Thursday, April 28, 2011

The United States and Eurasia

An interesting on-line debate between Alexander Dugin and Olavo de Carvalho (both pictured below) has been going on since March elsewhere on blogspot.


Dugin requires no introduction to readers of this blog; de Carvalho does require some introduction. He is a Brazilian journalist, columnist and philosopher now living in the United States, where since 2009 he has been heading an Inter-American Institute for Philosophy, Government, and Social Thought. According to this institute's website, "the keynote of his work is the defense of man's innermost consciousness against the tyranny of collective authority," and he believes that "the most solid shelter for individual consciousness against alienation and reification can be found in widely varying degrees in the ancient spiritual traditions."

And Dugin, of course, represents another form of Traditionalism, similar and yet different--as the two photographs above, chosen by de Carvalho, indicate. And as the development of the on-line debate, entitled "The United States and the New World Order" and focusing on Eurasian-Atlantic relations, has also indicated.

Worth looking at.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Heidegger and Traditionalism

Reposting from John J. Reilly's article on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

Parallels can be found in the similarities between elements of Heidegger's system and that of esoteric Tradition, principally though not exclusively as represented in the philosophy of Heidegger's contemporary, Rene Guenon. Both were convinced that Plato roughly marks the point where Western philosophy departed from the contemplation of Being in order to gossip about the eternally expanding vacuum of mere ideas. Both had a horror of mechanism and quantification, and of what the modern world's embrace of these principles meant for the future. (Guenon's apocalyptic masterwork, remember, is called The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.) Parallels show up even in the details of their work, such as their insistence that time and space are meaningful in a way that geometry and clock-time simply caricature. Both were oddly fond of the adjective "primordial," at least if their translators are to be believed.

And then, of course, there is Julius Evola, sometime ideologist for Fascist Italy, and by most accounts the black sheep of the Traditional family. His system almost seems like Heidegger re-expressed in alchemical terms. Evola's formula for immortality involved not just resolution towards death, but the resolution to actually die. His late work, Ride the Tiger, is about the cultivation of the authentic self in a world where history is breaking down. By any reasonable reading, it is a form of existentialism, with only residual esoteric content.