Perennialism

Ideals, people, politics

I am a perennialist of sorts; there is one divine, and all religious traditions express it in their own distinct manner. This expression, as varied as there are types of people, occurs alongside an entire assemblage of beliefs as to what this divinity entails, how it relates to this world below, and how it should inform a way of life. I believe the specifics of these beliefs are determined in large part by the psycho-physical make-up of the people. I don’t think this perennialism leads to a ‘pick and choose’ view of religion, with each person being allowed to choose what he likes most, on the basis of personal preference. Far from it. Precisely because what makes religious traditions is not their claim to God, but the specific way in which God or Gods are lived by this people to which the tradition belongs. Perennialism clears the scene; precisely because we all refer to one divine, all religions are fundamentally different, just as people are different from each other. It shows that, insofar as we speak of religions, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the divine in and of itself, but only with the divine in so far as it is lived by a specific people, with customs that derive not from God, but from how God speaks to this people and how these people interpret the message. As all peoples are different, the divine speaks in different voices, with different messages. In a way, saying that all traditions refer to one and the same divine is as insignificant as saying that all races of man are human.

This perennialism shows the peculiar idiocy of the convert, that man who thinks he can adopt a foreign religion because it is only through this tradition that he will gain access to the truth. He is quite similar to the transgender, who imagines things will be better when he or she switches sides. Truth is everywhere, the paths are different. Some are suited for the traveler, others are laborious, hard, and require unnecessary suffering. The convert is often the type who hasn’t looked deep enough into the religious traditions of his own people, or he simply prefers a foreign way of life over his own. In this sense, Islam is most interesting as there is perhaps no religion today that speaks as intensely of the need to convert non-believers, and even the most liberal or most pro-European Muslim will never refrain from his task to convert you. Multiculturalism for him is only loved because it allows for “da’wah”. As conversion is so high on the list of virtues, what better people suited than the Europeans who are distinguished by their openness toward other traditions, and have lost respect for their own traditions —Christian and Ancient. 

The traditionalists who pretend that all traditions are united in a fight against ‘degenerate liberalism’ are deluded. Your tradition is not mine. Our ways of life are not compatible. I don’t want women to be exposed to the idea of covering themselves from the sun with a ‘burqa’. If the opposite of so-called sexual liberation is the denial and repression of female beauty, we don’t want it, and ‘degenerate liberalism’ is preferred. If the argument is that Islam expresses the divine in a uniquely beautiful and truthful way, so what? God is everywhere.

The history of Western ideas is marked by a decline of philosophy’s most beautiful concept —the Idea. When Plato speaks of an Idea or a Form, we can see it as a certain quality or thing that is only itself and nothing else. When I look at a person’s face, it might have some beauty to it, but it is mixed in with formlessness and perhaps some explicitly ugly elements. The face is not entirely beautiful, it shows a little bit of beauty. The Idea of Beauty would be beauty and nothing else, beauty by itself, alone in its perfection. How does the person have some beauty, if he is not entirely in possession of beauty? He participates in Beauty, and a little bit of beauty shines down on him. But for a little bit of beauty to be present, Beauty in its fullness must be shining through the particular features of this face. So Beauty is entirely present everywhere where beauty is experienced, be it the conditions that allow it to shine forth determine the degree to which it can be seen. Some faces are structured in such a way that Beauty is clearly visible, some faces are so formless that Beauty has no way of shining through.  

Some say that for Plato, these Forms exist objectively somewhere in a separate realm. In reality, it is perhaps more complex and less fantastical. What is important is that these Ideas are the reason or ground for our behaviour and being, and they are the ideals that drive us on to get closer to the idea. The Idea Beauty allows us to participate in Beauty, and it also drives us on as an ideal, leading us to work on becoming more beautiful or creating more beauty in the world through work, politics, art, and so on. These Idea(l)s, they are the same for each and every individual. And so man is not distinguished by having different Ideas or Ideals, but by the degree to which he approaches them, and by the particular way in which he expresses them. There can be beauty in many different types of faces but it is expressed in different ways. And what is required for a face to display beauty depends on the person. Some types of people require this diet, others require that diet. Some require more sun than others. Similarly, truth can be expressed in many different traditions. But the traditions are still different, with all the consequences. 

