AJ wrote: My object is to clarify the perspective that I have, and must live with, in the face of the opposition that I receive.
Dubious wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 10:00 amWhy? Even IC doesn't give a crap about anyone's opposition. The only opposition able to change anything are the insurrections that boil from the inside.
What an odd question, from where I sit.
If I'm to answer I have to back-track. Ultimately, we are dealing here (here on this forum, and here in this plane of manifestation) with questions of
ultimate meaning. I do not mean to say that I think this is
your driving concern, who knows what your driving concern is? (Perhaps you have never thought about it and perhaps such a pointed question is not of use to you?) But that behind all culture and civilization and government and ideation it is these questions that loom.
Our own hopped-up Harry was once a participant on a forum, now shut down, where such absolute questions were debated over the course of many years. In the course of my participation there, dealing with some men (the founders of the forum) who felt they had got down to metaphysical bedrock and defined a sort of neo-Buddhist alternative to the decadence and decay of the West and of the modern world, in the course of participation I formed the set of ideas I now work with. They were and they are still an odd bunch.
Their apperceptions and their choices in regard to the inanity of modern culture led them to define a radical program and to (more or less) preach the necessity of those perceptions and those choices. I was always in fundamental disagreement with them because they were, to a man, atheists and (I'd also say) anti-metaphysicians. However, their mettle and in a way their resoluteness had an effect on my own thinking. But when I came to some conclusions about what they were doing (intellectually, spiritually let's say) I came to believe that they too were an 'outcome' of forces & events (in the realm of ideas) of which they were not sufficiently aware. Nevertheless my exposure to them, and to their resoluteness in regard to 'absolute principles', set me to work to define what I felt they were missing.
Oddly, they turned out to be more-or-less coddled liberals and subjects of their socialized Australian state. That is to say men who were not really free. This contrasted in my view very harshly with their radical absolutist positions (involving manly independence and living in accord with the absolute truths they defined). It is kind of a long story (I realize as I try to offer a
succinct [!] picture). They revealed their cards, so to speak, through political and cultural events in 2016 more or less. I won't bother to go into details.
In any case at the end of many years of involvement there I felt I was left with the task of defining what I felt these fellows could not define. I always felt that they dismissed far too much about our own culture. I concluded they were 'ignorant' of it in the sense that they lacked 'proper preparation' of what I came to call
paideia.
What this entailed was a research of the bedrock of Occidental ideation by examining anti-liberal positions. Julius Evola and René Guénon were just two quite radical intellectuals who define positions that are largely diametrically oppositional to what Guénon defines as 'the crisis of the modern world' (in his study by that name). They are very influential within the Dissident Right along with a group of others. I would place Richard Weaver within the category of the radical Dissident Right given that he grounds his ideas in an understanding of foundational metaphysics. (I must mention that Weaver's first book was
The Southern Traditions at Bay -- A History of Postbellum Thought.)
Therefore, the necessity of discovering, of defining, of making choices about,
what are those foundational metaphysics. Something that Guénon wrote caught my attention. That as far as the Occident goes (caught in fast-moving liberal and progressive processes which can only culminate in disaster, which in my view seems to be the case) the place where at least some of those foundational ideas are preserved is within Catholic doctrines (and also religious symbols). And that is essentially what I have found to be true. And also why I approach Christianity and Catholicism as 'symbols' which speak to larger, constant, foundational truths.
Immanuel Can's position, I have come to see, places him within a certain type of
irrelevancy. If all that you can say to people is "Watch it! Because in a few moments or years you are going to stand face-to-face with a God who will likely banish you into the shelves of a living hell!" then you really do not have any program at all. IC has been extremely valuable to me because he is, without knowing it, a hyper-liberal in his own odd way. He is not a conservative! Because conservatism involves a set of definitions that, at least as I see things, involves radical and oppositional positions. He cannot
explain the metaphysical principles that undergird his Christian façade of belief. What he does, or so it seems, is to bark at neo-Marxists who march in the institutional hallways of our culture. That is
part of the struggle. But there is far more too it. There is really a whole range of things I was forced to confront in confronting what IC
represented to me. (This has
zilch to do with him personally though).
That is why I said: "My object is to clarify the perspective that I have, and must live with, in the face of the opposition that I receive."
The only opposition able to change anything are the insurrections that boil from the inside.
This is a meaningless statement unless you better define what you are getting at. My view is that unless a given person is grounded in foundational concepts, which in turn are grounded in foundational metaphysics, that person will not be able to define a position that corresponds to Being and will be a 'victim' (i.e. be captured by, be propelled by, be directed by) mutability and contingency.
But 'insurrection'? Whatever could
you mean? What would one be in insurrection against or in relation to? I would begin to answer that question by saying "in insurrection against what we have become". Insofar as we are products and outcomes of people who have become unmoored from those 'foundations'.
So I would venture to say that you, Dubious, because you cannot seem to define a solidity within yourself, and because you seem to reject the idea of strict or absolute metaphysical definitions (I might refer to Weaver here and his description of an encounter with the 'witches on the heath"), you are a living example of insurrection. But I think all of are, to one degree or another.
So if once Christianity was seen as 'taking the Christian cure' and gaining a position, internally, on correct metaphysical foundations, and as a result being 'cured' and 'healed', I do not in any sense reject or ridicule or dismiss the acute need for what
corresponds to the same for us today. But we are not going to find it, or not enough of it, in conventional Christianity (nor Judaism for that matter).