on. That, in turn, required a third opera, which became The Valkyrie, and then he capitulated to his creative vision and reworked the entire sequence into the four librettos we have.
As he originally envisioned the cycle of operas, it was a tale that began in tragedy and ended in triumph. The first opera, The Rhinegold, sets out in music, drama, and vivid imagery the principles that underlay the modern world of his time. The second and most of the third trace out in equally symbolic form the entire history of European humanity from the Dark Ages to 1848, and the last act of Siegfried and the whole of The Twilight of the Gods were intended to map out the future as Wagner imagined it, in which Siegfried’s heroic death and Brunnhilde’s equally heroic self-sacrifice brought the whole vast structure of European society, with all its injustice and lovelessness, crashing to the ground so that the utopian new world of freedom and love we discussed two weeks ago could take its place.
Then, of course, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 burst on the scene and just as promptly collapsed. It didn’t take Götterdämmerung to bring them crashing down, either: in Saxony, where Wagner was at the center of the revolutionary movement, a very modest pushback from hastily assembled royal armies did the job, and sent him fleeing to Switzerland in disguise with a price on his head. Plenty of people who had committed themselves to the revolutionary vision responded to this shock by giving history a blank look and continuing to believe that utopia was on its way. That was where Marxism got its initial following, since Marx promised that the longed-for revolution was an inevitable product of the dialectical process in history, and simply hadn’t gotten around to arriving yet.
Wagner didn’t embrace that easy evasion. He realized that the events of 1848-1849 proved that there was something profoundly amiss at the heart of his political beliefs, and thus undercut the entire vision of history that informed those beliefs—and The Ring. It is to his credit that he grappled with that challenge, and even more to his credit that he turned for guidance to one of the few philosophers in Europe in his day who rejected Hegel’s handwaving and traced out Kant’s insights to their logical conclusion. We’ll follow Wagner there in two weeks.
Is it too late to build asylums to appropriately contain Hegel’s followers?
WOW this serious has been so enthralling. I really so mesmerized by this portion of history I never knew. Thank you for this. I feel during this time in the US this is just fascinating to read.
>German society in the 19th century, as elegant as it was pretentious. The radicals had good reason to be irritable,
Have you ever met a German who *wasn’t* grumpy?
>Obviously a ritual activity celebrating the autumn equinox, since of course deer can’t exist.
Well, these days they do exist but they’re all corrupted with CWD, which is basically mad cow but for deer. So maybe he really is celebrating the equinox, even though he’d rather be shooting at a deer.
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I’m guessing that Hegel wasn’t the first person to come up with these ideas, he just happened to package and market them in a way that he could put his name on? I suppose you could stretch things out there and make the claim he was the first postmodernist, or at least, he’s the spiritual ancestor to that particular way of (not) thinking.
I swear, it’s like there’s lore to the lore to the lore. Why is there an elf in my game? Tolkien. Where did Tolkien get his ideas from? Wagner. Well, where did Wagner get his ideas from? Feuerbach. Well, where did he get his ideas from? Hegel.
It’s lore all the way down.
You’re telling us that most of philosophy and the philosophy of cience in the West today (and probably a lot of science) can be considered a brain fart? Yes, you’re right, I agree with you, many ideas in the West today are nonsense.
It is an advantage that many cultures have preserved their own worldviews, far from Western nonsense.
Synthase, there was one for a while; it was called the Soviet Union. Unfortunately it had to close due to financial problems. 😉
Kyle, thank you! The history of ideas is fascinating stuff and it also has a lot to say to what’s going on in today’s world. (That’s probably why you won’t learn about it in school or university…)
Other Owen, yes, but she was drunk at the time. (So was I, admittedly.) As for the origins, no, in his own way Hegel was an original thinker. He’s one of the great examples of someone who was brilliantly original and creative, but wrong.
Zarcayce, that’s a fair assessment. I simply find it useful to explain to people why it’s a brain fart, and how it got to be a brain fart, in the hope of decreasing the production of further cerebral flatulence! The thing I’d point out is that the West also has its wisdom — it’s just you have to hold your nose and go past the pungent region of mainstream culture to get there.
Okay, that one got the beverage reaction. LOL
“…like several other idealist philosophers of the time, Hegel argued that the human mind had a capacity for “intellectual intuition,” which allowed it to jump over the barriers to direct knowledge Kant had discussed and grasp the unalloyed truth about the universe.”
Unfortunately this reminds me very much of Rudolf Steiner. Too bad he fell for this line of thinking as well.
While I am an idealist, (I think ‘The All is Mental’ and the cosmos is fundamentally spiritual), I do not think that gives us direct access to the raw, naked truth. While humans and other living spirits are microcosms of the great all-pervading cosmic spirit, that doesn’t mean we are omniscient or have direct access to the macrocosm. Nor does it mean we can force The All to do whatever we want by demanding it.
Another fine installment. Been a while since you’ve done a post on Schopenhauer. Looking forward to it.
JMG, do you think Hegel, “brilliantly original and creative” as you say, fell in love with his own ideas or did he perhaps find that a few articles and comments here and there got him enough attention, maybe because of the originality, that he said to himself Here’s my ticket to position and influence?
Is it fair to say that while Hegel’s prose, which I have not read and don’t intend to read, may have been turgid his ideas were fairly simple?
John,
(1) “It’s long been fashionable to claim that this is pure hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is conscious, and this habit isn’t. ” I call this “Evil by Proxy”. It is a massive defect in human consciousness and “rationality”: keep yourself from seeing the sources and outcomes of what you lust for and what you do, by handing off responsibility to another agency (the more “official” the better). It’s one of the most disgusting of human failings, and all of us display it every day, although some much more than most.
(2) “Hegel added another really bad idea to that argument, though, and this one was a true stroke of malign genius. He argued, on the basis of an unusually turgid set of metaphysical arguments, that it wasn’t just that human understandings differed: truth itself changed over time. What was true in one age was not necessarily true in another . . .”
Isn’t that evident everywhere! Especially noisome, to me, is that allowance by “legal scholars” to never-endingly re-“interpret” the short and precisely written rules of the Bill of Rights. As Bill Clinton assured us, “it depends on what ‘is’ is”
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https://slate.com › news-and-politics › 1998 › 09 › bill-clinton-and-the-meaning-of-is.html
Bill Clinton and the Meaning of “Is” – Slate Magazine
Here’s what Clinton told the grand jury (according to footnote 1,128 in Starr’s report): “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and …
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At least once before I suggested you write a book sketching out philosophy through the ages, as an introduction for those of us who have never formally explored philosophy, but live with its legacy.
As I recall, you didn’t seem too excited about undertaking such a book. But I would like to suggest it again. Through the decades, you’ve written a massive amount of words about various philosophers and philosophical ideas. I think it will be a shame if you never try to gather those tidbits up, organize them into a framework, and publish them.
The organization, depth, choice and thoughts written can — and should — be idiosyncratic to you. It is fine if you only write about one philosopher in a-hundred and don’t try to detail, in depth, the interlinkage of contributions. I just think it would be nice to read a short, organized exposition on how philosophy has impacted the practical flow of civilization. And I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather get that overview from! Please consider it.
>He’s one of the great examples of someone who was brilliantly original and creative, but wrong
But maybe that might change in time? =)
Monty Python sums up the philosophers:
Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ‘ya ’bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And René Descartes was a drunken fart: ‘I drink, therefore I am.’
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.
“The writing process was made a little more complicated than it might have been by the fact that he didn’t originally plan on writing four operas. ”
Mission creep is a problem for opera composers too? I can’t say I’m surprised, but it was still good for a chuckle.
Even as a technical writer there have been times where I realized I had to explain more than originally expected.
Thank you for this great essay! I just re-read Toynbee’s Volume 12 (“Reconsiderations”) in order to refresh my memory of his description of the Syriac-Hellenic culture-compost (I still find it the best model for the first millennium AD). I ended up reading on.
Toynbee’s rather vague propositions on the nature and purpose of “higher religions” and the future of humanity sound more than a bit like Feuerbach, too… It is Man’s destiny to form a brotherhood of saints on earth, and the “higher religions” ought to lead the way towards that perfect state on earth. “God”, in Toynbee’s writings, sounds rather like a philosophical idea that humans happen to have stumbled upon.
P.S.: You summarize Wagner’s reasoning as “since all the cultures of western and central Europe had been founded by Germanic barbarians…” That is the point that so surprised me on reading his “Wibelungen” essay. France got its name, a rather small genetic contribution, and a smattering of words and sounds from the Franks, but not much else – its culture derives much more from the Roman Empire (and of course older layers). A fortiori for southern Europe. The western and southern parts of modern Germany use the German language, but most historians would nowadays agree that the Roman (and pre-Roman) influence on how people live even today in these parts is immense, starting with the locations of the cities. The Roman influence decreases towards the east where Wagner was born, but it doesn’t disappear.
Question for you, what is the philosophy of magic? Or magical thinking. Where would I find this?
Per comment by Gnat, I would like to second a book about history of philosophical ideas. Perhaps you could write a book about what the philosophy of magic is. As part of that put in the history of ideas and philosophers. To explain much about the world today. As well as what the philosophy of magic has to fight against and why it is misunderstood, if that is the problem.
Thank you for the wonderful history and explanations of how people today think. Greatly appreciated.
John–
Not to wander too far on a tangent, but understanding the function of religion as the means by which humans relate to these beings we refer to as gods has helped me resolve some longstanding inner conflicts I have had with Christianity and with Paul’s teachings in particular, primarily re the role of women and the relationship between the sexes (but also other human institutions such as slavery, as discussed in Ephesians 6). In discussions with devout Christians who (understandably) looked askance at my disagreements with Paul, the point was made that, “Well, this is how God set up his Church: the Apostles were men; Paul as an inspired author states that women cannot hold positions of authority over men.” This appeal to authority has never been satisfactory to me, but I had a realization recently as I stepped back and looked at the issue from my now-polytheistic perspective. A deity can, of course, direct his or her followers as he or she wishes in regards to the form of worship that deity desires. And if YHWH desires his followers to be organized in such a way, well, YHWH has the power and authority to do so. (Your oft-made suggestion that there may very well be a number of beings answering to the various forms of Jesus invoked today makes a lot of sense in this regard too.) And I can be a guest in such a house of worship, so long as I understand and acknowledge my place as guest and behave respectfully. It is liberating to understand that we are not debating something universal (woman is subordinate to man) but rather something specific and related to the worship of a certain deity (this congregation of faith holds that their Scriptures state that women are subordinate to men in their particular ecclesia). Since I am not a member of that ecclesia, my opinion isn’t relevant and I need to be appropriately respectful of the traditions of the house I am visiting.
The USSR may have closed due to lack of funds, but I understand that China, North Korea, and Cuba are still operational… even if China has changed operating procedure substantially from how their founding documents state they should operate.
I too used to belive that the intelect could break thru Kant’s prison by the way of contacting spirits since the spirits theoretically proceed from realities above reason and senses. But then it ocurred to me that even if an Eshu gave me intuitive knowledge once my monkey brain started processing and digesting that knowledge i’d have to do that using a symbolic language present in my mind, made from ineficient senses, a mind made for foraging fruits and killing animals, with limited bandwidth and working memory. Going right back to where i started.
And that’s assuming that the spirits that Man can contact easily are actually more informed then us and not in a kantian prison like us, but different due to their differing natures.
Great post! I remember reading about this in college. Of all of the ‘Young Heglians, Max Steiner is the only one I have found to not be absurd. Of course I reject his Materialism, but I appreciate his writing on the ‘creative void.’
So in a very real way, we have come back around to talking about the so-called disenchantment of modernity and the west.
@Other Owen,
> Have you ever met a German who *wasn’t* grumpy?
Harumph! *grumble* 😛
@JMG,
> The thing I’d point out is that the West also has its wisdom — it’s just you have to hold your nose and go past the pungent region of mainstream culture to get there.
Wouldn‘t the wisdom of the West also make for a nice essay or two? It has even got an alliteration right in the title! Just thinking aloud… 😉
Milkyway
John,
You bend my mind quite often and not just with the masterly prose and intellectual vigor of your essays. As often as not it’s in off-hand replies to comments. Your reply to Synthase’s rhetorical quip “there was one for a while; it was called the Soviet Union. Unfortunately it had to close due to financial problems.” fascinated that part of my brain that will never look at that part of history the same again. A low bow, a whispered “touché” and a tip of my hat kind sir. PS you’ll hate this but I’m jumping on the history of philosophy bandwagon.
@Mary Bennet, #9, you ask, “Is it fair to say that while Hegel’s prose … may have been turgid his ideas were fairly simple?”
I can’t speak for all of his ideas. But you might be interested by Walter Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind, Vol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel. Kaufmann’s prose is clear and lucid; and he argues that Hegel had some valuable insights into how the mind works, but that he then hid those insights behind some of the worst writing in history. Kaufmann’s last chapter (chapter 46, which occupies about the last nine pages of the book) summarizes five theses that he finds in Hegel, in terms that are straightforward and make them sound sane.
I don’t know whether the rest of Hegel’s thought can be treated the same way. There is no question that most people over the years have read Hegel in a way that makes him sound crazy—not to mention astoundingly wrong! Whether the common (and historically influential) reading is actually a mis-reading, is a question I am not competent to judge.
JMG,
Where do these ideas come from? I can just see a group of angels sitting in St. Mike’s Hair of the Dragon pub alternating pints of Ambrosia Ale™ with shots of Celestial Bourbon™ and one of them says, “I know, let’s see what they do with this idea.” Find a useful id…, I mean candidate or two and send out the muses.
“…Absolute expressed itself step by step, thesis by antithesis by synthesis, in the world of space and time.”
Hegelian expression of Absolute through tetrad of Understanding (positive element, thesis), Dialectical Reason (negative element, antithesis), Speculative Reason (reconciling element, synthesis) and Sublation reminds me of the Tetragrammaton as a formula of creation, as described in the works of Mouni Sadhu or Bardon. I’m curious whether there was a Hegelian influence on Hermeticism, or a Hermetic influence on Hegel, or was it just a coincidence?
Synthase, the Beverage Reaction (though it probably should be renamed the Beveridge Reaction) should feature in some piece of retro science fiction!
Enjoyer, yep. Steiner grew up in late 19th century central Europe at a time when Hegel’s style of idealist philosophy was overwhelmingly accepted, so it’s no surprise that he fell into the same trap. I freely grant that The Philosophy of Freedom is one of the most cogent and thoughtful works of its kind, but it’s still founded on an illusion, and it’s an illusion that he stayed stuck in all through his career — he was never able to treat inner experience (whether rational or clairvoyant) with the same necessary epistemological skepticism as outer experience.
Douglas, it’s in the works. We’ll cover the old grouch of Frankfurt two weeks from today.
Mary, that’s the 64,000-Reichsmark question! In my less charitable moods I agree with Schopenhauer that Hegel was a deliberate fraud who excreted a vast cloud of verbal squid ink to make himself look profound. The reaction he got was the same one Gilbert and Sullivan parodied in Patience:
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Then what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
Where Hegel’s clear enough that you can find some ideas in his writings, they are not merely simple ideas, but stupid. His philosophy of history is a case in point — it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see from a clever but shallow high school sophomore, and the whole vast creaking edifice of Hegelian philosophy of history has been created by people who are convinced that Hegel couldn’t possibly have meant such balderdash and so tried to wrench some kind of profound meaning from his utterances.
Gnat, two good points. As for the history of philosophy, I’d have to find a publisher willing to take on so crashingly unfashionable a project, but I’ll put it in the think-about-this file.
Other Owen, I’m prepared to admit that there was a five minute interval in 1967 — I think it was from 6:27 to 6:32 pm London time on February 18 of that year — when Hegel’s philosophy actually made sense. Before and after that interval, not a chance. (Okay, maybe once before in the middle Jurassic and once again 375 million years from now, when the distant descendants of freshwater clams rule the world, but brontosaurs weren’t interested in philosophy and the corbicules, the tentacled horrors that will arise from those clams in the deep time of the far future, pondered that five minute interval, glibbered eldritchly to one another, and went on to something more interesting.)
Robert C, there’s that!
Siliconguy, it affects all the creative arts. I originally thought that the story that turned into The Weird of Hali was going to be a single novel.
Aldarion, yes, there’s a definite admixture of Feuerbach in Toynbee, and just about every other thinker of his time. As for the Germanic thing, keep in mind that the German countries of central Europe had a whopping inferiority complex back in Wagner’s time, and made up for it by insisting that all European culture was really German.
Miles, you’re most welcome. The short form — the very short form — is tht the philosophy of magic has its roots in the branch of ancient Greek philosophy known as Middle Platonism, which drew on Pythagorean and Orphic ideas and was adopted (and adapted) by the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions in antiquity, and blended with Neoplatonism in the last centuries before Rome’s fall. It was passed on to the Arabs, who developed it in a rich literature of occultism, and then handed on from there to medieval Europe, giving rise to such works as Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy and the early writings of John Dee. In the 19th century it was further enriched by inputs from Indian philosophy and by the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, which inspired Eliphas Lévi and many of the other founding figures of the modern occult community. Yes, I could probably do a book on that, though I figure it would probably sell fifteen copies in my lifetime. I’ll consider it nonetheless.
David BTL, good. Very good. Yes, exactly; Christians have a specific covenant with a specific deity, and that comes with certain limits and rules that apply to them. I heartily agree that any Christian ought to study and keep the commandments of his or her god strictly; I’d just be happier if they remembered that the rest of us have our own gods, our own covenants, and our own rules, which are not theirs.
Pygmycory, oh, granted. It was an off-the-cuff joke.
Luciano, good! For my part, I tend to think that gods and spirits are also subject to the same fundamental issues with subjectivity that we are; gods are, and spirits can be, much, much wiser than we are, and so can be sources of excellent advice and guidance, but that doesn’t make them limitless. (It’s one of the great differences between monotheism and polytheism that monotheists believe that their god made the universe, and so the universe is an artifact that can be understood; polytheists believe that the universe gave birth to their gods and goddesses, and so the universe is a transcendent source that can only be reverenced.)
Pleh, I haven’t read Max Stirner in a very long time. I’ll consider giving him another look. The Ego and its Own is available from Project Gutenberg, I notice.
Justin, yep. It’s a theme around which most of modern life circles.
Milkyway, er, Bertrand Russell got there 75 years ahead of either of us:
Loon, duly noted! ‘Tis an ill wind that blows no minds. 😉
Hosea, interesting. I’ve read a fair amount of Kaufman, so I may well take the time to see what he has to say about Hegel.
Will1000, your Drunken Angels version of Platonism definitely has its charms!
Brent, there are several writers now who claim that Hegel was influenced by German Hermeticism; my German isn’t good enough to allow me to check their claims, but the idea is out there. I’m fairly sure, though, that Papus (Gerard Encausse), from whom Bardon and MS both got the idea, was picking up Hegel’s formula and trying to do something interesting with it.
Many years ago, before he completely sold out to the establishment media, Stephen Colbert parodied the Hegellian idea of intellectual intuition by branding the word ‘truthiness’, that truth is more dependent on your feelings than on actual facts. At the time, he was, of course, parodying Republicans and Trump cultists. Later, he and most of the Democratic establishment quickly fell into their own truthiness trap.
I also see this in the men’s Bible study group I attend on Tuesday nights. Every now and then, the person giving the evening sermon will throw out the phrase ‘Evolution is a lie from the pit of hell.’ There are several critical flaws with that statement. It assumes that Satan rules in hell, which is not Biblically true. Satan will be cast into hell for punishment along with all other unrepentant sinners. But also, it reveals a misunderstanding of what science is and what scientists think about science. Most honest scientists will admit that we are like blind, deaf explorers groping around in the darkness, occasionally finding some pattern, but never completely understanding it. This explains why so many good and great scientists are spiritually/religiously inclined. They have first hand knowledge of the limits of our understanding and that only the Lord God Almighty has the eternal and infinite perspective to know genuine Truth.
Hello Mr. Greer,
It is fascinating to see how different cultural, religious and philosophical traditions in Europe interacted to lay down foundations to modernity, and you have shown Wagner’s Ring cycle to be the perfect vantage point for viewing the history of the Western civilisation. I am glad to see that Christianity is entering the story centre stage, and this piece has helped clarify historically how it came to be that even Western movements seemingly most antagonistic to Christianity are in fact just its offshots. The observation that middle classes were clinging to some aspects of Christisnity while rejecting everything that, in my view, makes it meaningful, really helped make sense for me of some puzzling developments in the history of ideas.
Regarding Hegel, it is interesting that Russians, who did their best to put his ideas into practice (with predictably catastrophic results), were also the first ones to fully grasp their implications and formulate vociferous opposition. For me, nothing demonstrates the absurdity of Hegelianism as the following quotation from Konstantin Leontyev:
“Would it not be horrible and humiliating to think that Moses climbed Sinai, that the Greeks built their graceful acropolises, that the Romans conducted the Punic wars, that the handsome genius Alexander in a feathered helmet crossed the Granicus River and fought at Arbela, that the apostles preached, that the martyrs suffered, that the poets sang, painters painted, and knights shone at tournaments only so that a French, German, or Russian bourgeois in his formless and comical suit might prosper, individually and collectively, on the ruins of that past glory.”
Admittedly, hailing George Bush as apotheosis of history comes close.
That said, I do see some value in the belief that humans have a limited capacity to access truth about the universe. Although obviously problematic, such stance seems to me the only alternative to a viewpoint that would necessarily end in nihilism. I do hope to see more exploration of this topic in the comments.
The idea that truth changes over time is also something I would not completely dismiss – in my understanding, there is no reason to believe that even laws of physics remain constant throughout the history of universe. There has been a lot of discussion here on the differences between the ages of Pisces and Aquarius – isn’t it conceivable that even patterns followed by human societies might differ somewhat? I wouldn’t wager that this would follow the thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme as imagined by Professor Hegel though.
A question: you hint that there have been attempts even in Western philosophy to find out how to live in a world we do not understand. Could you please elaborate on this? I personally find the Taoist approach most congenial, but would love to find interesting thinkers within the civilisation I am from.
Many greetings!
re: Truths changing over time, dTruth/dt
Not to play devil’s advocate too much but there’s a guy named Sheldrake who got a whole Ted talk banned because he was pointing out that physical constants aren’t as constant as we like to believe. Granted, physical constants aren’t quite the same thing as Truth(tm) but they do live in the same neighborhood subdivision.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hO4p3xeTtUA
The people who shepherd the SI units over time (ha) have cleverly done everything they can to hide this by defining a physical constant to be constant and letting its components vary and hope you never notice. Read up on how the speed of light is defined now, to take one example.
Just a couple of quick points. I agree about the disastrous influence of Hegel, especially in the vulgarised political form which reifies abstract ideas and treats them as concrete objectives towards which we can make progress. (OK, I’m a bit of a Nominalist but I’ve seen with my own eyes the disastrous effects of policies and especially military interventions, in support of vague ideas of “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights” as though these things had an actual objective existence.) The classic, of course is “the Market” which is spoken of, even today, as though it actually existed, and you could go and photograph it somewhere, as opposed to being a purely human intellectual construct.
I also agree about what I describe as the de-sacralisation of religion. It’s almost impossible to explain to people today, of whatever political orientation, that there are societies now (and there were many more in the past) where people believe that their religion is literally true, and behave accordingly. Thus, for example, the total western failure to understand the Islamic State. Thus also the kind of person who says “I can’t believe in a religion which consigns people to eternal damnation.” To which the answer is, it doesn’t matter what you believe, it matters what is true. Billions of people in history (and large numbers today in certain parts of the world) found no difficulty in believing that at all. Our modern western society reduces religious belief to a kind of aesthetics.
Oh, and the Soviet Union didn’t run out of money. The economy was in a bad way but that was true of the West as well. It was a poorly thought-out political reform policy originated by Gorbachev that blew up the system, as the Communist Party started to lose control and Russian nationalists came to power. The catastrophic economic collapse happened after the abandonment of the Communist system almost overnight. One of history’s great “what if”s is how things would have turned out if Andropov had lived, and introduced reforms much more gradually. The Soviet Union might still be there today.
Yes, exactly. I think it’s interesting how we are seeing this attitude in the West cross multiple boundaries and contaminate many different areas of human experience.
Philosophically, we have Hegel and others thinking that the rational faculty of humanity is indomitable and can directly apprehend the capital-t Truth. Technologically we have engineers, scientists, techbros, and the elite in general thinking that humanity can overcome any obstacle with technology, and that there is no limit to technological progress. Militarily we have the West thinking that they’re always the good guys on the leading side of Progress who will cast down all barbarism, evil, and superstition. Spiritually we have people like Steiner who think that their spiritual senses are completely inerrant and that they can apprehend naked spiritual truth. And the icing on the cake is the modern New Agers who think that their spiritual powers are so strong that they can force the Cosmos to give them whatever they want.