With the arrival of modern thought, this classical concept of the Idea falls. And it takes Immanuel Kant to give us a new notion of the Idea that can survive the modern skepticism concerning a world beyond. For Kant, there are Ideas, but they do not exist somewhere outside of us, objectively. Rather, they are properties of reason. As a reasonable being, you are driven by Ideas, ultimately three in number —God, I, World. For Kant too, the Idea is both ground and goal, it drives us onward, and it allows us to do so. What is important is that there are no longer any objective Ideas in some realm of forms, but only subjective Ideas characteristic of Reason itself, which everyone has. The Idea becomes immanent to subjectivity. One could say Descartes already prefigures this conception of the Idea, although he does not conceptualize it in the Platonic sense. With Descartes, there are only two “Ideas”: God and the will of man. 

Skip forward, and we are left with nothing. No objective Ideas/Ideals shared by each and every person. And no longer universal subjective ideas common to all men, or to all men of a community. This is the post-modern project. No more Ideals, not even freedom, as it was for modern man. 

So, every person is forced to come up with his own ideals. Which is too much to ask of most. And even if he manages to, none of his ideals can take on the significance of an Ideal. On top of this, the mere task to choose or create in freedom, not even this serves as an end worth anything. The mere ability to exert one’s will in freedom, in itself a thrilling and intoxicating possibility for modern man, strikes us as equally void of sense as belief in a world beyond.

This condition of no Ideals being given, and everyone having the freedom to do as he pleases, without particularly caring for the self-accomplishment of one’s freedom, this is what we term the liberalism of today, which lacks any real desire for the absolute freedom in which man rises up to the status of a God-like capacity for self-determination. 

Now, the problem is, even if you are not given Ideals to direct your actions, things to strive for, you still have to act. And even if you believe in nothing, you still have to act on what you believe. Take an extreme example of a nihilistic type —terribly depressed, no goals or ideals, nothing to strive for, no reason to get out of bed, and so on. But usually these types still eat, or someone gives them food. And they still watch tv or something. So they have no ideals to guide their actions, but instead it is now netflix or something that determines what they watch. And it is not they that choose what to eat, but what is most convenient, the companies that have the best marketing campaigns, and so on. 

So here’s the thing; without Ideals, you don’t escape from Ideals, you become a victim to those who do have strong Ideals and are able to use you for their ends. So you either create them for yourself, in which case you are still alone to be sure, or you become a victim to other people’s ideals. First, the ideals of those elites who have as their end your total psycho-physical retardation, later those people who do have strong ideals. 

What I want to say is very simple and visible to everyone: “Western degeneracy” is a type of weariness, a weakness, that as much as it can be considered an enemy in itself, is really to be despised because it allows foreign enemies to come nearer. It has little power, it is not some Satanic entity. If it is anything, it is like this point the Platonists describe where the soul approaches non-being and has a taste of it without actually seeing it because it has already become blind. It is total impotence, darkness, non-being. Perhaps not as much an enemy to fight, as one to draw away from. And ultimately, even this blindness and end-point of weakness expresses the greatest power of the soul, as that being which is able to step out of Being, as a light that is willing to approach the darkness that surrounds it. 

Now, the West might no longer have any grand ideals beyond the freedom to cut off genitals. But other traditions have. Islam, for one. But also the Russian people and the Chinese.

I see two different analyses going around. The one says Western degenerate liberalism with its trans-humanist and globalist undertones is the real enemy, whereas other more powerful cultural blocks are only a distraction. “They want you to be angry at the Muslims, they want to put people up against each other, and so on, but we are united in our fight against globo-homo!” The other says the liberal degeneracy only makes us weak, but the true danger is foreign powers. In truth, there is a combination of both. Our own weakness makes us easy prey for others. Who is then the real enemy? Does a fighter lose because of a superior opponent, or because of his lack of training? It is in part a senseless question, but it is one of consequence.

The problem is the European’s self-hatred that makes him first destroy himself as seen in the evident pains of ‘degenerate liberalism’, and after realizing what he has done to himself starts grasping for whatever strong and firm tradition he can latch onto. Islam being the most obvious candidate, with its own specific problems. For one, Islamism is always globalist in that it always seeks to convert non-believers. Their enemy is every non-Muslim element of your being, and there’s just more non-Muslimness in the transgender than in you, for now. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” might be true for now, but maybe not for as long as you wish. 

