Paul Christensen's Blog, page 3

Plato's 'Ion'

Ion by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The first half of this dialogue is good,
Dealing as it does with inspiration,
Magnetic power beyond the conscious ‘should’.
But then it makes erroneous equations,
Equating conscious knowledge with the pearl
Of true rhapsodic passion in a whirl.
Directed inspiration is a thing:
A mean, between blind groping on the wing
And uninspired and hollow artifice;
But Plato never says a word of this.



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Plato's 'Meno'

Plato - Meno by Plato

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Is virtue the same for different people?

Yes, if ‘virtue’ consists in realising the destiny laid out for one before birth by the Self.

That is ‘what’ is the same about it in all people.

The famous ‘ignorance’ argument is laid out by Meno: ‘Those who think bad things benefit them don’t know they’re bad things.’

Socrates: 'So if everyone desires good; virtue is being better at securing it.'

Socrates gets Meno to ‘admit’ virtue is only things done with justice (rather than wickedness).
Therefore, for Socrates, justice is a part of virtue.

But if every action performed with a part of virtue is virtue, then what is virtue?

The section on reincarnation:

The soul, because immortal, can recollect things from prior existences.
Learning = recollection.

But then S. uses mathematical logic to ‘prove’ that opinions one thought not to know are in one.

Is virtue a kind of knowledge? Apparently not, because no one is teaching it.



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Going Solo

Going Solo by Roald Dahl

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Roald Dahl’s funny and vivid second autobiography covers the 1930s and 40s.

It deals with his time in:

Africa
Dodging deadly black mamba snakes.

Greece
Fighting against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens with only seven rickety planes.

Palestine
As a witness to the prelude of the creation of the Zionist entity. This section is extremely creepy and deserves to be quoted:

‘Is this your land?’ I asked him.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘You mean you’re hoping to buy it?’
He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’
‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’
‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’
‘Then you will all become Palestinians.’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’
‘Then which country did you have in mind?’
‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it…’





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The Tristan Chord

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Wagner, in Magee’s words, was ‘the only major composer who seriously engaged with philosophy’, so any book looking at the philosophers he read is bound to be interesting.

And so it is - where Magee follows Wagner’s early interest in Feuerbach, his earth-shattering discovery of Schopenhauer, as well as the real reasons for Nietzsche’s break with the master (namely the fapping advice incident).

However, the book has a major glaring omission - Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau’s influence may have arrived too late to affect Wagner’s music and libretti, but Wagner’s fascination with his ideas was by all accounts a very strong one (although he rejected Gobineau’s pessimism, believing as he did in regeneration).

So, it would have been interesting to read about Gobineau’s ideas and how they affected the great man, but Magee dismisses Gobineau in a sentence or two as ‘unimportant’, when by all accounts he was W’s greatest philosophical discovery after Schopenhauer himself.

Magee seems to have written this book as a justification to his liberal friends as to why he likes Wagner so much, trying to make the latter seem philosophically ‘respectable’, but at the expense of truth. (To be fair, Magee lives in the UK, where it would be illegal to objectively discuss Gobineau’s ideas). So, while this book sheds valuable light on Wagner’s work, I can’t award it very high marks.



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Plato's Euthyphro

Plato's Euthyphro by Plato

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a frustrating dialogue, because Euthyphro throws in the towel
Before Socrates has properly interrogated him (technically, a foul).

Socrates does not understand the Homeric account of the gods.
That disagreements should arise among them is not particularly odd;

The essential mission of Aryan gods is eternal war against Entropy,
Decreasing which in the cosmos is the true definition of piety.

In this the gods are all as one, and what's loved by them all is pious;
They follow an imperative beyond themselves, in spite of Socrates' bias.

The gods follow the ultimate good (that they love it is one of its attributes,
But not however its essence), else sans meaning would be their attitudes.

There is no 'Euthyphro dilemma', for you see both gods and men
Follow something higher (call it 'good'), whose essence is beyond them.

We help the gods to help the good, not the other way around;
This dialogue will clarify that - frustrating, yet profound.



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A Vision

W.B. Yeats: A Vision, The Original 1925 Version by W.B. Yeats

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


‘A Vision’ is undoubtedly highly interesting, and sheds light on some of Yeats’ more obscure poems, but I was ultimately disappointed, being interested in the precession of the equinoxes and the Platonic Year. I guess I was hoping for a prophecy, but while Yeats has much to say about the Arian and Piscean eras, on the Aquarian he is totally silent.



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Damage Limitation: Trying to Reduce the Harm Schools Do to Children

Damage Limitation: Trying to Reduce the Harm Schools Do to Children by Roland Meighan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I take it for granted that most homeschooling parents these days are nationalists who do so because they don’t want their kids being dumbed down and indoctrinated by the leftist educational establishment.

This book, then, is somewhat odd: a defence of homeschooling written by lefty-liberal types who see the school system itself as ‘fascist’, and even quote the terrorist Nelson Mandela as a moral authority!

A real curiosity.

The book has a few good quotes, e.g.:

‘They work to pass, not to know: and outraged science takes her revenge. They do pass and they don’t know…’ - Thomas Huxley

‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ - W. B. Yeats



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Man and Technics

Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life by Oswald Spengler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The problem of man’s destiny

In this book Spengler examines technics, which he defines as the tactics of living, i.e. what one does with tools, rather than the tools themselves.

Spengler traces the history of technics in three phases:

Stage 1
The Hand

The genesis of man is the hand (see Animal Farm), which Spengler believes occurred as a sudden mutation.

It made man creative.