The neurosis runs so deep, John! Is there any hope at all? 😅
Apparently Hegel has become fashionable (again) among the kool kidz, i.e. bored, young hipster types who are the children of the wealthy managerial elite. I stumbled upon a little online scene of them on social media. I did a little digging and they seem to be self-identified communists as well, though they emphasized the Hegelian element way more than the communist. I did a little more digging and found they have a ringleader; a guy who is a devoted follower of Russian philosopher Alexandr Dugin. Then I saw the “synthesis” they’re attempted to meme into reality, I kid you not…”MAGA Communism.” Yeah, I had a few laughing fits upon seeing that. This is not the first attempt I’ve seen of Dugin’s followers to convert rich Western PMC youths to some weird form of Third Positionism. I also have a suspicion that Dugin is an occultist, or at least dabbles a bit; some of his philosophy reads to me like a sensible reworking of some of Julius Evola’s rather hazy ideas. So if Dugin is behind what I’ve outlined above, it seems like his own little “Operation Mindfrack”, and of course any such successful operation must include a least a few dollups of Hegelian insanity.
On a somewhat related note, I for the life of me cannot figure out why any earnest truth-seeker would have the any serious interest in Hegel’s ideas.
Finally, Wagner’s revolutionary obsessions being intertwined with his creative works, reminds me a bit of the New Age’s 2012 fixations and also how some of the more esoteric alt righters seriously believed the Trump presidency would usher in a new Golden Age and end the “Kali Yuga”. Suffice it to say, much of the more fantastical of the alt right’s internet presence quickly died down just a few months into Trump’s presidency.
JMG, I truly look forward to and appreciate your ongoing writings each week, thank you
@Aldarion #14
I have been trying for years, without success, to get a copy of all 12 volumes of Toynbee’s unabridged Study of History in hard copy.
Do you have a link to the whole series on-line? If so, I will download it.
Thanks!
Another illuminating essay. You should probably throw Foucault in the same steaming pile of philosophical excrement as Hegel. I would never leave any French post-modernist alone with my children.
I am being baptized in the Orthodox Christian church. Their faith in Jesus and the Nicene creed survived the Stalinist Christian purges and they are very much centered on a Hesychast type of asceticism that has been lost to Western Catholics.
Speaking of synthesis…
“But there are quiet times, you know, centuries long they can be, where the task is only to learn what the busy times discovered; and then there will come a time of new discovery, people in motion.” -John Crowley, Engine Summer
Hopefully by that time it won’t be Hegel that gets discovered and synthesized!
(I absolutely love Little, Big. Beasts had its own rough and wild and feral beauty. But Engine Summer might be my favorite so far. It has a different lyrical power than Little, Big but so full of its own magic.)
Hey JMG
Out of curiosity, what work by Hegel is the easiest for the layman to understand, if any such book exists?
Oh boy I’m on the cliff’s knife’s edge of my seat to see where he found someone to help him grapple beyond Hegel! The mental history of the modern West is so much funner than most people would guess. Thanks for leaving us dangling by the seat of our pants with this one. Also thanks for helping me get the gist of Hegel as I have time to read your blog but not time for the original source material at this phase of my life. For one thing I’m working on a big heritage food festival (a blog about it linked as the website with my name). Tho that seems practical, it is also very practical to understand the intellectual roots of one’s fellow citizens… Helpful post! Salute emoji
@aurelien, I am not sure about the Soviet Union, but I know for a fact that the GDR was only kept afloat during the 1980s by support from the West. In 1982 Mielke, the Stasi boss, told his colleagues that their state was nearly bankrupt. It’s ironic that it was Franz Josef Strauss, the most conservative politician in the Federal Republic, who approved and masterminded a credit deal of billions of DM for the communists. The reason was presumably that he didn’t want to deal with the collapse of the GDR and the consequent entry of millions of un-Catholic, un-conservative new citizens into “his” Germany.
I hope this is not getting too tangential!
Of course you are right that on a consumer level, the Soviet economy collapsed more visibly after Gorbachev.
@Michael Martin, yes, archive.org seems to have all volumes: https://archive.org/search?query=toynbee+study+of+history
Not the same thing as a hard copy, but something at least…
Christopher, you’re very generous in your treatment of science. Yes, science should be a humble groping for those truths we can find through the exercise of our capacity for reason. In practice, too often, it’s become a substitute religion with its own dogma and a hierarchy that can’t bear to be questioned by mere laypeople. As our civilization’s age of reason winds down, I cherish a hope that scientists will ditch the hubris and stop insisting that the laity accept whatever they say with blind faith.
Soko, that’s a great quote by Leontyev — where’s it from? As for the limits of human reason, of course, and it’s quite possible that physical constants change through time; for all we know, nature has habits, not laws, and can change them. The problem with the Hegelian notion is that Hegelians think the universe will change in the direction they want it to change. We’ll be getting to some of the better grade of Western philosophers as this inquiry continues; in the meantime, you might have a look at Michael Polanyi in particular.
Other Owen, nope. You’re not going to get away with obscuring the difference between facts and truths! It’s one of the great fallacies of our time that it’s possible to use an accumulation of facts about physical nature to make up for the absence of truths about the human condition. That said, as I noted to Soko just now, the thing that makes Hegelianism so toxic isn’t that it admits that truths can shift — it’s that it justifies claims that the truth will change to suit our convenience.
Aurelien, thanks for this. Your points about reified abstractions and the complete idiocy with which today’s bourgeoisie approach religious thought are important. As for the Soviet Union, er, as already noted, my comment was an offhand joke.
Enjoyer, fortunately for us all, the universe tends to deal very harshly with that kind of wildly overinflated sense of entitlement. It could only become fashionable during relatively brief intervals of absurd imperial excess; as reality gets a word in — and it always has the last word — I suspect those attitudes won’t hold up well. (The New Age movement has been staggering in circles since the 2012 fiasco, for example; one or two more disconfirmations and it’ll become a marginal fringe cult, as Spiritualism did before it.)
Corax, oog. Couldn’t they just go convince themselves that Thundarr the Barbarian is a revelation of cosmic truth, or something else equally stupid but less harmful?
Dusan, you’re welcome and thank you.
Candy, Sartre is the last French philosopher I can read without gagging, and even he has his bad moments. Foucault? Well, about the only thing I can say for him is that he’s not as much of a waste of time as Derrida. (BTW, your spellchecker also turned “Nicene” into “niceness.” I took the liberty of making both corrections.)
Justin, delighted to hear it. I love all of Crowley’s genre fiction — you’ve read The Deep, right? Another very fine tale.
J.L.Mc12, I haven’t read all his works by any means. Avoid The Phenomenology of Spirit — it’s famously incomprehensible. I found Lectures on the Philosophy of History readable but stupid; you might give it a look.
AliceEm, one moderately successful food festival will do more good for the world than every book written by every Hegelian in all of history, so I certainly won’t criticize your use of time.
The ultimate case of the middle class wanting to have its cake and eat it too is the delusion that we can have the current industrial American middle class without cheap, plentiful fossil fuel energy. Imagining that their houses, cars, jet vacations, big screens and air conditioning are possible with some kind of no-carbon green energy is the ultimate delusion.
That is very apparent when you see that the higher your are in the middle class ( thus the more energy you use) the more you believe in green energy, modular nukes and Lithium growing from trees on the rock candy mountain.
@J.L.Mc12, #37, you ask, “Out of curiosity, what work by Hegel is the easiest for the layman to understand, if any such book exists?”
Hegel wrote a short essay called “Who Thinks Abstractly?” that is actually funny in places—deliberately so, I mean. It’s not an introduction to his system or any of his Deep Thoughts™, but it does a good job of explaining what he means by the word “abstract.” (He uses that word a lot.) You can find it various places around the Internet, among them here: https://hoseaspatio.blogspot.com/p/who-thinks-abstractly.html
Re: Candy and ‘Hesychast type of asceticism’! And re: everybody about actually believing in more-than-material world of spirit
This is exciting. I’m noticing ‘Hesychast’ twice in a week. On august 27th, my mothers birthday, her husband with dementia got up in the middle of the night, took a car and drove 400 miles before he ran out of fuel and the golden alert/state troopers of Indiana found him. At first we didn’t know how early he had left, and we were looking close to home. Then it became known he had passed a traffic cam the next big town over (near I-75 too) at 3am. So we really had no idea where to look. Several of us were driving backroads around this town, not altogether aimlessly cause if he was in the city parked or walking someone would eventually call law cause he was barefoot and non-verbal. But if he was on country roads he could go undetected.
At a certain point, I said a prayer to Saint Anthony aloud, that what is lost now is found. When his car stopped, and was taken to the nearest tow yard and him to the hospital, it landed in the nearest small incorporated area of SAINT ANTHONY. This led to me looking up the Saint to show my mom, whereupon I realized that not only is Saint Anthony a patron of lost items, he is also supportive of elders and, according to Wikipedia, of lost souls and finding one’s spouse! Then I learned that st Anthony of Padua is named for the original ‘the great’ Saint Anthony who is an originator of that ‘Hesychast type of asceticism’ which I too have thought I wanted to incorporate more into my life.
So, candy, thanks for the reminder and couldn’t agree more about not leaving one’s children with Foucault! And about aligning with hardy sects who will not be squashed out even when they face deep adversity.
I almost stopped reading this when I saw the word Hegel. Ugh! I don’t know if the professor who taught Logic really believed that garbage or if he was just sadistic and liked to mentally torture his students. The only thing I learned from that class was to never take another class with that prof again.
As far as “Man as the Conqueror of Nature” what a pile of nonsense. I grew up on a farm and have gardened for about 50 years of my adult life and have lost crops to an early or late frost, pouring rain after a hot, dry spell, and watching all sorts of little critters feast on my tasty veggies.
The City of Toronto has spent untold amounts of money to devise a garbage bin that keeps the racoons out. They may have finally succeeded after several failures.
Human intelligence is vastly overrated.
“Yes, I could probably do a book on that, though I figure it would probably sell fifteen copies in my lifetime.”
Make that sixteen.
Hey Hosea
Thanks for this link
JMG,
Regarding the mistakes of Hegel and Feuerbach et al. and what can be laid at their doorstep, I have a question that I hope isn’t too off topic. I remember you framing Spengler’s work at one point as a civilization filling out all of the notional space from their core set. Obviously Western Civilization made some poor choices in how it filled out its notional space.
Do you see that sort of error as necessary and inherent to the process? Is the fully fleshed out notional space (any notional space, not just ours in the west) intrinsically flawed and full of contradictions by virtue of the limited human minds that made it? To put a fine point on it, If Hegel’s mentors had beat it into him that he absolutely had to think and write clearly and consequently he had produced an entirely different body of work, would the nature of the process of filling out our notional space put the nonsensical fudge factors somewhere else in the western mind? To wit, a philosophical version of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, where any civilizations final form must be logically inconsistent. And, if it is still logically consistent then it isn’t yet complete.
I was confirmed as a young adult in the Episcopal church. The hymns, prayers, ritual, creedal statements that are recited or sung by priest and congregation every Sunday were traditional, classic Christianity. As time went the liberal faction took over the church and still retained all the traditional language along with. extensive readings from the Bible. I sat once through the service of a quite liberal Episcopal congregation. Absolutely scorching judgmental verses from the OT were read. I was bemused by the contrast of those verses and the words of the entire church service with the real beliefs of the congregants. I often thought that the American Episcopal Church should just get it over with, and just merge with the Unitarian Universalist church.
Clay, there’s that! It has the same cause, too. I’ve noted before that everyone I know who’s actually powered their homes directly with renewable energy understands what the hard limits are.
Annette, that “ugh!” was well earned, but somebody has to talk about him to warn those who haven’t yet read him. As for the Toronto trash bins, you know as well as I do it’ll take a year at most before the raccoons figure out how to get into it. If they have to learn how to use welding torches, the trash pandas will do it. 😉
Jessica, I’ll be sure to mention that to a prospective publisher!
Team10tim, it’s a good question to which I don’t have a firm answer. My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that stupidity is not mandatory. If Hegel had decided to become an incomprehensible composer instead of an incomprehensible philosopher, doubtless there would still have been an age of ideological tyrannies, but the ideologies might have been less idiotic.
BeardTree, no doubt. You may be amused to know that the weird Gnostic church in which I was, for even weirder reasons, consecrated as a bishop came into existence because some Universalist ministers heard that their denomination was going to merge with the Unitarians, and say, “NO WAY!”
Speaking of dugin’s ‘mindfreak’ play and it’s Hegelian tendencies, here is description of his book in the ‘arktos’ email (linked here https://campaign-statistics.com/browser_preview/TiwGT3Jldy_SKxnY) , sharing top billing with Evola’s (refuses to allow me to not spell Ebola, speaking of crappy spellcheck jokes tho not as funny as ‘niceness’ for nicene. Cs Lewis would get a double laugh out of that one…) Pagan Imperialism and ‘archeofuturism’ which sounds like a hot mess from the sales pitch but there’s only 5 leather copies for $127 each so they don’t have the inventory to have to convince many people it makes sense.
“Alexander Dugin’s Politica Aeterna takes readers on a compelling journey through the timeless structures of the political Logos, uncovering their deep connections with philosophy, metaphysics, and ontology. Dugin masterfully explores politics as an eternal framework and then traces its dramatic evolution through the ages. By contrasting traditional and modern societies, he reveals how political ideas that once dominated can become marginalized or even “heretical” over time. The book brilliantly captures the tension between these opposing forces, showing *******how history itself brings certain political structures to the forefront while others recede into the background.*******[stars are alice’s]
Dugin challenges us to rethink our understanding of political metaphysics, arguing that time distorts our perceptions and offers only partial truths shaped by specific historical moments. As we navigate through different phases of political history, our views are inevitably coloured by the era we live in. Politica Aeterna is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the deep philosophical roots of politics and the ever-evolving landscape of political thought.”
Speaking of Kant, I’m currently reading a story called “The Gift of Perfect Knowledge”. Set in a world of superheroes and Harry Potter-style magic, its main character is a teenager whose superpower is that he really can know the answer to any question he hears, including those he whispers to himself. It gets him in all kinds of trouble.
Can you define what you mean by middle class? I’ve heard blue collar workers define themselves as middle class because their labor union got them high enough pay to own their homes and buy their personal motor vehicles new. I’ve heard blue collar workers excluded on the grounds that the term only covers workers who earn a monthly salary, not an hourly wage. I’ve also heard the argument that the upper management of large corporations are middle class no matter how much power and wealth they accumulate because they’re still going to a job every day, in contrast to the idle rich who live off their investments and never earn a nickle of their own living. I have known American antiwar activists who spent their adult lives keeping their income low enough so they wouldn’t owe federal taxes and thus wouldn’t be complicit in the U. S. government’s war-mongering, but who identified as middle class because they had been to college. Please give me your definition so I can understand who you’re talking about in that first paragraph.
JMG,
I noticed you mentioned the corbicules in post #26. Does that mean that the last race will make an appearance in some of your writing in the near future? I’ve missed them since Ten Billion.
Cheers,
JZ
It occurred to me on reading this latest tour de force of yours that Hegel was sort of the Judith Butler of the 19th century. — somehow managing to seed pernicious ideas throughout the contemporary zeitgeist ; indeed the two acted as respective midwives for said zeitgeists (it is, after all, a Hegelian term) via turgid masses of unreadable, impenetrable prose. It’s a real puzzle. One can understand how great writing might help disseminate pernicious or doubtful ideas (your January post on Tolkien points to one such example). One can accept that genuinely powerful, truthful ideas can emerge despite bad writing– .e..g., Kant. But how is it that awful prose can be responsible for the promulgation of awful notions? It’s a real mystery.
Paul Robinson in his provocative Opera and Ideas posits Berlioz’s Les Troyens as the ultimate Hegelian opera, embodying in music and drama the Hegelian notion that history has its, uh, own logic independent of what you or I might try to do about it; we’re inevitably trapped in its unfolding. and perhaps unlucky enough to find ourselves at just that moment when thesis clashes with antithesis. As you suggest, Wagner set out in the Ring to write the ultimate Hegelian/Feurbachian opera cycle, but then, as it were, got side tracked when after the failure of the 1848 revolution, he “turned for guidance” as you put it to the, um, thinker whom I. suppose, you will discuss in the next entry in this series. (I’m not giving away any spoilers here, ha ha!)
(Robinson’s is.a great book; he doesn’t just or even primarily highlight how the plots of the operas he chooses as examples apply the ideas fashionable at the time they were being composed, but demonstrates how the musical language of each of the operas itself embodies/ gives voice to those ideas. Take it from me, Berlioz’s music is far more enjoyable than Hegel’s prose; if you have to absorb Hegelian notions, a good performance or recording of Les Troyens is a far more pleasant way to do it than trying to read the original. The last chapter of Robinson’s book juxtaposes Meistersinger and Rosenkavalier to illustrate the sea change that the fin de siecle brought to the ideological/intellectual worlds in which they were composed. The bare bones of the plot of both operas are the same: older person loves younger person, but bows out gracefully when said younger person falls for another youngster and works to block the scheming of an interloper seeking to disrupt the natural course of young love. In the process he (Wagner)/ she (Strauss) learns to accept the coming of old age with grace and dignity and is rewarded with the gratitude of the younger person.. But the social and political environment in which the stories unfold couldn’t be more different — healthy social order in which every act has a social repercussions vs. corrupt decadence in which only individual feeling matters. The approbation Sachs receives is not limited to Walther but encompasses all of late medieval Nuremberg; the Marschallin has to content herself solely with Octavian’s gratitude, albeit embedded in one of the most glorious trios in all opera.)
>(It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is always what happens when a denomination becomes established as the official religion of a country. Clergy and believers embrace establishment because they think it means the government will be guided by their religion, but what inevitably happens is that their religion ends up controlled by the government. It was a stroke of real genius on the part of the founding fathers of the United States to protect churches from this fate by forbidding any establishment of religion; this clause of the Constitution has a very large role in the continuing vitality of Christianity in the United States as compared to Europe.)
Apologies, but I cannot square that with what I observe in real life.
Europe is religiously very diverse. There are traditionally Catholic countries in the South, traditionally Protestant countries in the North, Orthodox in the East, secular countries like France, and minorities everywhere. Some (usually Germanic) countries have state religions, most countries do not, some are secular, while others have (Orthodox) national denominations. Some countries have large Christian political parties, others do not.
Yet Christianity is going down the drain everywhere. If the explanation was as simple as you seem to think (just change the Constitution!), one could see proof of it on a map. I can’t.
Traditional Christianity is circling the drain in the US, too: Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox attendance is still a few decades behind Europe, but you are getting there too (https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx).
This is what church attendance of American Catholics looks like compared to the rest of the world (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253488/where-is-mass-attendance-highest-one-country-is-the-clear-leader) Hint: look at the bottom of the chart.
And these are the trends across Christian denominations in the US: https://www.churchtrac.com/articles/the-state-of-church-attendance-trends-and-statistics-2023.
So much for “continued vitality”. A “stroke of real genius”?
It seems to me that it works precisely the opposite way as what you suggest: when the state supports religion, religion prospers. When the state changes the official religion, the old official religion disappears.
At the end of the 4th century, the Roman emperors decided that Christianity was to be the new state religion: as a consequence, Europe was squarely Christian for the next 1000 years and paganism disappeared.
Then sometimes around 1500, European elites started looking for alternatives to the Roman Church. Some upstart German rulers found it in Lutheranism and adopted it as state religion. As a result, that part of the Germanic world was squarely Lutheran for 250 years and Catholicism was stamped out.
The merchants financing the Dutch and Swiss republics found Calvinism more to their liking. Which then became state religion and prospered for 250 years, too.
The Counter-Reformation played a similar role in Catholic Europe. When Henry IV of France chose for Catholicism, the rest of the country followed.
As long as the elites were invested in Catholicism, in the South, public life was squarely Catholic. Then cool new things caught the fancy of the urban elites: Enlightenment, Liberalism, Nationalism, Socialism, Communism, Consumerism, Capitalism, Atheism and now all the new spiritual fads. Which are now proceeding to stamp out Catholicism.
After Italian troops took Rome in 1870, the Church essentially disestablished itself in Italy. Surely that ushered in a period of “vitality” for Italian Catholicism?
Of course not. Rather, other (Socialist, Nationalist) movements took over the rhetoric of Salvation. By the 1920s, when Catholics decided to take part to Italian political life again, they could not secure more than 20% of the votes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_People%27s_Party_(1919)).
In the 1980s, the role of the Church was further diminished. And what wonderous consequences did that enlightened decision have on religiosity? Surely people ran out to church, singing hymns of praise to the Lord?
Of course not. Church attendance has since dropped by half.
There’s a hilarious battle of Man, the Ruler of the Universe, against a simple cat wanting food.
https://blondihacks.com/furiosas-cat-feeder/
So against raccoons the gods themselves don’t stand a chance.
Hey JMG
On the subject of Hegel, and also making fun of him, are you aware of “Existential comics”? They do philosophy themed comics that make fun of a lot of western philosophers. Here are the ones that feature Hegel.
https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel
Also, did you know that there’s a Youtube channel, “Half hour Hegel”, by a man who has spent 8 years going through “Phenomenology” and posting videos about it because he genuinely wanted to fully understand it.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4gvlOxpKKIgR4OyOt31isknkVH2Kweq2
“Where Hegel’s clear enough that you can find some ideas in his writings, they are not merely simple ideas, but stupid. His philosophy of history is a case in point — it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see from a clever but shallow high school sophomore, and the whole vast creaking edifice of Hegelian philosophy of history has been created by people who are convinced that Hegel couldn’t possibly have meant such balderdash and so tried to wrench some kind of profound meaning from his utterances.”
Like a lot of people, I have never read Hegel. What I have read about Hegel and his followers certainly makes me inclined to agree with this story.
My favourite Hegelian story is about Vissarion Belinsky, one of the first great Russian revolutionary democratic intellectuals, much celebrated in the Soviet Union and still honoured with a library in my city. For a few years, Belinsky strayed from revolutionary democracy because he read the following by Hegel: “the real is rational and the rational is real”. In his attempt to understand what the great man might possibly have meant, he reached the conclusion that because absolute monarchy in Russia exists (=is real), it is therefore rational, and what is rational is good and must be supported by all thinking people. I’m not sure Hegel even meant that last part, though given his political views he might not have disagreed. This probably says more about Belinsky than Hegel, but Belinsky might not have been the only one to stumble in this manner.
Personally, what I find objectionable in Hegel is not so much the idea that truth changes as the idea that it changes in such a predictable, orderly, easy to discern (for a Hegelian) way, and with such absolute and universal applicability. X is absolutely wrong until the 5th of January and no one in their right mind can even think of being for it; then it is absolutely right and everybody must accept it, because the World-Spirit says so (or at least its interpreters do). Now that I think of it, maybe Belinsky wasn’t that far off the mark in his understanding of Hegel?
Presumably we can never actually *know* whether idealism (absolute, transcendental, analytical or otherwise) is the true state of affairs, or whether realism is. ? Similarly, how do we *know* that Steiner eg did not have unmediated access to reality (whatever that is)?
Personally I find the author of the Cloud of Unknowing makes a great deal of sense … but again that is highly subjective no doubt/some doubt!
@Robert Clayton
Years ago my son got a lift into town with the head of philosophy at the local college. The teacher rang me up later, almost speechless, to say that he had never known a child so full of knowledge about philosophy, with so much interest and insight. I was rather perplexed so asked my (mischievous) eleven year old when he got home. He told me the conversation had run something like this:
Son: So, Mr X, do you teach Heidegger and Kant?
Mr X — Yes …
Son: And what about Hegel? Do you find him as interesting as Hume?
Mr X — ???
Son: I always thought John Stuart Mill had something interesting to say … ETC ETC
The alert will note that my son knew nothing of philosophy but quite a lot of Monty Python.
Tee hee.
I haven’t read The Deep yet. Maybe that is next. I first read Little, Big back in 2017 and thought it would be worth revisiting this year after my conversation with the man in TN about Crowley and Robert Graves. I don’t know why I waited so long to dig into the others, but the prose is as breathtaking as the stories themselves. Lots to learn from reading him.
You may want to look again at Foucault, quite a lot of whose writing has never been translated, and who has been badly served by translators, and, especially interpreters, and turned into a kind of cartoon version of himself. He was basically interested in the history of ideas (The Archaeology of Knowledge and Words and Things are good places to start) and he asked how and why our ways of talking and thinking about subjects varied over time. For example, the discourse about astrology in 1500 was quite different from the discourse in 1800, and it’s different again today. Why is this? Foucault rejects Hegelian dialectical struggles of ideas, and looks instead at who has the power, in any given context, to say what a discourse is, and try to control it. (Think of Ukraine today, for example.) Discourses are therefore modified as patterns of power change.
Of course, this means that discourses, and thus truth and knowledge, are contingent and always incomplete. But I’ve never thought that’s a problem. It’s often forgotten that much of post-modernism and allied disciplines is just common sense, dressed up with the intellectual pyrotechnics and love of paradox which has always been part of French thinking. The Death of the Author, for example, is just a framing of the old Intentional Fallacy argument, long-established when I was a student of literature fifty years ago, and which holds that you can’t reduce a book just to a list of things the author consciously wanted to say. (Anyone who has written a book understands this very well.) This argument is trivially true: if it were not so, then you would be able to find a book somewhere which contained everything that needed to be said to understand every implication of, say, Hamlet or Moby Dick. And manifestly, that’s not the case. Likewise, there can be no final truth but only approximations. This argument is also trivially true: if it were not so, then you could buy a single book called The Truth which would never need revision, and that’s not the case. (Religion is not an exception: think of the doctrinal battles of early Christianity or the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence.) The real issue is who has the power, in a given situation, to dictate what the truth is understood to be. (Ukraine again?)
Anyone interested may want to check out an essay of mine that expands on these issues.:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/teach-your-children
This:
“Clergy and believers embrace establishment because they think it means the government will be guided by their religion, but what inevitably happens is that their religion ends up controlled by the government”
…is an excellent point, which admits of a broader interpretation, thusly:
“[Instigators of movements pursuing justice, liberation or other principles, through political action] embrace establishment because they think it means the government will be guided by [the principles inspiring their movement], but what inevitably happens is that their [movement] ends up controlled by the government.”
To wit, what has become known as “wokism”…
>it’s that it justifies claims that the truth will change to suit our convenience
It’s just a hop skip and a jump from that to “math is racist” or something completely untested is “safe and effective”. Maybe it’s already Hegel’s world and we just live in it? I’d like to live in a different world though.
Earlier this year in the Music as Magical Language post I promised to write a series of articles about music relating to: The Five Elements, The Nine Planets and the Zodiac. I had finished the first two, and now have done the third. The only thing is, this in itself will now turn into a short series of posts. So here is the first part of Music of the Zodiac, or Constellations. In this post I focus on the life and work of jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams and her phenemonal Zodiac Suite, and later, after her conversion to Catholicism the Mass she wrote in the idiom of jazz, blues & spirituals.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/constellations-i-the-sacred-music-of-mary-lou-williams
>You may be amused to know that the weird Gnostic church in which I was, for even weirder reasons, consecrated as a bishop came into existence because some Universalist ministers heard that their denomination was going to merge with the Unitarians, and say, “NO WAY!”
I guess you could call them – Bifurtarians? I’ll see myself out now.
Hello, JMG and kommentariat!
Here are my “Hegelian” thoughts:
-I’ve read somewhere that German soul is a sadistic one, under a mask of misticism. Maybe it’s too unfair to define every German soul, but I think this statement fits in HEGEL soul.
-When I was studying in university, I had a teacher who told us students that Marx thought he had made obsolete Hegel, but indeed, the same Hegel had made the “bear hug” to Marx. Because Marx believed in certain “laws” explaining (¿?) Universal History; his own laws of course: Marx didn’t go beyond the teleology (Theology?) in the Hegelian Philosophy of History…mere theology with the series number erased.
-If I’m not wrong, Borges wrote that Hegel was in his opinion, “a big liar”. I’m not sure of this quote, but “Si non é vero, é ben trovato” . Could you confirm or refute this apocryphal Borges quote?
About Feuerbach, I had to read some texts from him when I was studying, even then as a naïve student I was impressed by him…by his vulgarity and blandness, I mean.
Some years ago my youngest son was looking at colleges and explored the University of Chicago. He visited and said all anyone talked about was the the first year of required study in the foundations of western thought ( or some such thing). And within that they seemed to be overly fixated on Hegel and what great things he had to teach ( yes many of these were students). He was not amused with this and went to college elsewhere.
As some folks may or may not know, the University of Chicago is where the intellectual basis ( such as it is) of the Neo Con ideology was developed. The adherents of this ideology went on to effect ( badly) the foreign policy of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations.
So is some ways we can blame the accelerated fall of the American Empire on Hegel.
AliceEm, and doubtless he’ll find a steady stream of true believers to snap that up. Once you reify “history” as an active presence doing this or that, it becomes a surrogate divinity who can be credited for all kinds of things. It’s like the guy who flipped a coin for an hour, noted down how each toss came up, and then insisted that since the odds against getting that exact sequence of heads and tails were billions to one, some vast transcendent power must have caused it.
Joan, funny. I can see how that might play out. As for middle class, an exact definition isn’t useful here since boundaries change over time and space. The middle class, as the name suggests, is in the middle — above the working class but below the governing class. The specific markers that set the middle class apart in 19th century Germany were of course different from those in 21st century America.
John, I might do something with them someday. They’re too fun not to revisit.
Tag, oh, Hegel was vastly more famous and influential than Butler can ever dream of being. I also think that Butler believes in the steaming mess she’s promoting; I’m not sure Hegel ever did. As for the power of awful prose, it has to be incomprehensible to achieve that. Ordinary bad prose can have an impact but it’s not a lasting one. To be really powerful, it has to be so opaque that people can project their own fantasies and delusions onto it. Thanks for the heads up about the book — that sounds like something I would enjoy; and Berlioz is not merely better than Hegel (he can hardly be worse), he’s a genuine delight to listen to.
Disc_writes, now go compare the percentage of the population that attends church regularly in Western European countries with the percentage that does so in the US. (Eastern Europe doesn’t count because it’s still springing back from the Communist era of official atheism.) In England, for example, where the Anglican Church is the established state church, fewer than 2% of the population attend its services weekly, and only about 8% attend any religious service at all; in the US, 20% attend a church weekly, and 41% go once a month or more. That’s the distinction I’m talking about.
Lieven, funny!
J.L.Mc12, yes, I’m familiar with the comic! The video — well, I don’t do those, of course.
Daniil, that’s a great story. Belinsky’s interpretation is less crazed than that of some Hegel fans!
Larkrise, of course! Schopenhauer had fun with that; discussing the whole “intellectual intuition” business, he wrote: “As I wholly lack intellectual intuition, all those expositions that presuppose it must be to me like a book with seven seals. To such a degree is this the case that, strange to relate, with those doctrines of deep wisdom is always seems to me as if I were listening to nothing but atrocious and, what is more, extremely wearisome humbug.”
Justin, it’s his first novel, and it has a mild case of first-novel-itis, but it’s well worth your while. Imagine John Crowley writing A Game of Thrones and you have something of the idea…
Aurelien, I’ll consider it, but I wasn’t impressed the first time I read his work. I grant that French philosophical writing is hard to translate — it can also be hard to read, even in the original, at least for those who aren’t to the manner born. I thought that Foucault flogged his tuppenny dose of common sense much further than it would go. But I’ll consider a second look.
Scotlyn, that seems quite accurate to me.
Other Owen, we certainly live in a world that’s been shaped, or misshaped, by Hegel’s thought. I’d prefer a different world, too.
Justin, thanks for this.
Other Owen, and if it were founded among Tolkien’s dwarves, doubtless it would schism into Bifur-, Bofur-, and Bomburtarians. I’ll follow you to the door.
Chuaquin, I haven’t encountered that comment by Borges, but I’m inclined to believe it. Borges, for all his delight in fantasy and sheer play, had far too much robust common sense to be snookered by Hegel. Thank you for all of this!
Clay, back half a century or so the University of Chicago was notorious for its obsession with Aristotle. If they’ve gone from Aristotle to Hegel, I can’t say it’s an improvement.
JMG –
As a gigantic Wagner fan I’ve been just thrilled with these essays. I look forward to reading them many times over, and carving out some time to rewatch Der Ring after I’ve adequately digested your points.
Thank you – looking forward to the next installment.
I know I mentioned this in a previous post a long time ago, but I consider Martin Heidegger to be as big a philosophical fraud as Hegel ever was.
I tried (without success!) to read Being and Time years ago, I never got past the first few pages of his crazy locutions. They seemed to me to be such an obvious put-on, that I thought surely he must be playing some elaborate joke on his readers.
I once read an essay by Walter Kaufmann (whom I respect, however much I disagree with much of his thinking), entitled Against Heidegger. As I was reading it, I thought to myself, “Why is he giving this phoney so much attention? Cut off the oxygen! Don’t feed the trolls!”
Thanks for the neat summaries of Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s philosophies. In university I strictly avoided classes about Western philosophy because even in my late teens I believed that the train of Western philosophy had jumped the tracks after the Renaissance. It is interesting that the 19th century seemed to direct all the West’s useful intellectual energy into scientific, technological and geographical discoveries, while the philosophers decided to glorify the absurd. So far in my life I have not found a 19th century “ism” (and there are a whole lot of them!) that I do not despise; sadly, the edifice of modern society seems to be founded upon it (like a castle built out of rotting fish). I do hope that all this nonsense can be deep-sixed and duly forgotten in future centuries. I guess part of getting out of this mess involves figuring out how we got into it and what this mess actually consists of – and you appear to be doing us all a great service in this regard.
Sometime in the latter half of my public school education, in PA in the 70s, a history teacher regaled the class with a chapter of lessons, out of the blue relative to whatever historical period was on the curriculum that year, on the hidden forces driving the unfolding of the history we’d been studying. Which turned out to be all about, you guessed it, thesis-antithesis-synthesis. In classroom discussion it was easy enough to think of examples that seemed to validate the concept. Too easy; as far as I could tell, the supposed consistent pattern underlying all of history was, and is, unfalsifiable by any conceivable course of events. It was too vague even to try to argue that point in class, though it was an interesting enough idea at first that I don’t recall wanting to at the time.
Fortunately, apart from remembering the three buzzwords for the inevitable fill-in-the-blanks question, there was nothing else there to put “on the test.” So from a pupil’s point of view the whole weird footnote was literally forgettable.
Much later I learned where the schema had come from, but even then I didn’t think about why that miscellaneous bit of abstract philosophy had surfaced in an eighth or ninth grade history class. I think you’ve just provided that explanation.
I suppose this might have been fairly common at the time, and maybe more recently as well. Did anyone else encounter anything similar?
Corax, I have been tracking that NYC mini scene of reactionaries who call themselves MAGA communists. Some of those girls tried to launch a “Hegel e-girls” scene and it blew up pretty quickly with deceit, grooming, and backstabbing. What’s even weirder about them is that many of them are christians (orthodox to be precise, hence the Dugin connection), so their love for Hegel is about him being a Christian philosopher. There’s also some occult stuff going on that they’re not being honest about.
So what they tried to do was launch is some type of reactionary Christian MAGA communist movement but they essentially speed ran a cult. The blowup and drama was pretty funny.
On a more serious note, I do think most of these people are morons, but a more competent bunch in the future may figure out some reactionary scheme and scale it so I am keeping a track of them. Dugin is mostly a Russian state asset explicitly attempting to bring down the west faster (not that it needs help), and these people are either active accomplices or useful idiots.
@JMG, I think Gilles Deleuze is the most important philosopher of the last 50-60 years, carrying on the project being worked out by Spinoza and Nietzsche, and his world is yet to come. I recommend his books on Spinoza and Nietzsche as good intros.
Here’s Foucault reviewing a couple of his books: https://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm
>There’s a hilarious battle of Man, the Ruler of the Universe, against a simple cat wanting food.
He did win the battle, using his superior hooman intellect to outthink the cat. I don’t know if dogs are that much different BTW. I remember a dog from my youth that would spend hours figuring out how to get a gate open by hooking his paws around and jiggling it just so.
Lower mental horsepower isn’t an impediment if you have all the time in the world.
>Personally, what I find objectionable in Hegel is not so much the idea that truth changes as the idea that it changes in such a predictable, orderly, easy to discern (for a Hegelian) way, and with such absolute and universal applicability
Cynically, what I see is once you call yourself a Hegelian, you can then proceed to say truth is whatever you say it is, whenever you say it is. You have complete write access to truth. But is that really, um, true, I wonder? Just because you say the moon is made of green cheese – is it really?
Say, is Kamala a Hegelian? Where one day she opposes X and then the next day, well, X needs support and implementation.
Hello Mr. Greer,
Thanks for pointing me to Michael Polanyi: I’ve read his Wikipedia page and he seems well worth considering. I particularly appreciated his stance that reductionism is a pathology of modern mind that, in an effort to reduce higher-level realities into lower-level realities, rejects higher with moral passion. That describes quite well the scientism that permeates the current Western thought. Coming back to the discussion from several weeks ago on why science today cannot take into account life force phenomena, Polanyi’s insight provides another reason. I also note that his professional path – from brilliant scientist to brilliant philosopher – is sadly impossible in today’s academia where people are mostly locked in their little boxes of generally trivial pursuits.
The Leontyev quote comes from his article “Byzantium and Russia”, which has been published in a 1969 anthology of his works called, appropriately, “Against the Current”.
@Daniil Adamov #59 I believe that Belinsky understood Hegel quite well, in a typically uncouth Russian manner of not shirking from unwelcome conclusions. He was also quite conflicted – publicly he was all for modern western progressivism, and he famously chastised Gogol for not being sufficiently on message. Privately, however, he rebelled against the implications of Hegelianism, and the following passage from his letter where these sentiments are expressed is often quoted:
“Even if I were able to arrive at the highest degree on the ladder of culture I should not cease to demand of you account for all the victims of the conditions of life and of history, for all the victims of chance, superstition, the inquisition of Philip II, etc.; else I would throw myself head first down the ladder. I do not wish to have happiness for nothing, so long as I am not set at rest about each of those who are my brothers in blood. Disharmony, it is said, is a condition of harmony; it may be that this is very beneficial and amusing for melomaniacs, but not at all for those who are compelled by their fate to incarnate the idea of disharmony.”
IVN 66, you’re welcome and thank you!
Michael, when Heidegger said that clarity is the enemy of philosophy, he let the cat out of the bag. Clarity is the enemy of bovine excrement. Real philosophy is as clear as a mountain pool — the whole point of philosophy is that it makes the world make sense.
Ron, have you read Schopenhauer? He’s the one Western philosopher who paid attention to Indian philosophy — he had the first European translation of the principal Upanishads, considered them to be one of the supreme achievements of the human spirit, and read from them every night before sleep. He has his problems, but his philosophy gave Eliphas Lévi the foundations for the philosophy of high magic. Predictably, most Western philosophers hate him.
Walt, I really do need to do another post on the Discordian critique of Hegel’s system. It makes so much more sense once you realize that after thesis, antithesis, and synthesis come parenthesis and paralysis…
Daedalus, Deleuze is notorious in some circles because people who get seriously into his book Anti-Oedipus very often end up schizophrenic. Now of course schizophrenia is one of the themes of that work, but I confess that’s not exactly a recommendation to me.
Soko, glad to hear it. I particularly recommend Polanyi’s book Tacit Knowledge, which does to philosophy more or less what Kurt Gödel did for logic; Polanyi showed conclusively that a completely explicit account of the world is impossible. It’s worth very close attention.
Clay Dennis, neo-conservatism was also hatched at New York City College and especially at the New School for Social Research, where Leo Strauss had a professorship. You do know this merry gang were Trotskyites way back in the day, right?
I can remember watching Senate hearings about Iraq before the invasion, but post 9-11, and wondering how smart people could be so dumb. The answer which I came up with was the Wolfowitz, et al showed a remarkable thinness of life experience. They seemed to have moved from grad school to foundation to government posts back to foundations again. Not one had ever picked crops, driven a taxi or truck or combine, or even waited tables. You will recall that Reagan was at one time a lifeguard. And they were famously a band of chicken hawks, no military experience at all but ready and eager to send other men into wars.
No, I have not read Schopenhauer, though I have heard snippets about him that made him sound at least quasi-sane. As a person who got his mind permanently blown at the age of 16 reading an English translation of the 13 principal Upanishads, I think that he may be a man after my own heart. I look forward to finding out if he blew Wagner’s mind, too.
I’ve been reading Toynbee out of my local library which has it in its HQ store. Or at least most of the volumes. Either it is missing 9 and 10 or it has some kind of cataloguing error because it combines several later volumes into one item but only vol. 8 arrived when I ordered it. I’ve used archive.org to get 9 and 10. Some of it I find a bit opaque and difficult to read but there are intruiging anecdotes. In a footnote at one point, Toynbee explains that he took the Trans-Siberian in 1930, and that the Urals were hardly more significant than the Chiltern Hills between London and Oxford. Although HS2 did cost a lot of money there. He can be very scientific inspired in much of his language, and wonder if he came back again as a young scholar now if he might try putting the whole thing on a more explicitly quantitative footing.
Hegel I have never read, and I haven’t really read much about him, but he is I suppose in the taxonomy of philosophy the common root between Liberalism and Marxism and this historical commonality helps those two traditions to influence each other such that there can be various ideologies formed in a kind of modular way combining different elements.
@JMG #79 re: Polanyi and Tacit Knowledge
Huh, interesting, this is a topic I’ve come across in many places and been meaning to look into, and I’ve also run into Polanyi a few times and meant to check his work out, but I didn’t know he had written on the subject, much less one of, if not the, definitive works on the matter, so thank you!
A question: when I search alibris, I see two books that seem to address the topic: Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy and The Tacit Dimension – do you happen to have a recommendation on which would be a better place to start?
Thanks much,
Jeff
Today I saw the following sign on the window of some sort of beauty salon. It was very large, the size of the front window with a rainbow background. It is a kind of simplified version of one I have seen around Portland since the BLM riots but today it struck me as kind of Cracker Jack Box Hegel, combined with woke nonsense. But the first line is especially relevant to the topics of this blog:
Science is Real
Black Lives Matter
No Human is illegal
Love is Love
The last two lines seem very Hegelian while the first line is kind of head scratching. Yes it refers to the viewpoint that all vaccines are products of “good” science and anyone who disagrees does not believe in science. I am not sure who still clings to that, but I pity them.
>Not one had ever picked crops, driven a taxi or truck or combine, or even waited tables
I noticed sometime from the 80s -> 90s, kids of the upper classes weren’t expected to get the usual part time work that had been pretty common amongst kids previously. That was the start of what I’m tentatively calling The Solipsism, where their points of reference completely diverged from the rest of society. Hardworking kids, no doubt, some of them but totally divorced from shared experience.
I think that’s also when military experience for upper level politicians began to be seen as optional and if you didn’t have it, eh, no big deal.
This Hegel fellows philosophy sounds like it has a lot going for it.
Because it is Deep/Incomprehensible. We need a priest class to interpret it.
Further because it is BaffleGarble. The priest class can spin it to support the system they want, communist, facist, whatever. Further as the situation changes so can interpretation.
Afterall it doesn’t matter whether we are conservative or liberal. Communist or Fascist. We all have the Intellectual Intuition to understand that our Dogma is true, and the only reason someone would disagree is that they are evil.
@daedalus (#75):
About Dugin, it’s really not that simple, or simplistic.
First of all, Dugin is not actually a Russian Orthodox Christian today. Instead, he’s a Russian “Old Believer” (staroobriadets), that is, a member of a group of schismatic Russian churchs that broke away from Russian Orthodoxy in the middle 1600s, in response to a few Western-inspired changes introduced into Russian Orthodox liturgy and ritual under Patriarch Nikon. (From his perspective, that makes him more truly Christan and Russian than any modern Orthodox Russian, which may well be one of the reasons why he became an Old Believer. It also makes him opposed, at least in principle, to the Westernizing reforms of Emperor Peter I, the Great; in practice, like almost every Russian Old Believer, he compromizes. For instance, he wears modern Russian clothes, Western though their origin is, rather than 17th-century ones.)
My take on Dugin is that he’s a Russian and (as he sees it) a Christian first, a philosopher second, and a “Russian State asset” maybe in 25th place or further down the line, if at all.
Also, he’s definitely not, as some idiots have claimed, “Putin’s brain.” First of all, Putin is and always has been Orthodox, not Old Believer, baptized secretly by his grandfather as a child, (though he had to conceal his Orthodoxy during the Soviet years). And second, Putin certainly has a high-quality brain of his own. Brainless, nincompoops, even if they were part of the KGB, were not posted to European states like East Germany.
And Putin, though glad to consider Dugin’s thought, was far more strongly influenced by the émigré philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an Orthodox Russian and a quite original philosopher. Putin even arranged for Ilyin’s remains to be transferred from Switzerland, where he had died in 1954, to Moscow for reburial in the Donskoy Monastery.
Ilyin’s doctoral dissertation, appropriately enough for this post, was on Hegel. Here he noted that “Hegel is primarily an intuitionist (and not a logician or, even more so, a rationalist).” Hmmm …
Hi John Michael,
Ah, utopian visions forced upon the messy realities of civilisation, rarely work out all that well!
You’d imagine that by now, the numerous historical examples of that process failing utterly, would put an end to the mischief, but no. I guess it’s hard for people with actual (or even pretensions to) wanting to let go of their power and control. Beats me why they would want to hang on so hard that that choice destroys the very thing they hunger after. Guess it’s hard to grow up, huh? 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Jeff: I have Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy and highly recommend it. Polanyi also addresses in it some of the disparity between what scientists say they do and what they actually do (remember he was a practising scientist before moving on into the philosophy of science).
JMG, I think you said that you studied the history of ideas at university. I too attended an ivy covered institution but my courses were much more vocational in nature and any ideas I was force fed by the exalted professorial class had been chiseled and polished through centuries of use (misuse too) and weren’t to be questioned by those as lowly as myself. If you wanted to pass you took them as given and applied them or you bloody well failed. The process was to shut up and, upon graduation, to hit the ground running.
The exception was economics, which I took to be complete bushwah, even if dissent was tolerated. By second year I suspected that there was nothing to this dung-heap, by third year I had no doubt. And then there was that one course in philosophy.
So that was the framing of the two questions that sprung from your essay even if they sound hopelessly simplistic.
I noticed something alarming while at school; philosophers are lousy writers. Who taught them anyway? If their raison d’etre as intellectuals is to impart ideas, well, they ain’t doin’ so good. As for their acolytes, if the output of so many of these great thinkers is rubbish, why do they have such widespread following and influence, why does it pass muster in the great academies? Can’t people see through their gobbledegook and call it out?
You may have seen My Fair Lady and heard Dr Henry Higgins’ immortal question, why cawn’t the English teach their children how to speak?
That’s the nature of my queries; why can’t professors teach their students how to write? And why can’t professors teach their students how to think? To teach people to write clearly, to think clearly, to elevate intellectual functioning for the purpose of discerning sense from nonsense seems to me the central mission.
Did you ever have the great displeasure of having to read Heidegger? I did. Could you make any sense of it? I couldn’t. The big thinkers pull stuff out of their hindquarters and I don’t know what we bozos are supposed to do with it.
Western Civ is reeling from multiple hammer blows, intellectual degradation one of them. Or is this overstating the case?
This has been very helpful for me to understand why I find Jordan Peterson’s philosophy appealing and at the same time completely unconvincing. He’s an Hegelian!
In response to #84, I thought of alternatives:
Faith is real
What lives matters
No law is human
Talk is talk.
… or …
Science is religion
Colours are constructs
Law is not morality
TSW
… or …
Wotan is real
The ring matters
No opera is a put on
Wagner is Wagner
My guess on why some Universalists didn’t want to merge with the Unitarians back in the day is that from their roots in traditional Christianity they may have retained some form of Trinitarianism and/or regarded Jesus as possessing Deity. Stuff which in my experience is really cool.
@Robert Matthiessen #87 Your comment had me realize that our western elites have encountered in Russia an intelligent resistance from a different culture. Our elites can’t grasp that possibility and dumb down and caricature Putin as just another evil retrograde fascist who must be eliminated as our elites regard themselves as the banner carriers of a glorious future.
Ron, he did indeed. We’ll be talking about him in a couple of weeks.
Mawkernewek, Hegel’s the common ground that unites Marxism, liberalism, neo- (but not paleo-)conservatism, and fascism. He really is the evil genius of modern political thought.
Jeff, either one. They cover similar but not identical ground from within the same overall philosophy. I thought The Tacit Dimension was the more focused of the two, but your mileage may vary.
Clay, that really does beg for parody, doesn’t it?
Cthulhu is Real
Eldritch Lives Matter
No Shoggoth is Illegal
Madness is Madness
Dagnarus, those are doubtless core reasons why Hegel became so popular.
Chris, to some extent our species is eternally two years old, howling and beating our little fists against the floor because Mommy Nature won’t give us the treats to which we feel entitled.
Smith, no, it’s not overstating the case. You can’t write clearly unless you can think clearly, and you can’t think clearly without questioning a lot of bushwah, to use that fine old euphemism, that the official intellectuals of our culture can’t bear to see questioned. So instead we get Hegel, Heidegger, and postmodernists whose prose is so bad the product of random text generators can pass for their work.