Stage 2
Speech (and Enterprise)

Speech then arose for needs of conversation or command (not thought or judgement). It is the means to collective doing (enterprise). It emancipated the intellect from the hand.

Man then separated into commanders and obeyers; individual lives mattered little at this time according to Spengler; what mattered was the whole, the tribe, the sea voyage or building project.

But the obeyers (hands) increased, and thus personality developed, as a protest against man in the mass.

Last Stage
Terminator: Rise of the Machines

The city then developed, and thought/intellect became rootless (although the city still drew its material sustenance from the land).

Roger Bacon’s ’Scientia experimentalis’ (1200s) was ‘the interrogation of nature with the rack, screw and lever’. God became an ‘infinite force’ rather than a personified Lord on a throne. Monks tried to find ‘perpetual motion’, which some saw as devilish.

Eventually machines grew so complex that leaders and led no longer understood each other. A spiritual barrenness set in, and leaders became divorced from the people. Nordic Man became spiritually enslaved to the machine.

European, Faustian culture is the most tragic culture, due to the conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and its profound spiritual disharmony.

So the Faustian mind became weary of machines, and returned to contemplating nature (the green movement, the new age movement etc.). Man took refuge from civilisation. We can see this currently, with Nordics pursuing worthless degrees in ‘womyns studies’, while STEM positions in Western unis are occupied mainly by Chinese and Indian students.

Spengler thinks the export of white technics to the non-white world spelled the former’s doom, as the latter have no spiritual attachment to technics (except, maybe, the Japanese?). For non-whites, Spengler claims, technology is merely a weapon to be used against the Faustians who invented it (and he wrote this before mass immigration!).

But he then goes on to give his famous pronouncement that ‘optimism is cowardice’, that we must all die like the Roman soldier at his post.

With this pronouncement, Spengler reveals himself to be part of the problem.

Why didn’t he anticipate space travel, the ultimate technics? It can still serve as a point of revival for Faustians! What could appeal to their romantic impulses more than wanting to stand on the moons of Neptune?

Although Spengler claims the struggle between man and nature ‘ends’ with the Faustian culture, at one point he tentatively suggests a successor culture may arise ‘on the plains between the Vistula and the Amur’ (i.e. a Slavic-centred culture).

Given the current suicidal path Western Europe is following, this may turn out to be one of his more accurate predictions.





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The Problem of Democracy

The Problem of Democracy by Alain de Benoist

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book seeks to cut through the quasi-religious tone surrounding ‘democracy’ and examine what the word actually means.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, everyone has wanted to be seen as ‘democratic’. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 even proclaimed the USSR a ‘democracy’.

This wasn’t always the case, though, even among leftists. None of the major French revolutionaries used the term, except Robespierre towards the end of the terror (when it didn’t do him much good!).

‘Democracy’ wasn’t a household word until Toqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (1830s). Before that, writers who believed in ‘equality’, such as Rousseau, were admirers of Sparta rather than democratic Athens (ironically, the man who made Athenian democracy famous through the centuries, Pericles, exercised a quasi-royal authority over his city…)

Athenian democracy, in any case, was very different to the modern beast. It was linked to tribe and to place, and thus was very much a blood and soil ideology. Also, the Athenians saw equality (before the law) as a means to democracy, not as something valuable in its own right.

Some thinkers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, have seen democracy as ‘primitive’, and monarchy as more highly evolved. Alain de Benoist thinks both views, and ‘linear’ views in general, are wrong. In ancient Europe, kings themselves were often elected by popular assembly. Only in the 1100s were most European monarchies hereditary. The vast majority of historical regimes had mixed systems of government.

The working classes were often anti-democratic, as in Medici Florence - because the middle class who favoured democracy would give them less rights than the princes did.

Alain de Benoist thinks the best state is the one that gives the best form to the values of a specific people. (By ‘people’ he means something closer to the French word ‘peuple’ or the German word ‘Volk’, i.e. an ethnic group).

The modern liberal democracy actually distrusts the folk, but de Benoist on the contrary thinks that where there is no folk and only individuals, there can be no democracy.

In chapter IV, de Benoist gives reasons why ‘liberal democracy’ or ‘formal democracy’ (our current system) is indeed a farce.

Among other reasons:

- People elect representatives, but these must delegate their tasks to unelected officials (as portrayed in the classic 1980s satire ‘Yes Minister’).

- Party ‘brands’ mean that candidates aren’t elected for their personal qualities.

- Lukewarm voters are given the same weight as resolute ones.

And so on…

De Benoist’s solution is something he calls ‘Organic Democracy’, involving lots of referenda and plebiscites. This would be folkish, based on fraternity rather than liberty and equality, and thus more similar to the ancient Athenian democracy (something he doesn’t mention, however, is that the democratic faction in Athens fanatically pursued a ruinous fratricidal war with Sparta, whereas the artistocratic faction wanted peace).

His book was written in 1985, and I think things are too far gone now for de Benoist’s folkish democracy to put things right. It could never be implemented under the currect system, anyway. The closest equivalent, populism, has had little real success against the entrenched deep state.

Something more drastic will be required…

But if the crisis Western Man now faces is overcome, a future system of government will evolve organically, and will doubtless contain mixed elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, just as it has throughout our history.





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Plato's 'Crito'

Crito by Plato

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There are those who go against the grain
(Even if it results in pain),
And those who conform to the Many.

Socrates goes against the grain,
Yet submits himself (as he here explains)
To the punishment willed by the Many.

He could disobey the verdict,
And flee like a lonesome hermit,
But thought it would harm the city.

As his nationalism was earnest,
If the polis wronged his person
He’d abide, not flee from self-pity.



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