Monk, the shadow of Hegel reaches far.
KAN, funny:
Peak oil is real
Resource limits matter
No civilization is immortal
Decline is decline
BeardTree, it was partly that, but another very large part was that the Unitarian Church by that point had become Atheism Lite and the three ministers who founded the Universal Gnostic Church had no time for that. They believed intensely in the reality of the Divine and in the need for human beings to orient themselves toward the Divine. Thus their choice of the “Gnostic” label — they meant by that the quest for a direct personal encounter with the Divine.
JMG,
Your comment about Hegel and Heidegger and random text generators gave me an idea for the single best AI prompt I’ve ever written.
“Pretend you are Hegel. Write something profound. Choose a topic.”
Running this over and over and over again have generated some of the best belly laughs I’ve had in a long, long time.
“Intellectual intuition” just sounds like an excuse for a person to cling to their pet theory in the face of growing evidence against it. Then they wait for truth to change and the historical synthesis to eventually prove them right, after all. It’s a bit disturbing how many people are doing that, right now.
You did say that people would lose their shale as the dream of progress died …
JMG, I’m not sure I can top that one! But here goes:
TSW
YMMV (has anyone else noticed how close this is to the tetragrammaton?)
IIWII (it is what it is)
LOL
For those wondering about the period around 1848 in Europe, this is what one German author wrote (J. B. Krebs aka Kerning – he died in 1851 so this would have been written very close to the time):
“In the forties of the nineteenth century we saw Europe in a commotion where you did not know when the flame of outrage would spread over all its lands and turn everything upside down. Not only amongst the uneducated and oppressed, no, even amongst the most esteemed families, with men and youth who possessed the most distinguished reputations for morality, lawfulness, and every social virtue, the spirit of outrage had taken root, and phenomena became visible which you did not know how to explain. No state administration, and even if yet so good, no regal virtue, and even if yet so gleaming, gave guarantees for the calm of a land, and it was no different than if a spirit of hell were strolling amongst humanity in order to forge ever new plans and fanaticise the participants.” (from “Ebbe und Flut”)
Basically, you are saying that due to the hard limits on knowledge, there’s no getting around that individual, magical world view that underpins every knowledge system. And that in itself is largely individual, given that no two consciousnesses alike will represent the world in the same way.
Commenting on John et. al’s comments on Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer was a profoundly unhappy and maladjusted individual. However, he was a genius, and reading The World as Will and Representation was well worth the effort. I think Schopenhauer’s metaphysics are among the last good things to have come out of modern western philosophy. I’m delighted to hear that he also lampooned Hegel for his sophistry.
Also John, this leads my mind back to quite a few posts ago shortly after I discovered your blog. At the time, we got into a discussion about metaphysics, non-duality, and schopenhauer. I would like to apologize for that conversation. I didn’t know anything and I wasn’t yet doing much occult practice. I realize now that the simple worldview I had back then was a flattened model compared to what I have discovered now through studying occult philosophy.
@JMG,
We agree that attendance in Europe is much lower than in the US. What we disagree on are the reasons for this difference.
Your suggestion, the Establishment Clause, seems to me fanciful at best: European countries have moved towards a similar framework, de lege or de facto, for the past 200 years. Attendance has fallen in lock step.
I also find it questionable that you use England as a valid example for the whole of Europe, while there are (almost) no other European countries with a state religion, and the English do not think of themselves as very European.
This seems to me a classic example of a complex problem with a clear and simple answer, which is also wrong.
@Robert Mathiesen #87 This is definitely getting into the weeds, but Dugin is an edinoverets (“one-faither”); i.e. he is for the pre-Niconian old rites and theology, but recognises the official authority of the Niconian Russian Orthodox Church. True Old Believers don’t, and tend to have a much more oppositional stance. Compromises start there. He has a bunch of other idiosyncratic ideas all his own or shared with the Eurasian tendency. I strongly agree that his influence on Putin and importance to the Russian state is highly exaggerated, or rather mostly made up (he enjoyed some support from the state years ago and generally supports it for reasons of his own). He does have some intellectual and semi-intellectual followers who, as far as I can tell, tend to be more interested in the grand “Eurasianist”/”Atlanticist” geopolitical and ideological opposition than in the details of his theology. The ones I’ve encountered, at least, have a significant resemblance to America’s LaRouchists. They may have some good ideas between them and also a lot of very bad ones (highly simplistic conspiracy theories, fondness for ideocracy as something a priori positive, general contempt for ordinary people and their lives when not yoked to a Great Project that would grant them Meaning).
@The Other Owen #77 It helps if you confine yourself to remote, hard-to-verify truths, like the Direction of Human History and the True Meaning of Progress. When people say “Y was a good idea for its time, but in the year 20XX it is completely unacceptable”, I think they are unconsciously being at least a little Hegelian. Sometimes it might be valid if based on specific circumstances that make the same idea work or fail. But often it’s just based on unwarranted, impossible to disprove assumptions about “its time” (was it really that good then? did everybody think so?) and the year 20XX (what has actually changed? and when?).
@Soko #78 Thanks for that. Without being an expert on Belinsky, I get the impression that he may have misunderstood many of Hegel’s specific statements (not a hard mistake to make in general, but the assumption that “rational=morally good”, rather than merely “rationally comprehensible”, is pretty damning) while still grasping the essence of his system well enough (that it reduces history to progress towards an arbitrarily selected ideal state and tramples notions like morality along the way). This eventually caused him to discard it, at least in part. I am not sure that he ever discarded Western progressivism per se, though. If I understand correctly, he was a committed adherent of “Romantic politics” whose moral sense was eventually offended by Hegel’s callous-seeming bafflegab.
“One of the constant themes of middle class thought in modern times is the insistence that it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too.”
This leading sentence (I think, I hope) makes the point I’m about to make topical.
What it is, is that an acupuncture blogger I’ve been following, on a blog called “Working Class Acupuncture”, has been consistently hitting out exactly the opposite gems – to wit, why the acupuncture profession in the US canNOT have its cake and eat it too. What I have finally figured out is that although she still “kinda, sorta” still thinks of herself as a socialist, she isn’t that at all.
What she is, is someone whose working class sensibility is bred in the bone. And, out of her bred in the bone sensibility, she has crafted a way to make a living, while providing highly affordable acupuncture, and even to set up an accredited acupuncture school to teach the same, which will not leave its graduates too deeply in debt at graduation to earn livings in their turn.
From a recent post:
https://workingclassacu.substack.com/p/on-transforming-health-care
“I was glad that the articles presented POCA [People’s Organisation of Community Acupuncture] Tech [the affordable acupuncture SCHOOL] in the context of tradeoffs. We actually have a first year class that’s all about tradeoffs, which a student christened the “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” class. The name stuck, and I’ve had fun teaching it, though now we might have to rename it because our new space is obviously a nice thing. Anyway — spoiler alert for Cohort 11 students — the class is about breaking down in detail what you get, what you give, and what you give up when you provide acupuncture for $25 per treatment as opposed to $100 per treatment. It’s a lively conversation and we cover the whiteboard with lists. And then we do the same inventory for the school itself — what do students get, what do they give, and what do they give up in a school that costs $25,000 instead of upwards of $100,000?
“Analyzing tradeoffs is an important competency for small business people. Which almost all acupuncturists are. POCA Tech’s a good opportunity for students to get used to tradeoffs and limits and other realities of small business.”
Tradeoffs – analysing what you get, what you give, and what you give up.
The sensibility that crafted this approach and made it teachable, could not be LESS middle class, in the sense you have opened this post with.
🙂
PS, once again, my thanks to whichever commenter first linked to this blogger somewhere in these ecosophia threads. I cannot remember who you are, but you have my thanks.
For all of you Aristotelians out there:
In This House We Believe
Philosophy Begins In Wonder
The Soul Is the Form of the Body
A Friend Is Another Self
Metaphysics Is Real
Virtue Is Everything
You can get the T-shirt here:
https://x.com/AgnesCallard/status/1699567194433327517
It seems to me there is not just one trickster in action ushering in sweeping change but three (or three vessels for trickster action):
The King in Orange being one
Elon Musk being another. His actions consistently play out in controversy, etc. Thumbing his nose at things on X.
Mocking current elite fashionable attitudes.
There is also the fact that he is involved in both car and communication companies, as well as space travel.
All ruled by mercury.
Then RFK Jr. seems to have been bitten by the trickster energy with his first leaving the Dem party and his endorsement of Trump.
Yet there seems to be so much fear of change that I see. But change also seems to be inevitable at this point.
>Love is Love
Tautologies are tautological?
>If you wanted to pass you took them as given and applied them or you bloody well failed. The process was to shut up
What (most) of college taught you was to take information you didn’t particularly like or cared about, manipulate it and spit it back in the forms your masters wanted to hear. And that’s what they call “learning”. And yes, you did learn. But not exactly what they intended. Every college degree comes with a minor in cynicism, I would claim.
And they wonder why the younguns these days haggle over grades. I’d say they are the *best* students, and they’ve mastered the true fundamentals of a college edumacation.
@robert
Basically that would be the equivalent of saying that some Amish dude is “Biden’s Brain”? Which would be moderately amusing if it were true. Although I don’t know who it would more insulting to – the Amish or Biden.
Wer here
Well I personally don’t have enough free time to read all those authors, sometimes I just spare a glace at Ecosophia and the comments and sometimes I don’t even read the majority of the comments here to be honest. About the great philosophers of the (“fadding of Europe time in the 20 century and 19th I confess to be ignorant of their writings here). Well Hegel did a lot of damage and ended up siring the worst political classes of the 20th century and today, but even if he din’t wrote anything perhaps some scoundrel somewhere would have did this for him.
What i do not understand is for a lack of a better term the current “church of Peterson” on the right. In my opinion he never was anything more than the Daily wire’s (Ben Shapiro) personal pet philosopher just like Fukuyama. was for the neocons.
And this endless noise about Ukraine Is just getting crazy again. You know the whole “Great Kursk offensive thing” correct me If I am wrong but what is the dammed purpose of this whole thing? sit on the Russian border for a while? PR stunt? So far it seems that it more united the Russian society than everything. The were videos of indyvidual Russian civilian whom even took up arms and organized watches on the other sides of the border to ensure something like this won’t happen anymore else. And the Ukrainian lost an enormous amount of vehicles for what?
That convinience store that is endlessly shown in the Polish media which was looted by “freedom loving Ukrainian soldiers” on the first day. The polish public secret response to those videos was more like ” they Ukrainians are behaving like cavemen and why are roads in Russia so much better than our roads?”
In 1941 the Nazi offensive into Russia managed to get hundret’s of kilometers by the the end of the first month sitting in a convienience store in a village next to the border for an month does seem to compare…
This was an extremely important essay for me – caused much thinking on my thinking.
Thank you. I think this was a kinda initiation for me.
Too many different directions my thoughts went to say but some random thoughts:
People are more important than I thought they were.
You can’t know everything but you can get yourself into a lot of trouble thinking that you do.
How to live in a world where you can never know everything = humbly and in awe.
Dennis, that almost makes me wish that I hadn’t promised myself never to use AIs. I bet it was hilarious.
Kfish, that’s exactly what it means — and yes, quite a bit of shale is being lost.
KAN, I think that’s a worthy contender! Thanks for the Krebs quote — very timely.
Peter, yes, that’s one of the things I’m saying.
Enjoyer, good heavens, you don’t have to apologize. If you’ve learned something since then, that’s a genuine plus.
Disc_writes, of course I cited England, since it’s one of the last European countries that still has a state church, and thus makes my point about state churches all the more precise. I could also have cited Denmark, which also still has a state church; maybe 5% of Danes go to Lutheran services weekly. In Germany and Austria, there isn’t an official state church, but the churches are funded out of tax revenues and are subject to strict government regulation; thus they’re state churches in all but name. Elsewhere? France is the only western European country that had no state church in 1900, many nations (such as Spain) didn’t give theirs up until quite recently, and the recent abandonment of state control over churches elsewhere hasn’t had adequate time to make up for the negative impact of all those centuries of political domination of the religious sphere — except, of course, for mosques, which were never under the thumb of European governments and so are thriving across Western Europe. Meanwhile, in the US, most of our states never had a state church and those that did abandoned it almost 250 years ago. I quite understand that you disagree with my thesis, but I think the evidence really does support it.
Scotlyn, I’m delighted to hear this. It’s precisely ventures of this sort that offer some hope that acupuncture in the US will survive the collapse of the upper middle class that originally supported it.
Eagle Fang, ha! That’s great.
Wer, Marx had few good ideas, but he had one great line: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The German invasion of Russia was the tragedy, the Ukrainian is the farce…
JustMe, if you get that, you’ve gotten one of the most important lessons of all.
JMG,
So Hegels advise is basically be exessively reckless (jump past first hand knowledge what he calls direct knowledge) and downplay or ignore physical reality (like resource distribution and topography which layed the foundation for societal structures in the first place) because truth can change.
I am starting to get a much better understanding of how some philosophers lead the West into a dead end.
Hum! Truth changing over time– I used to have a job that included looking up scientific journal articles. It used to annoy me a LOT that the reliable benchmark research paper of 5 years ago could no longer be a reference because “that was 5 years ago,” implying that what they wrote might no longer be true. No flaws pointed out, mind you, just that it was old.
And holy cow!* Believing that there are not and never were gods seems an extraordinarily dangerous position! The gods will let you know they are there, and sometimes what they think–
I have been writing a story that included passing mention of ‘The Men In Black’ (they of urban legend, not the movies). After I wrote the current draft, not finished or posted yet, I began to experience a series of minor accidents, near-misses, and repeating instances of 666 wherever I looked. Apparently the Men In Black were not happy with the treatment they were going to receive in my still un-posted story. I’m revising it, and it’s now a better story but sheesh! So touchy.
I regularly smack my forehead when I hear someone confidently affirming belief that there are no gods or spiritual influences, and offer prayers for mercy.
Great post JMG! Keep up the good work 😉
@Daniil Adamov (#103):
Thank you so much for clarifying Dugin’s religious views!!! I had not known what exact sort of “Old Believer” Dugin was. That he is a edinoverets meshes well with other things I have read about him, including also his Eurasian take on Russia.
I first encountered Eurasianism back in the 1960s, in connection with N. S. Trubetzkoy, the brilliant Slavic linguist, and his К проблеме русского самопознания. Interesting stuff, and it meshed rather well with the views of many of the Russians (all strongly anti-Soviet) whom I grew up with in the San Francisco Bay region of California.
@The Other Owen (#110):
“Close enough for government work,” as the saying goes. I’d be surprised if Biden knows much of anything about the Amish, so it’s probably the Amish who would be more insulted. Much respect for the Amish!
@Wer (#111):
The whole Ukrainian mess seems to me to have been a fantasy of the USA and NATO, who wrongly supposed Russians were weak people just like them, that is, people who would roll over and submit meekly to outside military and economic pressure once it started to cause them real pain. The ultimate Western plan, it seems well documented now, was to carve Russia up into a dozen or so weak puppet-states that would meekly permit their Western masters to make money by stealing all of Russia’s quite valuable natural resources.
The fools!!! All of Russia’s history shows that when the going gets tough, the (Russian) tough get going. It took a power like that of the Mongols under Ghenghis Khan to subdue Russia the one and only time they were ever subdued in all recorded history. And even that was only for a time. The current West, despite all its military technology, can’t come even close to exercising that sort of power. It just doesn’t know how.
As you may have gathered by now, I have less-than-zero respect for and confidence in the Western elites who are currently shaping our foreign policies.
And what really worries me is that these Western elites might turn out to be the sort of elites who will nuke the planet rather than accept defeat: “If we can’t win this war, no one anywhere must be allowed to survive it.” Ugh!
Re: the difference between church attendance in the U. S. vs. in Europe, I want to suggest another factor. Because communist revolutionaries all over the world correctly saw mainstream religious institutions as propaganda organs of the ruling classes, they slaughtered clergy and suppressed religion wherever they came to power. This scared American clergy. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a group of them got together and agreed to start preaching anticommunism from the pulpit. (The “under God” phrase had already been added to the Pledge of Allegiance about a decade before, for similar reasons.) Thus, church attendance became, in this country, an act of patriotism, and freedom of worship became intertwined, in the public’s mind, with “free market” economics. Europeans have always been more blasé about Communism, to the point of letting Communist parties compete in elections, so this was never a factor for them. As Communism faltered, and especially as capitalism has become more corrupt, going to church as a political statement has faded from popularity.
>It helps if you confine yourself to remote, hard-to-verify truths, like the Direction of Human History and the True Meaning of Progress.
How does that old saying go? If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bull****?
Except people are not confining themselves anymore. Air conditioners went from just cooling air, to being sexist, to give an example. And it has only gone downhill from there.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” Attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Alleged to be based on:
“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.“,
Rev Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion, published 1853
I guess Parker was living in Hegel’s world. Parker was a Unitarian Minister, much beloved in the current Unitarian church. Parker actually worked to bend toward justice in his life, as a leader in the abolitionist movement. My church, the First Unitarian Church of Providence, proudly displays two chairs which once belonged to Parker. I doubt that anyone realizes that these are the equivalent of the relics of the saints in many Catholic churches.
Just this past Sunday, the MLK version was quoted in my church. The subject of the service was “We are called to meet this moment. This is not just about defeating the threat of fascism, although defeat it we must. Our challenge is much broader and deeper. Are we indeed “the ones we have been waiting for”? If so, what must we do to “bend the arc of justice”?
The implicit message of the service last Sunday was, of course, that we must all vote for the Democratic Party, come November, or we will find ourselves like the Germans in 1945, in ruined cities while Götterdämmerung blasts across the landscape. I resisted the temptation to tell the speaker that we are bending the arc against justice, with our support of wars in Palestine, in Syria, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Ukraine, and soon to come in Iran, and that neither party resists the will of the oligarchy currently in charge of the US
Some weeks ago I lead the service. My theme was Canto IX of Purgatorio of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At the Gates of St. Peter, Dante comes before an angel:
Falling devoutly at his holy feet,
in mercy’s name I begged to be let in;
but, first of all, three times I smote my breast.
Then with his sword he traced upon my brow
the scars of seven P’s. “Once entered here,
be sure you cleanse away these wounds,” he said.
The “P”s are for the Peccati, “sins” in Italian, and the angel inscribed the 7 sins of Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust on Dante’s brow. In order to enter the Earthly Paradise, from which he can ascend to the Paradiso, Dante must do the work of climbing the mountain of Purgatorio. My implicit message was that we must all do the work to efface our sins, though I knew better than to say so out loud. The service was well received, although I suspect this was the first time sin was discussed in our meeting house in my lifetime.
RE Establishment of religion: Massachusetts only disestablished the Congregational church in the 1830s. By then, the churches had split over Trinitarian or Unitarian doctrine, but the ministers all agreed that disestablishment was the work of the devil. Here in Rhode Island, the Charter of 1663 states that: “ a flourishing civil state may best be maintained with a full liberty in religious concernments.”, for which all may thank Roger Williams.
“if you get that, you’ve gotten one of the most important lessons of all.”
OK- now what’s the next most important?
Just kidding – i reckon it will come in it’s own good time.
I’ve always been in a hurry to get onto the next thing.
GlassHammer, that’s pretty much how it’s worked out in practice, yes.
Joan, that may also have been a temporary factor, of course. As with any complex social phenomenon, there are always many things feeding into every change.
Great Khan, I admire your willingness to make the effort!
JustMe, if I say “meditate on that,” will you promise not to throw things at me? 😉
I apologize for being off topic, but I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on the lightning strike on the Arch of Constantine last Tuesday? “Just” regular old meteorology? Not that there is anything “regular” about the behavior of lightning! I am particularly thinking of the principle that the initial strike is upward from the Earth charge, which establishes a route through the atmosphere for the big strike downward from the clouds. Presuming the physics of this is accurate, what does is imply that the Triumphal Arch of Constantine is suddenly charged with potential? Why now?
My intuitive reaction is that Constantine played a major role in the development of the Catholic Church during the declining years of Rome and that that “energy” might be echoing in the present. The Arch itself is an interesting mashup of repurposed older friezes, statues (some with the head’s removed and replaced by images of Constantine) and in general serving as a marble faced physical embodiment of The Decline of Empire. Though the structure was doubtlessly not intended to produce that effect originally!
(JMG – If this is too far off topic, I completely understand if you prefer to not post it. Perhaps I could revisit the question another time in that case?)
Philosophy begins with Love
Wisdom recognizes its ignorance
The Truth is beyond mans understanding
But ideas can still be useful
Hi JMG,
Please delete if this is not fitting for the post. There is an invitation for all Brother Masons to attend a cornerstone ceremony at Mount Vernon on October 14th. It seems like a very auspicious event and I thought I should let you and the other Brothers know. It’s only a month away.
https://www.mountvernon.org/plan-your-visit/calendar/events/freemason-cornerstone-laying-and-lunch-celebration
“the whole “Great Kursk offensive thing” correct me If I am wrong but what is the dammed purpose of this whole thing?”
Militarily it made sense. The eastern front was slowly crumbling. Continuing a losing game is a, well, a losing game. So attack Russia in a weekly defended area and force them to pull troops off the eastern front to block the new attack. This would take time so the attack could make decent headway before the transferred troops could stop the Ukrainian forces. In the meantime the eastern front could be stabilized. With Ukraine holding Russian territory and the eastern front stabilized the Z man could open negotiations in a better position, or the success would open the doors to more foreign support, and that might bring the Russians to the table.
It didn’t work, but it was a decent gambit, better conceived than the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, but in the end it also failed. In both cases it resulted in the loss of a lot of men and armor that could have been better used. The Kursk salient is stalled and the eastern front is collapsing faster with all those men and equipment diverted into the offensive. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
On a different topic, “given that no two consciousnesses alike will represent the world in the same way.”
That’s why science is obsessed with measurement. Is your perception of ‘red’ the same as mine? There is no way to tell. But if we generate light with a wavelength of 680 nm and agree to call that ‘red’ we have a common basis for discussion.
Do I dare ask how Hegel defines what “truth” is, or is it garlic parmesan mashed potato castles all the way down?
Gee, if you had taught philosophy at college I might have changed majors. As it is, this is probably the most philosophy I’ve learned ever.
Hi John Michael,
It’s seems to be a common affliction, sorry to say.
Speaking of which, if our official media down here is saying this: Ukraine’s invasion of Russia was seen by some as a masterstroke, but it might backfire, and to me the details supplied don’t look so rosy for the west’s interests, then things on the ground are probably far worse. The recent changes to conscription suggests a very real lack of manpower. There’ll be consequences for the west arising from this eventual loss.
So did Wagner discover for himself via this saga, that the come down for the west was real?
I’m going to head out and break some rocks – literally. Rocks are very useful.
Cheers
Chris
This sonnet looking thing has neither rhyme nor meter, but may be appropriate considering our topic this week. Neologisms are kinda the theme after a fashion.
“Noverjoyed: Beating the bots–or strategically writing like some infamous German philosophers.” Or, Imparsible Prose.
While TPTB enjoy the fruits of hovering,
Known as hoverjoyed, and the rich rake it in,
The rest of us may not be so overly pleased,
Or noverjoyed for short. If you care for such
Word salad by a mere peon, not a rich peon
Nor an especially shabby one, a middleclapeon,
To strangle the tongue a bit more, just so that
The bots that survey everything have even
More work to do to sort out what is being said
And, alas, so do you, my reader. What’s to be
Done? Sure as shootin’ (a trigger word if ever
There was one) I don’t know. Triggyfiggyout if
You can, samizdat style. Poetry style. German
Philosopher style (impossible to parse: impossiparse).
Thinking about defining the middle class, I’m looking at a metaphor from biology.
As members of the animal kingdom evolve from single-celled to multicellular organisms, the various cells within the organism begin to specialize. Some end up on the outside of the body and along the digestive and respiratory systems, interfacing with the greater environment. Others end up completely enclosed, supporting the interfacing cells and being supported by them. A liver cell, for instance, sits inside the ribcage processing waste, being fed and protected via the bloodstream and the lymphatic system, obeying signals from the nervous system and reporting via that nervous system. It never has to deal directly with the world outside the organism. Therefore its capacity for surviving outside the organism evolves away.
I’m going to venture to suggest that something like that happens to societies as they increase in complexity. At the earliest stages, every fully able individual is capable of surviving alone by the age of 15 or so. As society gets more complex, some people will specialize, part-time you might say, but will still engage directly with nature for part of their living. The healer also forages; the potter keeps a kitchen garden and a flock of chickens.
As societies continue to grow and especially as they urbanize, the first enclosed cell type roles develop, probably for providing services to the government, scribes and armorers and so forth. Someone brings them their food. Someone takes away their waste. They never put a seed in the ground or pull a fish out of the water their whole lives, nor do they fight. Being, in a sense, part of the infrastructure that the ruling classes depend on, they are carefully protected from the demands of the outside world and are rewarded for compliance and cooperation as well as inventiveness. Because the cost of trying an improvement that doesn’t work is low compared to the reward from trying one that succeeds, their environment encourages the attitude that improvement is always possible. After a few generations, they are very, very good at what they do, but their ignorance of anything outside their narrow specialty becomes so complete that they can make up nonsense and have it persist for generations without being debunked. (I’m thinking here of the belief, once common among the educated classes in Imperial China, that the snake and the turtle were the male and female of the same species. The peasants could have told them the truth but none of them would listen to peasants.)
In the final stage, the enclosed cell types get so numerous that they become a class, with all the political power and consensus-manufacturing capability that implies. They occupy their own neighborhoods and hardly need to venure out of them, so the realities that the other classes live in are unfamiliar to the point of being hypothetical. They begin to imagine that they have the solutions to all the world’s problems and that those solutions involve everyone becoming like them: hard-working, cooperative, compliant, inventive and improving. They are unaware of their own enclosed condition and the resulting narrowness of their understanding of the world. They are privileged but don’t know that their privileges are privileges. They are protected but, like Tolkein’s hobbits, unaware of their protectors. They mean well but they are fools, fools with power. Theirs is the road to Hell that is paved with good intentions.
Ken, it’s certainly a Wagnerian kind of symbolism…
Dobbs, I like it.
Jon, so noted.
Other Owen, here’s his definition:
“We must however in the first place understand clearly what we mean by Truth. In common life truth means the agreement of an object with our conception of it. We thus presuppose an object to which our conception must conform. In the philosophical sense of the word, on the other hand, truth may be described, in general abstract terms, as the agreement of a thought-content with itself. This meaning is quite different from the one given above. At the same time the deeper and philosophical meaning of truth can be partially traced even in the ordinary usage of language. Thus we speak of a true friend; by which we mean a friend whose manner of conduct accords with the notion of friendship.”
“The agreement of a thought-content with itself” is the short form. What this means, of course, is that a statement is true if it’s internally consistent, whether or not it has any relation to experienced reality…
Chris, that “master stroke” has cost the Ukrainian side hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men they can’t spare. While frantic efforts to get reserves in place seem to have slowed down the Russian advance on the key transit hub of Pokrovsk, the fortress cities of Ugledar and Chasov Yar are on the brink of falling to the Russians, and once the Russian army gets past Pokrovsk they’ve crossed the massive belt of fortifications the Ukrainians built from 2014 to 2022 — and after that it’s wide open steppe most of the way to Lvov. I grant the Ukrainians had to do something, and a gamble is better than nothing — but they lost the gamble and now things are getting very, very harsh for them.
Clarke, thanks for this.
Joan, that seems reasonable as a first approximation.
Way back, I made no headway in reading Heidegger so I read learned commentary instead in an epic struggle at comprehension. So, just today I did it again, this time I took the liberty of looking up Hegel in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I wish I hadn’t. I should stick to what I know. Here be dragons for the uninitiated. Anyway, the article recounted what Hegel said, that ‘philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts’.
Um, well, yeah, sure, maybe something got garbled in the translation but understanding what’s around you is a good idea so you don’t end up as breakfast.
But, I mean, comprehended in thoughts? Is there another way? Ok, never mind, it’s what comes after that’s alarming. The article talks about the implied ‘historical and cultural conditionedness (is that a word?) and variability that applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself’.
Boy, based on what I’ve seen, it ain’t close to the highest form of human cognition. But never mind that too. That gobbledegook, ‘cultural conditionedness and variability’, to be fair, written not by Hegel but by the author of the article, gives license for all kinds of mischief because there’s no end to cultural, um, conditonedness. And so where does that lead us?
See, I read that philosophy is like the intellectual operating system for science which itself is akin to an app. And I imagine that other human endeavors ie other apps, also depend on philosophy as the underlying manager and guide for mental and behavioral functioning. IOW, screw up the operating system and you have no end of trouble.
I suppose it’s well known that PPE forms the core curriculum for tomorrow’s leaders. What we should expect out of this are finely tuned minds, tested and tempered, and those guys ought to be departing those campuses with deep wells of knowledge and agile and adaptable intellects.
I mean, if these people are going to be navigating the tattered and battered remnants of western civ, which will be one of the templates for whatever comes next, they better be up to it.
One last mistake, I looked up ontology and epistemology online. Reams of crap. Made me laugh. Maybe my recollection is faulty but as I remember it my philosophy prof said that they are, respectively, what we know and how we know it. Simple, no?
This helps explain the thing I always found most puzzling in Spengler. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of pseudomorphosis than medieval Europe, which was basically a disparate group of barbarians united through the auspices of the late Roman institution of the Catholic Church. Yet, unless I missed it, Spengler fails to draw that conclusion and all but ignores the Church’s role. I guess the Church, and Christianity more generally, had been so debased by the time of the 19th century that people went off looking for other mythologies as a way to move forward.
“One of the constant themes of middle class thought in modern times is the insistence that it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too.”
Carl Schmitt referred to it as the bourgeoisie’s aptitude for the ‘neverending conversation’, squashing any discussion by preempting (and grinding to fine dust) any practical viewpoint, any attempt at escaping this avalanche of thoughtstoppers.
A recent example:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002210
““The agreement of a thought-content with itself” is the short form. What this means, of course, is that a statement is true if it’s internally consistent, whether or not it has any relation to experienced reality…”
That’s Hegel in a nutshell, isn’t it? I’d concede he had some more or less valid things to say about thoughts as they relate to other thoughts. Relating them to any external (to one’s own thoughts) realities is where he falls down for me; it’s very hit and miss at best, which renders it largely useless as a philosophy. Yet for Hegelians his teachings are key to understanding those same external realities…
How do we distinguish between Hegelian Intellectual Intuition and that kind of knowledge that we know to be true but cannot prove? From recollection your example of the latter kind was a photo of your mother – tricky to show that that individual was actually your mother even though you have a bedrock certainty of it.
@The Other Owen #120 “Air conditioners went from just cooling air, to being sexist, to give an example.”
But how can anyone disprove (or prove) that air conditioners are sexist? That sort of statement is still safely in the territory of the unprovable and therefore undeniable, though it may seem otherwise. So long as one can maintain an internally consistent concept of how they are sexist, it’s all good…
Hi John Michael,
That’s the thing with gambles and/or ultimatums, they can fail. And in this case resources were expended that could sorely be spent. How can supply lines be maintained for that incursion gamble, and lets not forget that it’s heading into winter? It would be possible to eventually split that force off, then starve them out, whilst they run out of ammo and shells. I’m pretty sure that outcome has historic parallels in that part of the world.
The ol’ crystal ball is foggy, but common sense suggests that sooner or later someone will have to say sorry. Whether it’s the leaders, or what remains of the defeated people, it matters not. Incidentally, I have it on reliable sources that that word is very hard for people to say.
Cheers
Chris
>In both cases it resulted in the loss of a lot of men and armor that could have been better used
Are you sure about that? If you’re going to lose either way, perhaps it’s better to go out with a bang? War is a funny game – people keep playing even when it’s clear they’ve lost.
>The agreement of a thought-content with itself
That almost sounds like circular reasoning. I’m liking Hegel less and less.
Wer # 111:
You said: ” sometimes I don’t even read the majority of the comments here to be honest.”
Well, I sometimes do the same thing, to be honest too, because…Life is short and time is limited at least for me. It will be our little secret, Wer (ha ha ha). I like your comments, man (Well, I suppose your a man).
JMG #113: “many nations (such as Spain) didn’t give theirs up until quite recently, and the recent abandonment of state control over churches elsewhere hasn’t had adequate time to make up for the negative impact of all those centuries of political domination of the religious sphere”
A very negative impact, I agree!
This historical situation explains such as “interesting” facts about religiosity/spirituality in Spain nowadays. For example, the fact that vast majority of Spaniards can’t think out of the false dycothomy “Catholicism/atheism”. A lot of people think that if you aren´t a Roman Catholic, you’re a non-believer (indifferent, agnostic or purely atheist). There are a lot of Evangelical Churches in my town, by the way, but most of believers there are Gypsies (an ethnical minority of course) and South Americans migrants (another minority too). I also know the case of a few people “100% Native” near me that are Muslims (converts),Protestants, Buddhists, New Agers and even “Russian” Orthodox, but they confirm the rule…because they’re freaks in their lifestyles, a very minoritarian trend, I mean.
>The whole Ukrainian mess seems to me to have been a fantasy of the USA and NATO
I think they were watching how badly they did with the Chechens (if I had to put on their clown shoes for a moment here) and concluded “these guys are pushovers, they’re feckless and gormless, a joke”. And that probably was true at the time. Probably. But invoking Hegel here, the truth, um, changed. In the intervening years, for whatever reasons they decided to become less feckless and gormless. It would probably be less words to say feckful and gormful but I’ve wasted enough words already.
Clark #131
“Imparsible Prose”
What a lovely and useful term! Thank you!
Sadly, I often find more of the world “imparsible” than most people (or so it seems), so I parse slowly and cautiously at that bit of the world which is within my reach, and enjoy the “parsible” when I find it. 🙂
@Ken (#125):
I see that lightning strike as yet another strong omen (among several recent ones) of an oncoming hard strike on the present world order. By “hard strike” I do not mean the slow collapse that our host regularly mentions; that will continue, IMHO, as he supposes. I mean something else, far more impressive (though far less consequential), that we (I, too) have not been able to foresee with any precision.
The Gods do not speak to us in words, but in acts. This seems to me to be such an act.
@Clarke (#131):
This is going in my permanent file of memorable quotes! Many, many thanks!
Smith, philosophy can be extraordinarily wise and useful, but it can only do that if philosophers are honest with themselves. Epistemology in particular is very useful indeed — but only if it accepts just how little we can actually know. The problem is that since Kant’s time most Western philosophers have been desperately trying to pretend that they can know things that they can’t — or, since the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, insisting that if they can’t know something it must not exist at all. So philosophy has been relegated to a sort of respectable fringe status, and toddles on in complete irrelevance to everything else.
Simon, one of Spengler’s serious mistakes is that he failed to realize that every great culture goes through two pseudomorphoses. Faustian culture had its first pseudomorphosis from Magian culture — other than the fine details of religion, Europe in 1000 was basically a backwater region of the Magian sphere, complete with a dominant scriptural religion, monarchic governments, and the rest of it. (As Spengler himself pointed out, “Late Roman” is early Magian; he called the Pantheon, that utterly unclassical structure, the first of all mosques.) The second pseudomorphosis came in with the Renaissance, derived from the Apollonian civilization, and it did the usual trick of shocking the Faustian soul into full wakefulness. (The Apollonian culture did that twice — the Magian culture had Babylonia for its first pseudomorphosis and Hellenistic culture for its second.) One of Toynbee’s strengths is that he gave proper attention to the role of religion.
Michaelz, thanks for this. What an over-the-top quibblefest!
Daniil, exactly. Hegelian idealism assumes that thinking comes first and reality tags along meekly behind it like a well-trained poodle. That’s one of the core reasons why Hegel’s ideas so reliably fail in practice.
Andy, it’s quite simple. Tacit knowledge — the kind that allows you to pick out a photo of someone you know, even though you can’t define how you do so — is rooted in personal experience, and so it cannot be used to justify claims about things that are not subject to experience — for example, the nature of the Absolute or the process by which it works out in history. Tacit knowledge also can’t be used to prove anything to anyone else — how do I know that you’re not just pointing to a random picture to mess with me? It belongs wholly to the personal sphere. That’s why gnosis, which is tacit knowledge applied to religious experience, is so difficult for theologians to deal with: it’s the heart of personal religion but it can’t be used to prove anything outside the individual sphere.
Chris, unfortunately people can be blown to bits while they’re still refusing to say they’re sorry. That seems to be happening quite a bit in that part of the world just now.
Other Owen, nah, if the Ukrainians weren’t being led by someone who has zero grasp of strategy, and exploited by a hopelessly corrupt ruling class, they could have done much better. Instead of throwing it all away on the Kursk gamble, they could have invested every penny they could find into building a new set of defensive structures on the far side of the Dneiper River, and focused on making the Russian army pay in blood for every inch of the Donbass. If they played that well, they could have been in position to force a stalemate and a peace treaty that would preserve more than half of Ukraine as an independent nation. As it is, I don’t see much chance that the Russians will stop anywhere this side of the Polish border, and once they take Ukraine it’s probably a safe bet that they’ll encourage migration into it from other parts of Russia. Or — ahem — from North Korea…
As for Hegel, you don’t yet dislike him enough. I double dog dare you to read ten paragraphs of The Phenomenology of Spirit without flinging the thing across the room…
Chuaquin, it’s a common bad habit. Even here in the US you can find people who are convinced that if you don’t believe in Jesus you must be an atheist and a devil worshipper.
In response to JMG’s comment, there is a lot of wisdom in the West, there are many mysteries in Western occultism, but it is very difficult to access that knowledge, for obvious reasons, they are sacred, in occult literature there is a lot of wisdom, an example would be Edgar Cayce.
Although there is a lot of rubbish thanks to the New Age.
Speaking of other things, I’m going to say a few things, I’ll take Newtonian mechanics (Lagrangian mechanics, Hamiltonian mechanics and the rest of later developments) also called classical mechanics.
Classical mechanics is parametric differential geometry, it is pure geometry, mass is a scalar function, to give me an explanation to those who don’t understand a little, if you know a little about vector algebra, adding and subtracting vectors and multiplying by a scalar, you have the basic idea. Newton’s postulates are just something convenient so that parametric geometry can serve as a MENTAL MODEL.
Mental model that helps us have some guidance in this world, and nature does not have to obey our mental models, and here Kant has much more to say. Nature violates those postulates of Newton every moment.
Electrodynamics is also geometry, another type of geometric development. As a logical consequence, quantum mechanics is also a rather strange type of geometric development, because for quantum mechanics, the models of classical mechanics and electrodynamics were taken and applied to the small world, and the result was quantum mechanics. The success of quantum mechanics (here a point quantum mechanics has a very relative success, the conclusion of quantum mechanics is that the small world is very strange and perhaps geometry is not a good model for the small world) was not replicated in later developments, the standard model is full of patches.
Today, when a good part of scientists are lost in the world of their own illusions, illusions created by the idea of progress, and do not realize what I have mentioned about classical mechanics, which is common sense. This is very worrying but at this point the snowball is very big apparently, and it seems that only until the snowball crashes, it will stop.
Speaking of something positive, it is very likely, in my opinion, that classical mechanics and electromagnetism, can be very well preserved in the dark ages (which are not dark at all, but it is the time where many knowledge is lost), being geometry and the experiments are relatively simple there are not many problems unless the will to preserve them does not exist, also chemistry can be preserved, I am a chemistry student and I was a physics student, but chemistry falls into another category.
JMG, I think that if the Ukrainians didn’t have such a poor grasp of strategy, and weren’t so hopelessly corrupt they could have saved the money and lives needed to build fortifications along the river and just came to a peace settlement with the Russians on one of the many opportunities that were available.
They could have gotten away with just losing the Donbas and some of the Black Sea coast ( plus Crimea) if they had ignored their US puppet masters and come to the table. I think this opportunity was available to them right up until the time they blasted the beach with cluster munitions or invaded Russia proper. If they had played nice and handed over the worst of the Azov Nazi’s and other bad actors they might have even gotten a deal where Russia would provide them with energy and China would help rebuild their infrastructure.
>Relating them to any external (to one’s own thoughts) realities is where he falls down for me; it’s very hit and miss at best
To be cheeky, I think you could just replace “Hegelian” with “Solipsist” and the statements would make just as much sense.
>So long as one can maintain an internally consistent concept of how they are sexist, it’s all good
That sure is an odd definition of the word “good” there. Seems like I remember a brush with some philosophy students going on about Spinoza and similar concepts of internal consistency. Reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s intro in New Math “It’s more important to understand what you’re doing, than to get the right answer”.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
>I double dog dare you to read ten paragraphs of The Phenomenology of Spirit
Any 10 in any order? Based on what I’ve gathered so far, he sounds like the kind of writer that will put you to sleep.
>If they played that well, they could have been in position to force a stalemate and a peace treaty that would preserve more than half of Ukraine as an independent nation
That would require their backers to go along with that strategy. They’re kind of in the same boat as a startup after it has taken VC money, they may want to play it safe and conservative (then again, are they that compentent?) but the VC wants them to shoot the moon and bet on three cherries, because of internal VC reasons. And their incompetence plays into it as well, not confident enough to have a different opinion to that of their senior partners.
It’s a tragedy, however you slice it. One of the tragic things about war is how it drags on, even though EVERYBODY can see who has already won. It’s like it takes on a life of its own and only when enough people have died does war finally stop.
Hrmmmm
Sounds like we could use a new word for many of the academics who came after Kant.
Maybe Phobosophers?? Because it seems like a fear of wisdom rather than the love of wisdom.
@JMG (#149):
The Ukraine vs. Russia conflict isn’t between two rational state-actors jockying for miliary advantage over one another with respect to present-day economic, territorial and political issues. It’s not primarily about land and power, but about something that matters far more than such trivia to each side, which one might call identity or self-determination.
Rather, it’s the most recent eruption of a many centuries-old caldera of burning, boiling rage (on the Ukrainian side) vs. glacially cold moral certainty (on the Russian side). The issue between the two sides comes down to whether Ukrainians are a separate nation (or people) in their own right, vs. whether they are in fact simply self-deluded “Little Russians,” who need to be brought to acknowledge their supposed Russianess for their own good. Fire versus Ice …
Each side agrees that a stable compromise is impossible, and that military force must be deployed to secure a permanent victory if no lesser means will suffice. (And, though the course of history favors the Ukrainian side, the balance of military power –even if the US and NATO were to enter the war openly, deploying all their resources — definitely favors the Russian side.)
There can never be any permanent peace in such a situation, not short of the total destruction of one or the other side — and in this case, that comes down to genocide. (If this reminds one of the far more recent conflict — less than a century old — between Israel and Palestine, there is good reason for that.)
The apparent total ignorance of all this history on the part of the US and NATO — or much worse, their insistence that such history is irrelevant, that everything always comes down just to matters of current economics and politics — is why I occasionally don’t manage to bite my tongue in my comments here, but fulminate a little about the myopic, clueless idiots running the US and Western Europe.
@Simon and JMG: The medieval church was indeed a continuation of the Late Roman institution, and Toynbee saw that better than Spengler did, calling the church the chrysalis of the new civilization. However, I also think (agreeing with Spengler) that the Western church changed radically in the 11th and 12th centuries to embody the culture that was arising.
The Late Roman church was essentially an urban institution. It had one bishop per town, and theoretically only the bishop could celebrate the Eucharist – in practice, exceptions were made for particularly large cities where the presbyters could substitute for the bishop, simply because all Christians would not fit into a single building. Originally, there was no celibate at all. Monks arose separately and at first, did not fit in well into the regular hierarchy. The influence of the monks led to expectations of the bishop being celibate. The presbyters and diacons, that is, all the clergy except for that one person, were married. There was no way to celebrate the Eucharist in the countryside – there were no churches in the countryside, only oratories. The church embodied the urban nature of the Hellenic / Apollonian culture.
There were several way to continue after the Roman Empire lost the dominion over the Mediterranean Sea. The Orthodox church (according to my limited knowledge) stayed closest to the original institution, but the monastic element became stronger. The Irish church was carried by monasteries and wandering monks. In Islamic countries, other solutions were found.
The Western church created the parish priest to reach every single hamlet in the countryside. Obligatory celibacy of all priests separated them from the common congregation, as did the reservation of the chalice for priests. Celibacy also meant that a larger part of the tithe was passed on to higher levels. The secular power of the pope was, for a while in the 13th century, greater than that of any religious leader in history, I think. Monastic orders were integrated and subordinated to bishops and to the pope. Military religious orders were created, a complete novelty, and they conquered lands in Outremer, Iberia and Prussia.
JMG – For an onlist question, could we say that Wagner usefully embodies the futility and also the transformative possibilities “in the wisdom of the West”? If he comes to see the “lore of the lore” as representing something akin to the Imaginal world, that is participatory as we move past Nibelung into Parzifal?
Would you agree with the assertion that we are not human beings having occasional “spiritual” experiences, but spiritual beings having a human experience?
Dear JMG and commentariat:
This entire topic is really interesting. A thought occurred to me; could the rise of science at least partly been assisted by philosophy wandering into the weeds? Since philosophy wasn’t going to achieve in knowing everything about the world, try science! Look what its found out as of, say, 1820.
Further, “the West was still too caught up in its own wildly overinflated sense of cosmic entitlement to consider giving up on the goal of knowing everything about the world” the “wildly overinflated sense of cosmic entitlement“ could be due in part to the advances in science to that point, the rapid and drastic changes in Europe (fall of an ancient monarchy, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the vast disruptions of the Industrial Revolution, etc.), and the Christian belief in the second coming and heaven on earth.
After all, other mature civilizations and philosophies didn’t come up with a thinker like Hegel (oh, those Germans!).
Cugel
I have an idea about church attendance.
Faustians were able to avoid church (even in peacetime) and still consider themselves religious, as in Italy, an example of a combination of high Catholic identity and low church attendance.
Although the United States is highly Faustian at the level of government and secular politics, it still retains some remnants of magicians in religion (a high proportion of the Jewish population, communities of believers disguised as ethnic groups, etc.) where lay believers participate in the religious rituals had weekly cycle as indicators of religious activity may only apply to societies of magicians.
Joan #132 – I too like to use a biologic/evolutionary metaphoric lens to view social structures. In defense of the metaphor’s applicability, I offer the undeniable truth that we are biological beings (at the moment anyway) and therefore our behavior is appropriately interpreted through a biological/evolutionary framework of concepts and relationships. Of course, it is always good to remember that observed reality may or may not submit to your metaphoric analysis!
Addendum: I just discovered this quotation must have come from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: ‘You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.’
“Hegelian idealism assumes that thinking comes first and reality tags along meekly behind it like a well-trained poodle. That’s one of the core reasons why Hegel’s ideas so reliably fail in practice.”
It occurs to me that trans ideology, ie, the belief that we can change sex or become ‘non-binary’ is Hegelism in practice. Their belief is that, say, if a man thinks he’s a woman, then he becomes one and everyone else has to acknowledge that new ‘reality’ or they’re a very bad person who needs to be punished and shamed. Unfortunately biological reality isn’t a well-trained poodle and those who get so-called ‘trans healthcare’ end up with an unending series of medical problems which can lead to both disability and death. Eventually it will be abandoned but not before a lot of people have been harmed by it. It seems to be a facet of living in the Aquarian Age with its twin rulers – we have Uranian wild untethered ideas that eventually get clobbered by some harsh Saturnian limits so it looks like this will something to grapple with for the next roughly 2,000 years.
>tricky to show that that individual was actually your mother even though you have a bedrock certainty of it
Well, you can’t outdo Principia Mathematica, where they spent hundreds of pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2. Granted they were trying to do more than that, but Goedel later came along and set fire to the whole edifice. I suppose Kant and Goedel might have been good buddies, they both did a bang up job of discovering hard limits. However, the mathematicians didn’t freak out and produce an equivalent of Hegel for some reason.
@Other Owen #156
“However, the mathematicians didn’t freak out and produce an equivalent of Hegel for some reason.”
Ah, but they did! Look up “Cantor’s Paradise”. A whole field of advanced math (with consequences for the math you learned in high-school) is detached from reality completely…
Zarcayce, there’s an enormous amount of value in the Western cultural traditions; I wish more people were interested in saving it. As it is we’re going to lose an appalling amount. I hope we can save Euclid and some of the basic principles of the scientific method.
Clay, sure, but Britain and the US had to play stupid games instead.
Other Owen, nah, any ten in sequence. That’ll keep you from taking all the really short ones and calling it good. 😉
Dobbs, I could see that!
Robert, understood, but there’s still a smart and a stupid way to manage your anger. The Ukrainians let themselves be talked by Britain and the US into doing things the stupid way, and it’s by no means impossible that Russia’s response — icy as always, especially with that supremely glacial сукин сын Putin at the helm — could involve the end of Ukraine as a coherent national community. I wasn’t joking when I suggested that the Russian government might set out to repopulate Ukrainian territory with other people; after the ghastly death toll on the battlefields, the massive flight of Ukrainians out of the country already, and the flood of panicked refugees that will happen once the Russians break through the Donbass fortifications and begin the inevitable march on Odessa, there won’t be a lot of Ukrainians to push out of the way, and the Russians could forcibly relocate the remaining “Little Russian” population elsewhere and, say, invite the conservative people they’re currently bringing into the country to settle Ukraine in their place…
Celadon, that’s one of the reasons we’re having this discussion!
Larkrise, I would agree with it wholeheartedly.
Cugel, I would support both those suggestions.
林龜儒, that’s an interesting possibility — church attendance as a sign that the Faustian pseudomorphosis here in America is only skin-deep, and the deeper, more participatory culture is showing through.
Bridge, I think a lot of it is a toxic interplay between the Piscean and Aquarian energies. It’s a basic principle of Piscean consciousness that everybody must be forced into accepting the capital-T truth, whatever that happens to be this week. It’s a basic principle of Aquarian consciousness, by contrast, that each individual or little fringe group measure the value of their own beliefs by the number of people who reject it. So you get the current situation, where every little fringe group embraces the most extreme possible view, and then tries to force everyone else to accept it. As the Piscean influence fades out, I expect whatever survives of the transgender community to become a subculture with its own jargon, rituals, and identity.
Other Owen, mathematicians have to be logical or every other mathematician points and laughs. Philosophers, unfortunately, aren’t subject to that limitation.
Constructivist, okay, I stand corrected!
OT: my last update but one ended in my computer screen’s toolbar being reduced to a minimum, with apparently no way to access the internet. The next update put the wi-fi on the first screen saver, but getting back to my browser was not very east. Hence the prolonged silence. Sigh. The more “improvements,” the worse things get.
Re: Hegel et. al. – and the rest of the modern philosophers – I’m almost inclined to stop at Epictetus and let it go at that. Well, ok, include the Tao Te Ching. But as for his influence on modern thought, well, there seems to be an unending market among the intelligentsia for whatever feedlot sweepings is currently fashionable in any era. To paraphrase one of my favorite, mocking songs of the past:
“Don’t know much about philosophy…. theology….economics, metaphysics, or psychology…” Not even my own lying eyes, nor – Minerva help me -my own memory these days. Except that Orwell was a prophet when he wrote “We have always been at war with Eurasia….no, East Asia….no, Eurasia….”
Just accept that I can’t expect things to make sense, because everybody and their pet alligators and trying to gaslight the rest of us poor suckers. And themselves.
JMG,
I agree. Actually, it seems to me that what was established in Europe in the medieval period can best be called a Christian caliphate, with the Pope as caliph. Thus, the crusades were a battle between Christian and Muslim caliphates.
The collapse of the Holy Roman Empire is then the end of the institutional structure left over from the medieval period. Britain had already moved on to the nation state model and it took France, Germany and Italy many decades to establish something similar. Of course, they never really succeeded.
I think that’s important background to understand Wagner, Nietzsche and Spengler. The German-speaking lands were having a major identity crisis that was intimately tied in with the political crisis. Wagner even wrote an essay called “What is German?”. Obviously, it was a question that needed attention. The revival of the pagan myths was an attempt to create a new identity. But, in the process, it was a falsification of the real history. That’s why I think Spengler’s mistake is not arbitrary.
Aldarion,
Yes, the Late Roman Church belonged very much to the city. The word “pagan” was originally a derogatory term for those who lived on the land and followed the old religions. It meant something like “country bumpkin”.
Just the first paragraph alone is so so perfect!
JMG, I would say that the transgender community is already a subculture with its own jargon, rituals, and identity. However, given the huge cost of the surgeries and hormones which make them patients for life (if they medicalise), I don’t think it’s going to be a subculture with a long shelf life. It will have transformed into something else 20 years from now. With the economic hard times ahead, it just isn’t sustainable as it is, not to mention that some of the doctors are being sued.
I think a lot of trans kids would be punks, goths, or emos if they had been born earlier. The difference is that these subcultures were based on hair, makeup, music and clothes and didn’t involve ‘sex changes’ or medicalisation. I think it will go back to being about hair, makeup, music and clothes and that’s a good thing. There’s always going to be Romantics
who need to express that somehow. I saw it myself at a Faery gathering where I saw a woman in a wimple and a man dressed as a Knights Templar to name but a few.
@constructivist
Are you talking about Cantor’s set theory? It was Hilbert that made the statement “living in Cantor’s Paradise”. And it’s related to the efforts of Russell and Whitehead to put math on a pure logical foundation. And Goedel said some interesting things about the limits of that.
Veritasium makes a video that lays it all out – https://yewtu.be/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo
Whaddayaknow, Polanyi crops up in all of this with his Tacit Knowledge. It’s interesting the border between math and philosophy.
In any case, I don’t see where Cantor was freaking out over anything, maybe others were freaking out over the things he was saying, like some infinities are bigger than others. He really really liked playing with infinities. And he had some spicy things to say about sets at the time. Although today, those things aren’t considered that spicy.
@JMG (#166) writes:
“there’s still a smart and a stupid way to manage your anger. The Ukrainians let themselves be talked by Britain and the US into doing things the stupid way …”
Yes, I’m in agreement that Ukraine has been doing things in a supremely stupid way over the last few years. However, Ukraine wasn’t precisely “talked into” its course of action by the US and Britain. Rather, it was coerced, chiefly by the US.
It seems pretty clear to me that the current Ukrainian government was put in power by a successful on-going US covert operation, which also instigated the Maidan Events of 2013-2014. As a US puppet, the Ukrainian government wasn’t given any sort of free hand to set Ukraine’s foreign policy wholly in terms of Ukraine’s best interests.
*****
However, it’s far more complicated than just that. Large fractions of the population of Ukraine, especially in Kyiv and the eastern parts of the state, is now ethnically Russian, the result of immigration from Russia during the second half of the 20th century. Russian is their native language, not Ukrainian; and naturally enough, they regard themselves as Russians, not Ukrainians. (The western parts of Ukraine ard more solidly Ukrainian in native language and ethnic identity.)
And then there is the Nazi vs. Soviet question. Ukraine suffered enormously during the years leading up to WW2 and during the war itself. Much of that suffering was due to policies of the USSR, and much of it to policies of the Nazis. It really was a toss-up for any individual Ukrainian, whether (s)he had reason to hate the Nazis more (and thus favor the Soviets), or to hate the Soviets more (and thus favor the Nazis). That divide between Ukrainians is never ever going to go away, at least not until everyone who remembers hearing about those horrible years is dead and their stories forgotten.
This is probably far more detail than you really want or need, and even so I’m only scratching the surface of all the complexities. The short summary is that Ukraine does not have what it takes to implement any detailed foreign policy that might appeal to almost all Ukrainian citizens, whether they are aligned with the West or aligned with Russia.
And I really doubt whether any of the high much-a-mucks of US foreign policy have even the faintest clue about such things.
“mathematicians have to be logical or every other mathematician points and laughs. Philosophers, unfortunately, aren’t subject to that limitation.”
Hence the old joke,
The math department is the 2nd cheapest one to supply in the university: All they need are pencils, paper and erasers. The philosophy department is the cheapest. They don’t need erasers.
Off topic but thoroughly depressing, how can one profit from the illnesses caused by industrial food?
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/how-long-til-were-all-on-ozempic
Is monotheism as a whole another aspect of the Piscean age that people try to mark out as the capital T Truth and force upon everybody else in the world?
JmG, so duly noted! Just making sure I’m tracking with the current. I’ve heard others I trust say Parzival is the quintessence of Wagner, too. I guess the old sinner got there at last. Those Germans are pretty methodical. From your comments, I’m gathering you think the deluge is going to be profound. When I look at how much classical work was lost and how long it took to recover it’s really quite sobering. If the prime factor is human nature, it means that despite our technopoly, the pattern will be roughly the same. I’d like to see the next American culture have a know how and Faustian knack, but an awareness of it’s dangerous hubris and self destructive tendencies, eg., not playing the long game like China and India. Maybe some shaping of Tolkien themes would go some way towards making that real, given his mythos and corpus will be a surviving relic and vehicle.
As an aside, it’s inconvenient there aren’t any hobbit folk in Wagner. I guess I’ll have to watch the whole cycle and see if I can spot any.
It is a pity that much of today’s knowledge will be lost in the future, but returning to Newton and his postulates, the postulate of action-reaction is only a geometric application of the law of karma, the postulate of inertia is only a geometric application of the law that tells us everything moves by divine will.
The ancient wise rishis said that maya (illusion) is infinite (indefinable) and inexhaustible and in perfect flow, maya violates Newton’s geometric postulates when the reacion is not geometrical or when the principle of inertia is violated with a non-geometrical will.
The human mind is incapable of knowing its laws, if one can speak of law, we can only know certain things like the law of karma through the painful experience it causes and these laws of maya are so infinitely indescribable but at the same time so simple and applicable, and as a result have infinite applications.
It will really be a pity to lose much knowledge that can be preserved, mathematical logic is another that can be preserved, Godel’s two theorems and the Turing machine are something that are really worth preserving.
Most people today do not appreciate the beauty of mathematical applications, seeing how Maya in its infinity sometimes behaves like geometry, I suppose that will make it lost.
On another note, does anyone know if there is any initiative to try to bring differential calculus of several variables (without the strictly logical baggage, more intuitive) and classical mechanics to sacred geometry? It would be a good exercise, both mental and spiritual.
I have also been thinking lately that linear algebra (matrix algebra) could be used as a divination method like astrology or geomancy. I have thought about this because you once mentioned that today’s chatbots use some divination methods, and chatbots like chat gpt are, among other things, linear algebra. This method would be a combination of geomancy, numerology and matrix algebra, in my opinion, but the truth is I don’t know much about numerology. any opinions?
In the post you mention some of the frustrations of tryin to argue or reason with a Hegelian, but what I’ve been realizing the last few days, thinking about various discussions on various topics in various venues over the years, is they usually don’t tell you they’re expecting a new synthetic truth to emerge out of nowhere to solve whatever problem is under discussion once we all agree to wish for it hard enough. Instead, they play a confusing game of confidently predicting some particular positive outcome while dismissing any and all ideas, good or bad, of how such an outcome might be achieved. It’s not the most common style of argument, but it’s always baffled me when I’ve run into it.
The pattern includes focusing entirely on “raising awareness” of something as the only objective worth discussing (even when there’s plenty of awareness already); being far more concerned about exposing and condemning some other side’s propaganda concerning the issue than entertaining any actual proposed solutions; declaring said propaganda to be the only real problem in the first place (“We’d have easily switched over to renewables long ago if it weren’t for the fossil fuel industry’s climate change denial campaign!”); and taking disagreement as proof you’re either lying about your own opinion or you don’t have the faculties to hold a meaningful opinion at all.
At least now I know where those arguments are coming from. I used to suspect they were just an elaborate form of trolling. Though there might not be much practical difference.
Patricia M, well, Lao Tsu was around before Epictetus, so you’re still good.
Simon, that seems like a reasonable summary, yes.
Heinrich, thank you. It’s certainly attracted the liveliest attention from the current crop of trolls!
Bridge, as I see it, the medicalization of trans identity is a temporary phenomenon. A great many people these days who consider themselves trans aren’t doing the surgery — especially as word gets out that in most cases, once you have the surgery, you will never have an orgasm again — so it’s purely a matter of personal identity in the teeth of biology. I think it’s quite possible that there will be people who keep pursuing that long after the surgical dimension is a dim memory.
Robert M, if the sources I’ve been reading are correct, Britain’s been very deeply involved in the whole Ukraine business since 2014. The potential profits to be made by breaking up Russia and exploiting the fragments have been on the minds of a great many London financiers for quite some time now. Other than that, so noted — and the one thing we can always be sure of is that the US foreign policy establishment bumbles along in serene ignorance of all this.
Anonymous, that’s my guess. Henotheism — the worship of a single god, while not denying the existence of others — seems to have been common in other ages, but Neptune’s influence led Piscean prophets to insist that their particular god was the only one who could possibly exist.
Celadon, given the extreme fragility of our methods of information storage, and the lack of any significant move to keep less brittle technologies in service, I expect a fantastic amount will be lost. Tolkien might make it, though — popular stories often do.
Zarcayce, one of the things I hope to do is convince at least some occultists to hang onto a notion of basic experimental method. If that survives, the rest can be reconstructed. As for calculus and classical mechanics in sacred geometry, that’s another tradition that’s still having to be rebuilt from fragments, and the revival hasn’t even gotten to all of Euclid yet. If you want something like that to happen, you’re probably going to have to take a hand in it yourself; anything mathematical beyond trigonometry is a closed book to me.
Walt, that’s a fascinating point, and fits with what I’ve seen as well. The notion that a solution will pop out of thin air if only enough people feel bad about the problem is one kind of gibbering lunacy; the notion that whatever solution has been presented must work, because enough people want it to work, and that asking for evidence (or even suggesting that evidence might be relevant) is wicked, is another, closely related kind. I’ll want to brood over that for a while.
JMG,
That makes me think that if Christianity is going to last long after the end of the Piscean age into the Aquarina age, then it will have to repudiate the parts of the Nicene Creed which state that there is only one God which is all powerful, and adjust to the notion of the Christian God being only one god among many, while its members still adhere to the second Commandment of only worshiping the Christian God.
@Other Owen
There were a number of people who had qualms about the developments in set theory at the time.
For our purposes, Hilbert is the Hegel of mathematics (who had a lot of allies), and he won so completely that the “spicy” bits are considered completely normal in mathematics today. When Gödel came along, they pretended that it had only killed Russell’s Logicism, and continued to dance in the fields of uncountable infinities.
It’s considered quite eccentric to question the existence of such things anymore, since they are clearly quite as real as eternal growth and progress.
@Zarcayce #177 I’ve never really thought about it before, but you could express the construction of a geomantic chart in terms of linear algebra operations (and modulus addition). What an interesting idea! You still need a good source of randomness at the beginning and something entirely human at the end to do the interpretation though.
@JMG This is an unfamiliar area for me, but important I think. So if I follow your point one difference is the use we put a concept to. Tacit knowledge is something you know but can’t prove, Hegelian is something you “know” and then insist it’s true and attempt to force others to believe by an argument from authority.
I put the Hegelian know in quotes because it feels that ideas of that nature are qualitatively different from tacit knowledge. What I’m wondering is, is there a test I can apply to distinguish one kind of idea from the other? At the moment the only guide I’ve got is that tacit knowledge seems to apply to things that are external to me. E.g a memory of someone else, or someone else reveals a fact to me. Intellectual Intuition is more along the lines of “I thought very hard about… and then decided it must be …..” and now I’m going to insist on that.
I think religion is mostly about the self worship of humanity, via its own self image. One everlasting facet of humanity is our ability to take a ideal of humility and serenity from a source of genuine good faith and then subvert it into a abstraction of self worship and excuse making (Of horrible ideals and real harms, If you can get away with it and benefit via the short term then why not do it?) Maybe this is similar to the idea, where the rare exceptions deviate back to the mean/average? Humanity could march one Genius at a time, only to be dragged back down the slope of the masses.
—
I doubt that the west’s problem lies with hearing out bad ideas with bad results, as much as enduring an never ending hierarchy of elite goon squads, which will use any idea, no matter how mundane/idiotic, to justify the origins, means, and ends, of every mafia-like power play which benefits them. To me it seems like proof of the concept that ‘power corrupts all’ and so far there has lacked a friction/resistance to establish boundaries and burn away unproductive elements/organizations.
—
The most intriguing aspect of our decline into unsustainable madness, is how the elitist managed to grease the wheels so well that friction is practically non existent from the masses, then when our trajectory reaches terminal velocity they realize too little, too late that the braking mechanism has nothing to grip on to besides their own slimy egotism. The brake conversely accelerates and all steering has been lost, and after reading some of HL Mencken, I must agree it makes for a good show. If we must have fake politics, then at least let it have humorous irony.
—
On a darker note, I am steadily convinced that every lasting fad-cycle and institution is allowed to persist in the deep west exactly because they benefit the not-so-silent psychopathic tribal elephant in the room. Eastern Europe has a problem child that just keeps coming back, just in time to torch some else’s newly built house. Who else would find common human decency so deeply offending? Call me paranoid, but if we are allowed to have water, then it is a Likelihood that it was extracted from their saliva being spit into a well (Industrial fluoride anyone?)
—
Would it be too much to say that we mostly have them to blame for removing the necessary resistance from european-like societies, of the good old boot-up-the-arse humility which kept elitists jailed into their own club exclusive, echo chamber bubble by the healthy boundaries society once had. It turns out that the bubble could expand beyond exaggeration once unabated, and most normal observers are hoping a fast and decisive pop. You seem to believe in the slowly deflating balloon over a long period of ever-worsening. I do believe that humanity corrects itself one painful fall at a time, and the stairwell is practically infinite. But I can also see that the line ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ will lead to another power struggle that ends with a climax. Now that may be the first fall of many down the long winding road, to correct the last era of satanic nonsense, but I doubt many of us will survive fall #1. So… Perhaps taking down as many organized psychopaths out as we can in fall#1 will make it easier for fall#2 and so forth on the general trend downhill?
” I’ll want to brood over that for a while.”
Or might I suggest you meditate on that. Sorry to throw that at you.
JMG,
I hope that ‘trans healthcare’ becomes a distant memory but corporate interests have taken over and it’s big business now complete with lots of therapists who are basically sales people pushing it at gender clinics to vulnerable people with no mention of the serious drawbacks involved, of course. Autistic people are particularly vulnerable as some of them think if they don’t meet some stereotypical standard they must be the opposite sex somehow. The other aspect rarely mentioned is that some men are autogynephiles which means dressing up as a woman is a sexual fetish for them but they are now supposed to be ‘trans’. It’s a complicated thing as there is so many strands to it. It also shows how acceptance of gay people is paper thin in many cases and that’s why so many of them want to ‘trans the gay away’.
“The notion that whatever solution has been presented must work, [e.g. trans surgeries] because enough people want it to work, and that asking for evidence (or even suggesting that evidence might be relevant) is wicked, is another, closely related kind. ” This statement is over the target. One thing that the trans industry does is concoct ‘evidence’ to support what they are doing and if anyone questions it, it becomes proof of what a dangerous bigoted ‘phobe they are and they should be ‘cancelled’.
It seems to me that Hegel was pushing at an open door which is why he became so influential. Everyone’s pet evidence-free theories can become reality if you just believe hard enough is a message that lots of people want to hear. It can’t just be wishful thinking if a respected philosopher said it too with much more opaque and ‘intellectual’ language.
JMG (#179) and Bridge
“…especially as word gets out that in most cases, once you have the surgery, you will never have an orgasm again…”
There appears to be accumulating evidence that this may also be the case with puberty-suppressing hormones.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to cleave [a fool from his/her money]” – to mangle a bit of Scott…
@JMG – thanks for listening to my rant. I did get my ready access to the internet back by diddling around in Settings until I reached “What app do you want to use,” and clicked on Firefox. Which had had a crash earlier.
And thanks for the affirmation of my choice of philosophers. The last third of my life – last quarter, at least – has been a series of lessons in knowing, gut-deep, my own limitations and freely accepting them. I don’t think you’d have liked the intellectually arrogant little beast I was in the first third of my life1 But as I told my late sister during a let’s-get-honest reconciliation with her, “it was all I had.”
About tolerance of other ways and ideas and values – I noticed here that the younger residents tend to pretty much follow the standard PMC party line, whereas my own cohort and older have a diversity of all, which to me was like tasting good wine after being fed kool-aid earlier. Oh, they all have their strong beliefs, mostly Christian – and Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and east Asian. And as my friend from Klamath Falls said, “They’re old enough to let their freak flags fly.” No. That’s not it. It’s who they are, in their refreshing variety. Note: I left out “Boomers” – I’d say, “unpredictable but left-leaning.
Some earlier things I read lamented that the Boomers never stepped up to be the Moral Authority of, say, the Transcendentalists or the Social Gospel types. Well, they have now, in spades, alas.
Thanks again.
@Simon re: caliphate
The way I see it, three main forms of political organization were tried out in Western Europe. Charlemagne, the three Ottos, the emperors Henry III. and IV., the Hohenstaufens and, much later, Charles V. Habsburg had the ambition of uniting the whole occidental civilization under their military and secular leadership – and of having the popes and bishops obey their every order. That is the tradition of Diocletian, Constantine, Julian, Theodosius, Justinian and the later Eastern Roman emperors, but also of the Umayyads, especially Abd-al-Malik, and the early Abbasids. So there you have your would-be caliphs: hereditary universal monarchs with a military training who exert dominance over the religious hierarchy without being, themselves, religious leaders. 19th century German historiography confused this imperial tradition with anachronistic German nationalism, but I see Louis XIV. and Napoleon as also inheriting something of this ambition.
On the other hand, a faint outline of an English nation state started to appear under King Alfred, though it was almost erased after the Norman conquest. An idea of a French nation state was present at the time of the Chanson de Roland, but it was almost erased in the Hundred Years War. The states that appeared on the occidental civilization’s eastern and northern rim, such as Hungary or Denmark, had a somewhat easier time at developing this nation-state outline. But this idea of organization only really came into its own after AD 1500.
The third and most idiosyncratic attempt at political organization was under the papacy. It was hatched by Gregory VII, gambled on the success of the Crusades, created the Templars, Johannites and other military religious orders to be its most loyal servants and almost came to fruition in the 13th century, after extinguishing all male descendants of the would-be caliph Frederic II Hohenstaufen. England, Portugal, Sicily and Outremer were fiefs of the Pope. The idea is, I think, unparalleled in other civilizations: a succession of celibate priests without military training or aristocratic birth, chosen by election to rule the rigidly organized clergy and collect the tithe throughout the whole civilization, and to dominate all secular rulers, excommunicating or enfeoffing them at will. The Dalai Lama bears some similarity, but on a regional scale.
I am not a Roman Catholic, and my history text books taught me antipathy towards the monarchical popes. I find that vision profoundly disturbing and in any case bound to fail. Toynbee was the first person I ever read who expressed sympathy towards these popes. Yet it would be disingenuous to pretend that the monarchical papacy is not native to Western Europe, just as communism and national socialism are Western European ideologies. They all have in common the desire for universal control of the mind, the conscience and the body.
Western Europe tried to keep alive many features of the Christianized Roman Empire, such as the imperial title, the Latin language, scripture and the patristic commentaries on scripture. It also admired and tried to adopt many of the features of its (initially) stronger and richer Islamic neighbours: courtly love, knightship, philosophy and urban culture in general. But the monarchical medieval church was homegrown.
Any book on numerology that anyone could recommend? Maybe one that shows the different types of numerology that exist. That would be very useful. Also, the problem of radicals, the square root of 3 for example. What do the radicals mean? Well, we have the golden number (Fibonacci and Golden Ratio), which is credited with certain magical properties. That would be a start. Maybe something can be done.
Here’s question in all of this nobody is asking. People have bad ideas all the time. I probably have at least one bad idea before breakfast. This era is full of people who are full of bad ideas. It’s probably the one thing this era will be known for, if anyone remembers it. Why did this particular guy’s bad ideas propagate so strongly down through the decades and centuries? Why didn’t people just shrug their shoulders and ignore his bad ideas?
He wasn’t the greatest of writers from what I’m gathering, although I need to verify that for myself. He almost intentionally made his ideas obtuse and hard to understand. But today we’re still talking about him and way more importantly – his ideas. That’s kind of why I was thinking that he didn’t really come up with these ideas on his own, that they were just repackaged ideas that were already floating around. But you say that’s not the case, they’re all his own.
Who was shilling for him? Who was promoting him back when he could’ve sank like a stone?
Anonymous, if Christianity survives far into the Aquarian age it’s likely to jettison its obsession with creeds entirely — that’s yet another way to force uniformity — and focus instead on a personal relation with Christ. That’s already a major theme, of course, among the more vigorous Protestant sects.
Andy, intellectual intuition always involves a claim to unearned privilege, whether stated or not. Tacit knowledge doesn’t necessarily do so — you can say “I recognize this picture of my mom” without denying other people the power to recognize someone different in the lineup of pictures!
False Eruption, that is to say, you’re a follower of Feuerbach whether you know it or not. That’s certainly your choice, but I’d encourage you to remember that not everyone agrees with you! As for the broader picture you paint, every civilization goes through this same process. The elite classes always eliminate as much friction as possible, and the result is that they spin out of control and slam their society headfirst into one of the usual brick walls. It’s a normal process and we’re already well along it.
JustMe, no need to apologize. I may do that too.
Bridge, the medical industry is arguably the most unsustainable aspect of our unsustainable society; it can’t be supported except at an ever-increasing cost that our faltering economy can’t support indefinitely, and it’s also generating an increasingly forceful pushback that is already on the brink of becoming a major political force. Thus I expect the bottom to fall out of the medical-industrial state in the decades ahead, and as that happens, the surgical end of transgender culture will likely grind to a halt.
Scotlyn, also true — and of course irreversible sterility is a consequence either way, too.
Patricia M, well, I was a snotnosed know-it-all in my youth, for whatever that’s worth, and there are those who say I haven’t changed much. 😉
Zarcayce, the gold standard in numerology is Matthew Oliver Goodwin’s two-volume Numerology: The Complete Guide, which is out of print but readily available in the used market. As for the irrational roots, the simplest of those — √2, √3, and √5, along with pi and phi — have very important roles in traditional sacred geometry; you might read Robert Lawlor’s Sacred Geometry: Principles and Practice as an intro to these.
Other Owen, I don’t think it was a matter of shilling. I tried to address the reason why Hegel became popular in the post: a lot of 19th century European intellectuals desperately wanted a way to claim access to knowledge that Kant proved they couldn’t have; Hegel provided them with a way to do that, and he wrapped it up in such obscure language that it was impossible to disprove it in a way that nobody could question. (The most common dishonest gimmick in modern philosophy is “you simply don’t understand what so-and-so is saying;” neither does the person who’s saying this, since in many cases so-and-so isn’t saying anything, but as protective squid ink it’s a great move.) So intellectuals flocked to Hegel because he gave them an excuse for what they wanted to do. Freud, in a different sense, got the same treatment; his theories were, at best, very weak, but they gave people a good excuse to discard Victorian morality. It didn’t take any specific group of people shilling for him, just the fact that a lot of people wanted more sexual options than they had.
Strict Constructivist,
Don’t forget about the debate in mathematics over the use of the principle of excluded middle. Excluded middle says that every proposition is true or false, and if there is anything in mathematics that represents the dualism of the Piscean age, it would be excluded middle.
The fact that mathematicians started questioning excluded middle around the early 1900s looks like another sign that the influences of the Piscean age are fading away.
>Hilbert is the Hegel of mathematics (who had a lot of allies), and he won so completely
If he won, why does “We must know, we will know” ring so hollow?
As far as weird numbers that are uncountable, eh. Worst case, all I need are the rational numbers to two decimal places and I’m fine. Perfectly happy with pi being 3.14 and sqrt(2) being 1.41. If someone wants to cavort with infinities, hey, you do you.
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall
Aleph-null bottles of beer
Take one down, pass it around
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall
>a lot of 19th century European intellectuals desperately wanted
Ah so it was sort of like how linux got started. Honestly trying to understand the dynamics of how it all started in the first place. The first release of linux wasn’t much to look at, but it did enough to get other people’s attention and energy and it propagated from there. There was an unfulfilled need and it met it.
He was meeting an unfulfilled um, need. They needed Hegel.
JMG,
I wonder if then we’ll see a Muslim Protestant Reformation in the future between the current Muslim status quo and a new wave of Muslim thinkers who reject the consensus of the faithful in favour of a personal relationship with Muhammad.
There’s another facet of the kind of argumentation I’m talking about, that I forgot to include but in a way it sums up the others. That is, treating a goal as if it were itself a viable plan for achieving it.
To use another example from an actual discussion of climate change I engaged in, one person whom I’d asked what he thought I individually should do about climate change, confidently answered, “sequester carbon!” Okay, sounds good, but what might that mean in practice? Did it mean I should vote for candidates who support research and investment in carbon sequestration projects? “No, of course not, neither party will act, so voting is no help.” Did it mean I should use less fossil fuels myself so it can stay sequestered where it already is? “No, of course not, that’s a drop in the ocean that won’t make any difference.” Protest, plant trees, donate, run for office…? “No, ineffective, just sequester carbon!” Okay… I suppose I could go buy some charcoal and bury it in my yard… “Don’t play dumb, this is serious!”
Even though everything in quotes there is tue (more or less), the overall effect is “don’t ruin my ideal solution by asking how it works or how to do it!” while avoiding actually saying so.
While brooding, consider whether there’s a connection with how the press has always described laws, especially new laws. Do we read, “This new law will require private (but not corporate) operators of small boats (but not large ones) to pay a fee to file annual paperwork proving the trash disposal equipment aboard their craft meets a certain list of requirements and is in good repair, and authorizes inspectors to issue fines or seize non-complying…”? Of course not. “A new law to clean up our inland waterways was passed today…” As if the words just leap off the paper and carry out the intent. (This particular example is fictional but pretty much every new piece of legislation passed or under discussion provides a real example.)
How will that Aquarian focus on a personal relationship with Christ look like in sobernost Russian Eastern Orthodoxy?
JMG #191 I am one of those vigorous Protestants you mentioned. In my early 20’s I had the blessing/privilege/good luck of when I applied the come to Jesus and accept him prayer advocated by some devout vigorous Protestants I knew – it worked – the close face to face subtle but quite real presence of the Father manifested and I was propelled out of the New Age, eastern religions modality I was quite immersed in. One thing that did stick with me was my knowing of the aliveness of the created natural order which I have had since my rural childhood and youth. I suppose I have Druid and natural magic sympathies. The next year or so I examined the classic Christian Creeds – Nicene, Athanasian, Chalcedon and saw they were IMO a decent representation/summary of my experience and what I was reading in the New Testament and even now if I decide to throw in a henotheistic spin into my understanding of them.
Speaking of your first paragraph, this school year I am teaching Environmental Science to a group of high schoolers at the charter school I work. There are three aspects – the untenable nature of our current system my students and I live in – running up against hard resource limits and the bitter truth the system that supports us results in a systematic poisoning and degradation of the thin film of life that covers our globe and the systemic degradation of humans and society – secondly the complex weave of processes – physical and biological – that create and sustain the biosphere and thirdly the alternatives to the present death system. The alternative is a blend of simplification, localization and enrichment of life and society.
@Strict Constructivist, mathematics is full of abstractions right from the start. Circles, parallel lines, ratios… none of those exist in material reality. Heck, can you show me seven? Not a numeral representing seven, and not seven of something, but actual seven? It’s unlikely that even a countable infinity of any real thing or measure of a real thing exists materially. (That question is one reason theorists puzzle over black holes.) But infinities arise instantly upon applying the most basic of mathematical abstractions, like the number of different possible finite sequences of a set of symbols (I.e. integers) or the ratio of some positive quantity to zero. The universe doesn’t crash if you place a straight board vertically giving it an infinite slope, not only because the slope is a ratio which is an abstraction; your board isn’t perfectly straight or perfectly vertical in the first place, those perfect conditions being abstractions too
What Cantor proved was that one abstraction that has the abstract property “infinite” (the aforementioned number of different possible finite sequences of digits, aka countable infinity) was not equivalent to a different infinite abstraction (specifically, the number of different possible countably infinitely long sequences of digits).
The usefulness of mathematical abstractions is by approximations. Abstract perfect geometric circles are a guide to making things with physical imperfectly circular designs or parts, even though no object is perfectly circular.. Countable infinity approximates physical quantities too numerous to present any practical limit, like (back before massive industrialization) the number of grains of sand in the world, even though that number is actually finite. Different cardinalities of infinity is useful in computer science because it approximates certain distinctions between questions that can be answered by carrying out some enormously large number of operations (which, with computers, can often be accomplished) and others that cannot be answered no matter how many operations are done, even though every physical computer has only a finite number of states and only ever performs a finite number of steps.
Hi JMG,
I’ve certainly been guilty of this sort of “have your cake and eat it too” thinking – thanks for bringing it to the surface for us and tracing out some of it’s roots One thing that helped me a little was maybe 15 or so years ago I had a thought that I could just divide the world’s GDP (in US dollars) by its population – in theory giving you a look at what equality might look like, and see what you got. It turned out that what you got was everybody living in what the vast majority of people in the west would consider abject poverty. I forget the numbers at the time, but nowadays you are talking about under $1000 a month, which wouldn’t cover rent or cost of living in most cities, and that is leaving no money for infrastructure or any sort of government project, and that is including all sorts of inflated financial imaginary wealth.
I wasn’t really sure what to do with that information other than accept that I was benefiting from many things I would find unfair and unjust if I dug into them with any determination.. Some kind of relative good could be done to distribute wealth around more evenly within select ranges, but you were always going to hit this kind of thing – that what I had grown to like and feel was relatively modest, was in fact a totally unfair portion of a limited pie. It got me out of a lot of the sort of more utopian thinking I had had, because it was fairly obvious that you couldn’t expect people to volunteer for such a redistribution, and we certainly wouldn’t “like” the experience of moving towards it. Even if you could get people to vote towards it, as soon as we started to feel the approaching of that “equality” we were sure to change our tunes.
The only additional insight I gained this way, is that GDP is just a measure of money, and money and wealth are separate concepts. If I grow a tomato in my garden and eat it, that isn’t part of any sort of graphing of GDP, but I ate something all the same. I got this from both yourself (and your excellent “Wealth of Nature”) and Dmitry Orlov, although it probably took me a few other sources for it to sink in fully.
I’m quite curious to see where you go with this anyway. I’d say the above was humbling to me and made me more or less scrap a bunch of lazy rhetoric I had around what was the right way to do things, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever figured out how to rectify things personally.
Thanks,
Johnny
JMG, you wrote, “…middle class idealists insist that all people should be equal while also insisting that their own class privilege be respected by everyone else. It’s long been fashionable to claim that this is pure hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is conscious, and this habit isn’t.”
This succinctly summarizes behavior and statements I encounter on a daily basis. Still, I would use the term hypocrisy to describe these phenomena. When people are not conscious of the inconsistencies between their beliefs and their words and actions, i.e., when they don’t practice what they preach, what is it, if not hypocrisy? What difference does consciousness make when describing the behavior? I guess people have shoved things into the shadow, but still the inconsistencies emerge.
Thank you,
WILL1000
Other Owen, he did the best job of filling the need because he was so incomprehensible. There were several other German idealists before him, but their prose made some sort of sense, and so the Kantians could point to the logical flaws and snicker. Hegel was so impenetrable that anyone who went searching for the logical flaws strayed into the vast, eldritch, rugose darkness of his prose and was never seen again…
Anonymous, it’s called Shi’ite Islam — that’s the tradition that rejects the sunnah in favor of spiritual contact with the Hidden Imam. I expect it to do very well in the centuries ahead.
Walt, yeah, that’s a very familiar kind of rhetoric to me from the decline and fall of the peak oil movement. Another good point.
Albert, in the culture of sobornost it’s not the individual who has the unique experience of Christ, it’s the local community of believers. Russia already has a rich history of weird Orthodox sects, and I expect many, many more in the centuries before us.
BeardTree, here in North America I expect that to be one of the waves of the future. Most of the people I know who are Christians because of a spiritual experience — as distinct from those motivated by the Second Religiosity, who are fleeing the chaos of a collapsing civilization and hoping to find a framework for social and psychological order in traditional religion — have had the kind of experience you’ve described. I’ll be interested to hear how the kids handle what you teach them, btw.
Johnny, that was a useful thing to do! I’m far from sure it’s possible to rectify things personally, but we’ll discuss this further later on.
Will1000, we may be using the word differently. To my way of thinking, it’s hypocrisy only if it’s deliberate. If the person who’s doing it is wholly unconscious of how inconsistent he’s being, that’s a different phenomenon, which we can call “stupidity” if you like — that word applies, since it’s an inability to think through the obvious consequences of one’s beliefs and statements.
If one believes in the seven different planes like JMG does, the various mathematical objects might not be physical objects in the material plane, but they are objects in the mental plane.
Hypocrisy or ( from various sources)
“Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person believes in two contradictory things at the same time.
Within investing and in other areas, failing to resolve it can lead to irrational decision-making.”
Is cognitive dissonance the same as hypocrisy?
No. Hypocrisy involves a contradiction between a person’s supposed principles, beliefs, or character and who they really are or how they behave. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant mental state that may result if someone really does have certain beliefs but thinks or acts in a way that contradicts them.
There is also bisociation : the simultaneous mental association of an idea or object with two fields ordinarily not regarded as related. This is generally regarded as a useful skill.
And finally you can take solace in;
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function .” F. Scott Fitzgerald said that in 1936.”
Good point about the Christians who are Christians because of a spiritual experience vs those who are Christians because of the second religiosity. I think this could be applied in the Catholic case – for example, those who are Catholic because they witnessed a Marian apparition or they have a spiritual relationship with a Catholic saint, vs those who are Catholic because the traditional Latin Mass Catholicism seem to be a good shelter from the Muslim invaders in Europe even though they still don’t really believe in God or any of the other spiritual stuff in Catholicism.
More generally, Catholicism in the Age of Aquarius is probably going to put a lot more emphasis on a personal relationship with Mary or a patron saint if it is going to survive beyond the second religiosity, especially if the comments made last week are true that Jesus won’t be around anymore because he is the key figure of the Age of Pisces.
Hi JMG,
Just a quick comment (I hope) now that I’ve read some of your comments and answers to questions. I’ve read Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” and Heidegger’s “Being and Time” in a philosophy group I was in, Heidegger’s tome was a major part of why I eventually left the group, as having to slowly slog through every line of this sort of stuff was starting to wear on me. Both books weren’t complete misses for me, but they weren’t useful for me either, which is a pretty big factor, and also, despite reading the whole things I don’t have anything like a solid grasp on them. If somebody were to ask me what either were about I would just shrug my shoulders.
Conversely Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation” and Michael Polanyi’s “Tacit Knowledge” were fantastic – full of ideas that not only could I reasonably explain to somebody who hadn’t read philosophy (and I’ve done this several times) I was able to put to practical use in my thoughts and life. Polanyi in particular seemed incredibly valuable, and in just one example I think about his discussion of somebody learning to dance at least once a week (which is that when you dance some particular step, you do it based on internal feelings, but when you learn to do it, you do it mechanically, via brute force, through rote memorization of body positions, and that through dedication to this process, eventually you gain the internal feelings that you then replace all the cumbersome positional knowledge with – we call that “learning to dance”. In themselves the internal feelings are not transferable – or even explainable, but you can’t come to know them without a type of faith that they can be transferred by these other steps, and a diligence to stick with them.). That, being a metaphor for what is involved in attempting to transfer tacit knowledge from one person to another, and a reminder that if you simply say “well that is impossible, or hogwash” you can never do the work it’ll take to even see what it is they are valuing so much.
Currently I’m about a third or so through reading “A Guide to the Perplexed”, which seems like it’ll be a another winner along these lines.
Thanks – and thanks for the recommendation of “Tacit Knowledge” and many other great books to begin with!
Johnny
@JMG – thanks for the explanation of the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam. And that the latter took root in what was once Persia is also interesting.
Re: Faustian civilization – I remember Dion Fortune said in one of her books that the karma/destiny/ special job of the West was the mastery of the material world. IIRC, she cited the Greeks as an early example. I forget her exact terminology, but am thinking of the difference between mastery, as in excellence in one’s craft, and conquest, which is purely military.
A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/a-prophecy-of-evil-tolkien-lewis
In this narrow house we believe
*Undead lives matter
*The blood is the life
*Science is what the Master says
*Freedom is obedience
*Don’t buy the lie: not all must die
*They travel fast who travel with the dead.
Dear Mr Greer, sincere gratitude for your brilliant essays, and for making them available to the masses with little tech-harassment. I believe you are a reader of Jorge Luis Borges, in English translation. I am an admirer too, and in the process of re-reading, once again, his “Obras Completas” (I’m an fellow Argie), enjoying every page immensely, as usual.
I noticed how many Schopenhauer references exist in his work. I haven’t read his work, all I have as my guide to him is Borges. So here’s one you may find interesting; I translated it as well as I could. There are many others. I think it’s closely connected his idea of random combinations of letters forming words in infinite books on the shelves of an infinite library – one has to be the truth, another its refutation, another its vindication, and so on.
I would love to see a post about Borges sometime.
Looking forward to future threads and rabbit holes. Much appreciated!
Es aventurado pensar que una coordinación de palabras (otra cosa no son las filosofías) pueda parecerse mucho al Universo. También es aventurado pensar que de esas coordinaciones ilustres, alguna —siquiera de modo infinitesimal— no se parezca un poco más que otras. He examinado las que gozan de cierto crédito; me atrevo a asegurar que sólo en la que formuló Schopenhauer he reconocido algún rasgo del Universo. Según esa doctrina, el mundo es una fábrica de la voluntad.
JLB, “Discusión”, 1932
“It is risky to think that a network of words (Philosohies are nothing but that) may resemble the Universe much. It is also risky to think that, of those famous combinations of words, one -even infinitesimally- may be closer than others to that resemblance. I have examined the more creditworthy of them; I dare say that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer, I have recognized some feature of the Universe. According to that doctrine, the world is a factory of the will.”
I think what we’ve been talking about is a long-standing intellectual tradition that historically manifested itself in various ways, in its current iteration with lying constantly about everything, having in common with its previous versions wishful-thinking, and its conjoined twin, self-deception. Balderdashianism, I like to call it, Balderdashians, its practitioners, Hegel one of its earlier emissaries. The 20th Century communists really made a meal of it, got sick from it and lost power because of it.
But not just the lousy commies. Remember Robert McNamara? He apparently thought that the US would prevail – where France had lost – by means of spreadsheets because if you could put numbers to it, you could control it. And the outcome was beyond any reasonable doubt, it was indisputable, the numbers were there, body counts, tonnages of bombs dropped, villages cleared.
Well, as they say, garbage in, garbage out. The commies were absolutely full of it, the glowing reports of Five Year Plans, film reels of stout, sturdy, happy farmers, grimy, grinning steel workers, resolute, granite-jawed infantry, but all of it in opposition to what people saw every day. In fact, the only product never in short supply was vodka, the favored pass-time to drink until you fell off your chair.
Said Karl Rove, we create our own reality. So how’s it workin’ out? Hmmm, Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction anywhere and a resounding flop at this business of regime change, Afghanistan, same deal and an ignominious defeat at the hands of donkey-riding peasants. So, not so good.
Deception is one thing, it may work for you at least for a while, to lie in an election campaign a practice blessed by time and sanctified by usage. But self-deception never works out. If you must, lie, lie like hell, lie till you die because who knows, you may get away with it. But never lie to yourself.
So, if philosophy is the operating system of a civilization, Hegel and guys like him infected it with some serious malware. They say that western philosophy after Aristotle and Plato is just footnotes. Is it true? If it is then maybe this mess is salvageable. Or do we have to delete the files and start over? Is there a middle ground?
@Andy #182 your comment made me think, and you are right, geomancy and the geomantic shield can be encoded in linear algebra operations, matrix operations. If you can follow my reasoning, it is not difficult to see.
With the first four figures, the mothers, a matrix of 4 rows and 4 columns can be defined. The columns would literally be the four mothers and the first row of the matrix would be the heads of the mothers, the second row would be the necks of the mothers, the third row would be the bodies of the mothers and the fourth row would be the feet. We call this matrix M, because it is the matrix of mothers.
We must stop at just one small detail, the head of the fourth mother is defined as the first member of the first row and the first member of the first column.The first column refers to the first column from left to right, and the first row is the highest, from top to bottom.
To generate the daughters, matrix called D because it is the matrix of the daughters, M must be rotated counterclockwise, so that the first row of M becomes the first column of this matrix that we will call 1,the second row of M becomes the second column of 1…., and this matrix 1 must change the order of its columns, the first column of 1 is changed to the last column, the second column is changed to the penultimate one….
All these operations must have their mathematical formalism, but that is another story.
For the four nieces, called matrix N, an operation called reduction is defined, which is simply adding the first column of matrix D with the second column of matrix D, to form the first column of matrix N, and we stop here because the following steps are to reduce matrices until forming the JUDGE.
And for geomantic points, they can be encoded as a 1 and 2 (also 0 and 1) and this gives us a certain type of modular arithmetic (you can look it up if you don’t know what it is), imagine it like a clock that only has two hours, 1 and 2.
Geomantic figures can be converted into column vectors, for example the major fortune figure would be (2,2,1,1). The first 2 is the head, the second 2 is the neck…
And here something must be said, this coding is a modular arithmetic type and matrices, the important thing here is the interpreter and the geomantic symbols or the geomantic vectors, those cannot change, the coding is just something curious and perhaps useful.
What I had in mind was to generate a random matrix like the matrix of mothers, by rolling dice or something similar, but the problem is the numbering system, I wanted to use complex numbers, many properties of matrices (eigenvalues, eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, it’s mathematics) give us complex numbers as a result, but in esoteric terms, what is a complex number?It’s very difficult, but we’ll see 😭
In another note, I had mentioned that chatbots use linear algebra, this that you just commented on geomancy and its matrix coding, I developed it thanks to Andy’s comment, after this comment, I will not see chatbots with good eyes, what are people doing when they use chatbots?
Not even the creators of the chatbots know what they are doing. Who is the interpreter in these chatbots? Is it human? Or maybe it’s my paranoia 😢
Anonymous, I seem to remember that Dion Fortune says exactly that somewhere.
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
Richard, exactly. It’s the people who pursue personal relationships with a patron saint — here including unofficial saints — who are laying the groundwork for whatever future Catholicism may have.
Johnny, exactly. It’s really quite fascinating that the more popular and influential a philosopher is, the less practical use you can make of his or her ideas.
Patricia M, you’re welcome. The distinction between mastery and conquest is a very useful one.
Name, thanks for this.
LeGrand, ha! Nicely done.
Floridafarmer, both copies of your post came through just fine; there’s an odd glitch in the preview function that makes it look as if the breaks were erased, but I still get them. Borges — well, I’ll have to read a lot more of his writing than I have, but I’ll consider it.
Smith, “Balderdashianism” is one of the best coinages I’ve seen in a very long time; thank you. I may well have to use it in a future post. As for the outcome, what usually happens is that errors mount up until the system crashes irretrievably, and then the hard drive gets reformatted, the OS (Civilization 24.0) gets reinstalled, and you start again from scratch.
Hi John Michael,
The human dimensions of this story are not lost on me. As a side note, if the recent conscription, err, sorry, recruitment drive changes are anything to go by, they’re probably rapidly depopulating their country. And as you are suggesting as a future possibility in relation to immigration to that land, I’d offer the opinion that nature abhors a vacuum.
Just a word from the trenches down here in this remote corner of the planet. Serious people tell me that the CPI (Consumer Price Index) is hovering around the 4% mark. This suggests that prices on average will have risen about 4% over that of the previous year. So in the mail this morning arrived the house insurance bill. Well that baby rose 50% over the previous years and is now $6k annually. Based on the previous increases I was expecting around a 32% increase, so I’m a bit floored. Sure you can negotiate the excess and bring the annual premium down, a bit, but far out at such a compounding increase, it won’t take too many years before that bill is the equivalent of my entire income. It’s absurd.
The funny thing about the CPI measure is that I ask myself, is it a meaningful indicator of anything useful? I’m sure you have some thoughts in this matter? It no longer reflects the experience on the ground.
When people ask me why my views of the future are somewhat dark, I point to that bill. Few things suggest to me a collapse of the present arrangements like that bill. Most people don’t realise, or fail to acknowledge, that the present debt arrangements are only possible if the assets backing them are insured. The small print of the debt contracts is usually a solid guide to such outcomes. Boom! And so it goes…
Far out, man. My head is spinning Exorcist style.
Plus I did some citizen science research which was posted on YouTube: Proven birds eat dog poop ep 14. Nature is amazing, isn’t it?
Cheers
Chris
If we are including unofficial folk saints, that would include figures like San La Muerte, venerated by many Catholics in Paraguay and northern Argentina, who are currently condemned by people in the Catholic Church hierarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_La_Muerte
If this represents the future of Catholicism, this means that the Church hierarchy will probably reverse its position on these unofficial folk saints in the future and make them official saints in the same way that the archangels like Michael and Gabriel are considered saints.
Richard,
More likely I think is that the Vatican hierarchy declares that anybody venerating these death folk saints are automatically excommunicated, leading to a schism between the Vatican and Western Hemisphere Catholicism on the level of the Great Schism or the Protestant Reformation. Add that to the pending Vatican II vs TLM schism and we are probably going to see the Catholic Church collapse into multiple different regional churches with their own different beliefs.
Unfortunately one of the bad Hegalian ideas seems to be the current elite’s belief that everybody is interchangeable with everybody else and thus the obsession with importing the entire world into America to counter declining birth rates in the West. They believe somehow that this mass importation of other cultures won’t have second-order and third-order effects which will fundamentally disrupt Western society.
For example, a whole bunch of Haitians ended up in Springfield, Ohio:
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/thousands-of-haitian-immigrants-now-in-springfield-5-takeaways-from-our-reporting/QQFDZR6JAVCBNC6TGZGAEKE2JU/
and many of the local residents are horrified at what the Haitians are doing in their town
https://xcancel.com/EndWokeness/status/1832773191976014217#m
https://xcancel.com/captivedreamer7/status/1832265609905672235#m
i.e. eating the ducks and even people’s pets.
Hegel’s “intellectual intuition”, reminded me of Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom. But someone else beat me to it with a comment, “Unfortunately this reminds me very much of Rudolf Steiner. Too bad he fell for this line of thinking as well”.
Isn’t this the same sort of thing as Dharma, the True Will (Do What Thou Wilt…) and doing “The Will” of God?
Of course, “Knowing the Will of God”, most of the time leads to Ego inflation….
@JMG,
I think that you misunderstand the origins of state financing of European churches: they are a “compensation” the state gives to the local church for expropriations of the past. Society was already secularizing *before* state financing was introduced, and as a result churches could be expropriated. State financing is an effect of secularization, not a cause.
The CoE, which was never expropriated, does not receive state financing, except for some chump change to maintain a few historical buildings.
I am not sure what you mean when you say that churches in Germany “are subject to strict government regulation”. Regulation of what? There really is no German state employee in dark glasses noting down what priests say during sermons. Who in government is going to care anyway? German society has been basically atheist for more than 100 years. Priests probably self-censor, but because of the constant harassment from the media, not because of some threat (of what?) from the state. I was in the Catholic Cathedral of Cologne two weeks ago; the priest was speaking with admiration of Muslim devotion; I cannot imagine this was out of fear of the laughably hapless German government.
Churches in Austria are not financed by the state. They have a system of “compulsory” tax-exempt contributions that is difficult to implement and largely ineffective.
You speak of “all those centuries of political domination of the religious sphere”. I hope you realize that religion and state have gone hand in hand since the dawn of civilization (Establishment clause in ancient Egypt?). That did not have a negative impact on devotion at the individual level. Not to mention that in Catholic countries, the state has more to fear from the Church than the other way around.
You mention “mosques, which were never under the thumb of European governments”. You surely realize that mosques are “under the thumb” of their respective rulers in other continents, with little effect on attendance? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-2-religious-commitment/. The most devout European Muslims are in Turkey, where politics are very much mixed with religion.
If state churches are so bad, how come all Christian churches are bleeding members in Europe? I can understand that the British might be dissatisfied with the CoE. But why don’t they just pick another Protestant denomination? Again, no British state employee in black glasses will stop them from switching church.
The Dutch Catholic Church had been persecuted since the early 1700s to 1853 and had all but disappeared from much of the country. No one could think of it as somehow close to state power even after it was tolerated again. The Dutch royals were often vociferously anti-Catholic well into the 20th century.
Yet Titus Brandsma (declared Blessed, a celebrity among Dutch Catholics) lamented the secularization of Dutch Catholics already in 1932, a process that must have been obvious to many by then. How do you square that with your pretense of a church “under the thumb of European rulers”?
Christian churches in China are heavily controlled by the state. Yet they were booming until very recently, when the CCP started a clamp down. How can that be, if people are supposedly so repelled by secular meddling?
If the Establishment cause is so much better for religions, how come the US is secularizing, too? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/
What explains the differences across states? Did Vermont establish a state church without telling anybody? https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-state/
Concluding, you wrote a while ago about the possibility that the death of God is real. While I do not agree, that is a line of reasoning I can follow to some extent. But what you write here about the Establishment Clause being the only possible explanation of the persistence of Christianity in the US, and decline in Europe, is frankly beyond unbelievable.
@ Aldarion
I agree, but those different forms were not discrete but co-existed in a union. It was called the Divine Right of Kings. There was a lot of, umm, renegotation of the boundaries of that union over the centuries, but it held together all the way until the Reformation. The kings of northern Europe were happy to go along with the Reformation since it transferred power from the Church to themselves. But, actually, with the Pope out of the equation, the divine right of kings also no longer existed and therefore the role of king had also been called into question. So, it’s not a surprise to see the kings fall in protestant lands not that long afterwards (Britain and the Netherlands being the forerunners).
>The funny thing about the CPI measure is that I ask myself, is it a meaningful indicator of anything useful?
It is funny. That’s why I call it the Bureau of Humor and Goalseeking. Laugh at it, that’s what it’s useful for.
>he did the best job of filling the need because he was so incomprehensible
But the average response to something incomprehensible is to either reject it or ignore it. He gained traction anyway. I’m beginning to think of this more like a thunderstorm – if it wasn’t Hegel, someone else would’ve got it convecting away. To some degree, he doesn’t matter nor does his ideas. It was the desire he evoked in, well, that’s a good question – who exactly were the sort of people going “Hey, I really like what this Hegel guy is saying”?
>but in esoteric terms, what is a complex number
Complex numerology. Esoteric vectors. Cabbalistic matrices. Sacred Geometric Algebra.
I have no idea but these are things whose time has come =)
Hi John,
I’ve read your Ukraine comments with interest.
My polish in laws live close to the Ukrainian border in south east Poland.
Given its looking likely Russian tanks will be on the border by 2026 what’s your advice.
Poland is rapidly rearming but prospects of a war within a decade are growing fast.
I think JMG is conflating state control of churches in Europe with the real decline of Christianity that occurred in Europe because the Christian God is dead by 1887 and Europeans can no longer believe in him after praying their hearts out to him and finding nothing.
#224 Complex numerology. Esoteric vectors. Cabbalistic matrices. Sacred Geometric Algebra.
Sacred topology, anyone?
And of course, Euclidean geometry is not the only geometry, there are others such as spherical geometry (where the internal angles of a triangle sum to more than 180 degrees) and the geometry of Poincare discs (where the internal angles of a triangle sum to less than 180 degrees) – so perhaps there is an opportunity there for an expansion of sacred geometries? Or would that lead to Götterdämmerung? (And I am constantly amazed at how a discussion of Wagner can end up on topics like this.)
Off-topic
Feel free to not put this through.
STEAMPUNK GRANDMA
I am pretty enthused. Why? I received a second music CD-ROM set that will help me ‘stay present’ until the USA election on 5 November 2024 happens. I want to even out the emotional highs and lows I am feeling. I am a Trump-voter but feel it life-threatening to tell anyone locally (expecting vandalism). So I keep mum until that November day where I get in line/queue, then vote for Trump with a big shale-eating grin on my face.
I need to find a way to keep enthused. How to keep enthusiastic for two months? That is a tough command.
In August, I ordered two music album/audio CD sets (each below is two CDs). Both sets arrived. Between the two sets, there are two songs I plan to play ad infinitum (when alone), while this 70-something woman dances to, to keep my energy up (and out), for my own well-being. This two months is going to be rough on heck of a lot of people in the USA, all sorts of people. The question is how to stay “steadfast and ready” to vote. Not to get down, depressed, or angry.
My motto is Steadfast & Ready.
One song is Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” on album “The Very Best of Lee Greenwood” dated 2019.
The second song is Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” which I just received in the mail. The album/audio CD is “Cher Gold: 32 Greatest Hits of Cher” dated 2019. Instead of “if I could turn back time,” I substitute “if I could speed up time.” The balance of the lyrics, I hum.
So, I will dance through the next two months, by myself. I get ready to vote the vote.
I am the ‘sleeper vote’ I read somewhere that Democrats are dreading exists, because they can’t prevent my vote. There is nothing Democrats can do to change my mind. It is because of the Democratic Party’s mis-actions over the last four years where I feel I have no choice except to vote for Trump.
I am steampunk grandma.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🎼📀👩🏼🎤
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@The Other Owen #224 says:
“Complex numerology. Esoteric vectors. Cabbalistic matrices. Sacred Geometric Algebra”
Those things seem pretty hard to develop, has anyone tried it? If anyone knows someone who has tried it, I’d be very happy.
We already have geomantic vectors🫡(the geomantic figures, I just hope I’m not doing something wrong, by changing the geomantic points for numbers), probably someone realized this a long time ago, but geomancy is fine as it is, maybe it’s just a matter of taste.
JMG has said (here on the blog, if I remember correctly) that there is a lot of astrological knowledge that he doesn’t know about, because there is too much to learn.
In my opinion, I don’t know much about astrology (I learned it through geomancy and curiosity), and a lot of astrological knowledge came from people saying to each other: “we have astrological knowledge and we have this other knowledge, what will happen if we combine them?”
It is true, it requires a lot of patience, practice and error, wisdom and many other virtues. Today we have a lot of esoteric knowledge (although there are things that are not accessible to everyone) and a lot of mathematical knowledge, what happens if we combine them? Many mystics and magicians were good geometers and algebraists (Pythagoras perhaps), and that is not a coincidence.
any ideas?
JMG – In much of this talk about useless and dangerous German philosophy, I was reminded of the children’s (?) tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Perhaps the exposure of Hans Christian Anderson to some of this philosophy was inspiring? I check their dates: Kant (1724-1804), Hegel (1770-1831), Anderson (1905-1875), and Feuerbach (1804-1872). So, yeah, Anderson was writing “fairy tales” right along with the rest of them. But he didn’t pretend that they were anything else. Maybe it’s like L. Frank Baum, casting arguments about monetary theory into a “yellow brick road to the Emerald City”.
JMG – What about some more modern philosophers? I realize that we’re getting well beyond Wagner’s era, but Charles S. Peirce, Karl Popper, and Eric Hoffer wrote much more plausible philosophic works, and in English, even!
Off topic: So, being Monday, I pull-up J.H. Kuntsler’s blogsite… only to get the inter-toob’s version of crickets… so, a query: James has a medical issue.. e.i. a ‘died suddenly’ episode?? .. or, Venezuelan gangs decend on upper New York, with him in the way?? .. or, his most recent post is a stinging rebuke regarding joyjoy kumala’$ bout with de Orange Julius this Tuesday .. by the Blob, via a DOS attack, to try to deflect ANY criticism away from the demonrat posers????
Tis past 6:00 pm Monday, still crickets on a Clusterfruk Monday. Anyone have a clue?
Late to the game, but a house I used to walk past on my way to work had a sign in their yard that read:
In this house we believe
Bigfoot is real
I am going to kiss him
He will be my lover
I will be the little spoon
Me and Bigfoot will f***
And you can’t stop us
Hi John Michael,
An update on the situation. After a very long conversation with the nice company, the premium has been brought down to half that amount, although we’ve accepted and agreed to limits and costs. Plus we’ve learned a lot about the fine details as to how things work out with that industry in practice once an insurable event has occurred. Hmm. Don’t presume folks!
You know dude, they (being the nebulous they – whoever that may be) makes you work for every cent nowadays, and you have to be onto everything. How people who can’t navigate such Kafkaesque mazes cope with all these tasks, is something I wonder about. Things weren’t this hard when I was a younger bloke, and that is no mere retreat into some sort of halcyon days that never were. Life was actually easier then and there were less sharks in the muddied waters. Sometimes it is difficult to work out clearly, who’s interests are being served here? Is that sort of experience similar to life in your country?
Cheers
Chris
@Polecat,
I just checked Kunstler’s site at 10:45 EDT a.m., and it’s still timing out. I suspect a DDOS attack, or possibly ISP issues.
Alternate link from the automatic earth.
Jim Kunstler tells me his host is down, but he’s also been posting his articles on Substack for a while.
https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/the-votes-and-who-counts-them
I’m across the country but my internet has been misbehaving too. Whether it’s overloaded from political yelling, AI data scraping, or NSA machinations I don’t know. I’m not inclined to suspect malice, the system is creaky enough as it is.
This is OT and please delete if not ok JMG. I’ve been trying to get into Kunstlers site for two days and no access. Is anyone else having this issue?
Long time reader and enjoying this latest series of posts. Hands down my favourite blog in the blogosphere! Thanks for all you do here JMG.
Chris, insurance is another of the core rackets propping up the global financial
industrybubble, and the insane rate at which it’s being inflated tells me that the system is under very serious strain indeed. It’s not impossible that all those sunk costs in Ukraine, which were supposed to be paid off after the war by corporate ownership of most of Ukraine’s farmland and mineral assets, are starting to drag down hard.Richard, possibly, but it’s just as likely that the hierarchical church will break apart and saints will become canonized by folk process, as they were during the early Middle Ages. Look up the cult of St. Guinefort sometime!
Jack, that’s a classic sort of elite mistake. They know so little about anyone outside their own little oxygen-deprived bubble that it never occurs to them that the rest of humanity is not a collection of interchangeable parts. The idea that woke virtue signaling should take preference over technical competence is another example of the same sort of thinking.
Kevin, as I noted above, personal gnosis is valid when it’s not used as a claim to authority over others. If Steiner had said, “This is what the world looks like to me, but I know astral vision and mental intuition are as fallible as the senses — what do you think?” he’d have been fine. Equally, even if I know what my true will is, that gives me zero basis for telling you what your true will ought to be! That’s the line that needs to be drawn, as I see it.
Disc_writes, yes, you’ve said this before. Obviously I disagree, and I don’t see any point in going around the same debate yet another time.
Other Owen, that’s certainly a valid way to look at it. Think of it as supply and demand: there was a demand for an obfuscatory philosophy that would allow European intellectuals to pretend that Kant hadn’t cut the ground out from under their pretensions, and Hegel set up shop with an ample supply of pseudophilosophical balderdash to meet that demand.
(By the way, I’ve been told that there’s a bunch of Hegelians online busy ranting about how awful I am because I’m being so cruel to their hero, as a result of this post. I find this very encouraging!)
Forecasting, close to the border is actually a good place to be. If the Russians invade, they’re likely to drive some distance in from the border before things grind to a defensive stalemate, and in that case your in-laws are likely to end up in Russian-occupied territory fairly quickly. They may have to spend a few years in a refugee camp somewhere east of Novosibirsk but that’s a lot better than being blown to bits.
Northwind, under other circumstances I’d have deleted this, but I’ve been picking up old Jethro Tull and Supertramp CDs in much the same spirit…
Lathechuck, now you’ve made me curious about Andersen’s potential interest in philosophy! As for more modern philosophers, there are some very good ones — I find Popper compellingly readable, and Michael Polanyi is another very clear writer. I’m currently reading a rather Schopenhaueresque philosophical work by one Darren Allen, Self & Unself, which is also clear and cogent.
Jen, I like it! There’s also this:
Chris, yes, it’s very much like that here as well. And then the talking heads wonder why people are eager to vote for Trump…
Robyn, see immediately above. Other people are having the same trouble.
Thank you to those who responsed re. James’s present conundrum.. tis Tues. morn. and said site is
still um, ddosing off..
Polecat @ 232: Kunstler’s substack says: “Note to readers: My regular website, http://www.kunstler.com, is down Monday morning (hacked? dunno) and I have no estimate as to when it might go back up. So today only I am allowing comments here on Substack. . . and when my home site is back up, we’ll return to the usual commenting procedure there.” That’s at the end of his Substack post from Monday Sept. 9th.
FYI: Davis Kaiser, who prefers Harris, on the next election. Northwind Grandma has less to worry about that we think. And Kaiser also pinpoints the unyielding Democratic Party’s reaction to any Trump victory as de facto illegitimate in all its knee-jerk glory.
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2024/09/some-thoughts-about-election.html
As for the people’s reactions to the temper of our times as mentioned on this blog, I’m finding it very hard to distinguish it – mine, for sure – for on coming slow-motion senile dementia. As the woman with the gaslighting husband asked, “Am I crazy? Am *I* crazy?”
Richard #206 – You might find the rising worship of Sante Muerta interesting: https://www.grunge.com/1354286/who-is-santa-muerte-mexican-catholic-goddess-of-death/
With your premise that Catholicism will need to move towards the veneration of (official and un-official) saints, it seems that you include Mary at the same “level” as the saints. This is interesting to me as I have always thought that the Church of priests and popes did it’s very best to minimize and denigrate Mary as the feminine aspect of divinity; all the while most of the people and many monastics relate to divinity primarily to/through the Mother. I see the rise of Santa Muerta as a grass-roots uprising that is at least partially a revolt against an insular, intermediary priesthood that, rather than providing spiritual leadership, are simply parasitic irrelevancies. (Please note that I am sure there are still some truly devout individual priests who genuinely do some good in the world but I am also sure that their efforts do not outweigh the harm done by the institution.)
Re. Northwind’s “sleeper vote.” Well, count me in. I can’t vote for more of what we’ve had for the last four years. And me being a lifelong liberal! But, alas, no more. Where Tulsi Gabbard leads, I may follow. Michael Polanyi’s name has come up this week. About 20 years ago I read a book by his brother, Karl Polanyi, called “The Great Transformation.” (At least I think they’re brothers; am I wrong?) I was quite impressed with it back then when I read it. I just now dragged it down off my bookshelf, dusted it off, and checked the index for Hegel. Just one entry, on p. 116. If I re-read it now, would I still be as enthusiastic? I dunno. I dunno. I really dunno.
Re #224 et. al. re sacred complex algebra et. c.,
The complex plane is mysterious and sacred enough for me. There are videos of zooms into the Mandelbrot Set that go on, one continuous zoom, for hours. (The ones posted by YouTube channel Maths Town are the best I’ve found. Their latest single continuous zoom, just posted this week, is twenty-four hours long, in eleven segments. Maybe turn off the audio and find some other musical composition that’s approximately that length to listen to. Hmm, am I accidentally on topic? But one of their 2 to 3 hour long deep zooms is more than enough.)
It’s easy to forget, and difficult to understand, that what you’re watching is merely the behavior of rational numbers when multiplied and added in a certain consistent way. (The mathematical rule is defined for real numbers, but the computer can only calculate finite numbers of digits, even when it’s thousands of digits as in these deep zooms, so only rational values are involved in these calculations.) Long before the zoom reaches three minutes, the magnification is such that the starting frame has expanded beyond the (currently hypothesized) diameter of the observable universe. (The nature of the exponential expansion implied by the constant zoom rate means the size of your screen, from postage stamp to movie theater, only makes a few seconds’ difference in that calculation.) The scale of magnification after hours of zooming is unimaginable. Somewhere along the way, the starting frame width surpasses the diameter that would be needed to contain the compete Babel Library as Borges described it, and then keeps going, and going… And by tradition, such zooms usually end at a “mini Mandelbrot,” a tiny replica of the entire original set possessing just as much complexity as the entirety, one of literally countless such replicas dusted throughout it.
I find that these zooms are more conducive to contemplating the infinite than counting to high numbers or weird analogies about infinite hotel rooms, beak-sharpening birds, or moving coins in and out of jars an infinite number of times. (Continuously watching them for hours is unnecessary for this purpose, but give it at least half an hour to start getting the effect.) Of course you only see a finite number of pixels on a finite screen. Even an unimaginably large screen showing the entire set at the magnification of the deepest frame of a zoom, at the same resolution, would still have a finite number of pixels. But something about seeing the thousands of additional details that in theory you could be zooming in on instead, constantly passing out of sight off the edges of the screen, seems far closer to how we experience the world and time than e.g. navigating an endless corridor or stairway, or some number getting larger.
[You could make a pretty good go of it looking seriously into large numbers, though. Unimaginably large quantities like a googol (a one followed by a hundred zeros, easily printable at legible size on two lines of a page) or a googolplex (a one followed by a googol zeros, not printable in our known universe even if every subatomic particle were a page to print on) are a starting point when you remember that, having spent unimaginable numbers of lifetimes counting to such a number, you’d still be exactly zero percent of the way to infinity. And those two numbers are child’s play for mathematicians. If you perform addition repeatedly “in a loop” n times, you have multiplication by n. If you loop multiplication n times, you have raising to the power of n, aka exponentiation. If you loop exponentiation n times, you have a function called tetration to n, which leaves the googolplex far behind almost immediately. (3 tetrated to itself is 19,683 but 4 tetrated to itself far exceeds a googolplex). Then you can go on to loop that function, and then loop that function… and mathematicians have defined numbers where the number of layers of loops of the functions that define them are themselves some unimaginably large quantity. (Graham’s Number is an example.) And that’s still, of course, exactly zero percent of the way to infinity.]
If at least one type of actual infinity does exist as an object on the mental plane, I hope my mental sheath is ready to encounter such a monstrous thing.
Karl Popper somewhere remarks on what he calls something like the unreadability of German theoretical writing after Kant. which he attributes to the influence of Kant’s work and style. (Perhaps in The Open Society and Its Enemies?) He was talking about Hegel at al.
Popper, Hayek and others were notable exceptions, perhaps because they were Austrian: the Viennese world was perhaps not as convinced that depth precluded the enemy of lucidity) — and Polanyi, of course, who wasn’t quite. (Alas for that hypothesis, Steiner was Austrian as well. but not as readable.)
There is nevertheless something to be said for Hegel, but it would take a while. Another tome, perhaps.
@Anonymous#204 says:
“If one believes in the seven different planes like JMG does, the various mathematical objects might not be physical objects in the material plane, but they are objects in the mental plane.”
Great idea!!!
T here was a comment asking about modern philosophers, one of the few i have read, some of his books, is jurgen habermas. the book i read was “crisis of legitimation” which is a decent book, habermas is kantian mixed with hegelian, this makes one have to take precautions when reading it (his books are in pdf, sorry, where i am from the need is urgent, the books you recommend me like the numerology books, i download them in pdf, sorry).
On another note, i hope that many citizens of the usa are attentive with what is happening on the southern border, in mexico, the situation is changing rapidly in mexico (i am from latin america), and many changes that are happening in the neighbor to the south, will begin to affect the countries to the north.
How much of the Catholic church hierarchy are lenocrats in the sense JMG described in a blog post a few weeks ago?
I’m enjoying all the versions of “In this house we believe…” signs! Here’s my personal favorite:
In this house we believe that:
simplistic platitudes
trite tautologies
and semantically overloaded aphorisms
are poor substitutes
for respectful and rational discussions
about complex issues.
It can be ordered from a place that rhymes with “betsy.”
A side note: I go for walks in various neighborhoods in my diverse southwestern city, and I’ve only seen the original sign in affluent, mostly-white neighborhoods. I’ve yet to see a lawn sign that says “No human is illegal” in a neighborhood where undocumented immigrants live (though to be fair, most of them don’t have lawns).
Richard #206 “More generally, Catholicism in the Age of Aquarius is probably going to put a lot more emphasis on a personal relationship with Mary or a patron saint if it is going to survive beyond the second religiosity…”
Trump tweeted this on September 8th, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin: https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1832988358932348976
Sign of the times? If it were any other candidate I’d say he’s pandering to the Catholic vote, but although I’m not a fan of the guy, he doesn’t strike me as the pandering type.
Re: Santa Muerte – JMG said it first, that the new religious sensibility would come from “the crawlspaces of society and take root among the internal proletariat. And would disgust the respectable and intellectuals of the day. Myself, I see her as a psychopomp.
JmG, recommend the hermitix podcast on Darrell Allen. Pretty good stuff
In this house we believe
Trump won the debate against David Muir
Kamala Harris was a terrible moderator
In this house we believe
Whatever Mama says
Go on
Ask her
Politely
Classical civilization (called Apollo by Spengler) had three great philosophers – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The three of them have be fulfilled the philosophy of Apollo, and therefore there are no more substantial philosophers in the “West (actually the Apollonian civilization)” after Aristotle. The above three people have three corresponding roles in Western civilization – Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. It can be said that Western philosophical activities have been finished after Hegel. The social suggestions of scholars in academia are usually not as good as those of rural Protestant pastors. the massive expansion of academia (especially in the humanities) in recent decades is actually caused by the Faustian fear of the end of progress.
Of course, philosophy departments were doomed decades ago, and more and more remaining philosophical organizations were forced to merge with theology departments or participate in the same discussions in order to continue to exist. Decades later, many secular humanities departments It will also follow the path of the philosophy department, while science will split into two sides, one side will be absorbed by engineering and technology, and the other side will be absorbed by the theology department (which has already absorbed many humanities departments at this time).
The provocative statement is that Rousseau was the first philosopher to deny enlightenment rationality, and Kant was the last philosopher who did not conflict with Calvin (Calvin did not believe that philosophy could understand infinity, and people can only understand infinity from the perspective of faith. Just as Plato and Pythagoras also believed that intelligible things are perfect and eternal), Hegel was the last systematic philosopher in Western civilization (for example, the philosophical systems of Nietzsche and Marx are not self-consistent).
Of course, as the Aristotle of Faustian civilization, Hegel actually helped create a system that could continue Enlightenment in the era of modernity. Although the era of modernity, as an era of materialism and realism, valued rationality like Enlightenment should be abandoned in academia, but relying on the virtual system built by Hegelianism (just like the virtual world in the matrix) they successfully continued their belief in the Enlightenment until the mid-20th century, such as Pinker and Daniel are the last scholars in this system who is still influential in popular circles. Of course, they have no ideological successors (after Pinker was cancelled, he began to suggest that universities must establish a certain proportion of conservative quotas to ensure that the ideas of the Enlightenment can exist in academia, Daniel “wisely kept his mouth shut”. These behaviors were unimaginable to them when they were young)
JMG, this is again, just brilliant. You are stitching up so much of this for me. I’ve got me a new Ring DVD, but I’m not yet quite ready to open it up. Wishing you all my best! Carlo