You can dream away and be very romantic, think of the beauty of Sufism and all these great philosophers and scientists who worked under Islamic influence. I will be the first to say there is great beauty in the Islamic tradition, and in most if not all traditions. But realism is warranted.

What is happening now is an increasingly strong coalition of traditionalist thinkers, in the West and elsewhere, led by their master Alexander Dugin. In a recent post on Twitter after recent events in the holy land, Dugin predicts the future. He imagines Israel and the West forming one coalition he describes as Satanic Western Liberalism. The rest of the world, including all the third-world fanatics, he describes as eschatologically awakened to the truth of traditionalism. So this is the picture he describes; there are traditionalists and there is the liberal West. It does not matter what the tradition is, whether it be a backwards desert cult or Orthodoxy, tradition = tradition, and it is opposed to the West which is seen as liberal and degenerate, Satanic even, deserving of its own demise. He entertains a future scenario in which Europe will be in civil war; on the one side, the Westerners who side with “tradition” and make an alliance with Muslim immigrants, on the other the Westerners who side with “liberalism.” Essentially he predicts white Europeans killing each other, one side drunk on LGBTQ+ propaganda and the other intoxicated by some vague notion of tradition, even going so far as siding with a tradition that would choose to murder them if it could. The danger here is of course that Westerners read this and feel allied with Dugin’s message of Tradition, going so far as preferring third-world immigrants as their allies over their misguided liberal family, because at least the Muslim has tradition. It is in part a theory-drunk way of thinking; shared abstract values —“Tradition”— over concrete ways of living, peoples, family. The most important issue of right-wing thought —immigration— thrown away because of “tradition.” The way I see Dugin’s vision; the West’s self-hatred completed. At first, you have the liberal left that hates his own white culture, screeching for decolonization, immigration, minority rights, and so on. Now you have the right that was always critical of all this sharing in the self-hatred, “the West is marked in essence by degenerate liberalism and it deserves to burn, better Muslim tradition than the West.” Of course, the traditionalist says he does not want Europe to burn. Rather, Europeans should rediscover their own tradition. If it takes a foreign invasion led by Muslim Traditionalists to fight away the cancer of Satanic liberalism so the Europeans can rediscover themselves, so be it. At the same time, the traditionalists can’t help believing that the European tradition necessarily leads to LGBTQ+ propaganda and all the rest of it. Behind the apparent respect for all traditions, the traditionalist hides a peculiar hatred for the unique spirit of European and Western man.

In Plato’s Laws, it is said that civil war truly shows what men are made of as compared to war against a foreign power. In the latter, it is usually very clear who the enemy is and where one’s loyalty should lie. In the former, all of this is much harder, and it really shows you where someone’s loyalty lies. This is the choice we are confronted with.

I am generally critical of talk about a “return” to Western Ideals, for one because it often betrays a weird and erroneous way of thinking about historical change. Furthermore, the destruction of Idea(l)s, when undertaken with the right spirit, can only lead to their re-affirmation, be it in a different way. This has always been the way of the West. If you no longer believe in a Beauty beyond in some hidden real of forms, you still cannot deny the experience of beauty. And so it exists. In truth for Plato too the notion of the Idea is only a way to secure the affirmation of this direct experience. “What is Beauty?” not this, not that, and so the safest answer is that Beauty = Beauty, for no other definition can grasp it. Total questioning leads to total affirmation. This has always been our way, total scepticism, which when taken to the very end leads to a re-affirmation of that which is most dear and worthy of being preserved. This is also the most essential character of the Modern moment: Descartes. Absolute doubt, which when taken to the very end leads to an affirmation of the most radical confidence in one’s self and will. One could say Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was written as a critique of this element of European man’s spirit; if this skepticism is taken to the end, man only destroys himself, nihilism. What can save him? A more religious and traditional attitude, faith. The Russian theology of the heart over the Greek philosophy of the mind. In truth, this will to question, this hubris, this daring to fight what is given, it is not only our weakness but also our strength.

It is evidenced in the Iliad even, where men regularly challenge even the Gods. It is peculiar as here hubris becomes a virtue. Of course, not for everyone, and most would do well knowing their place. It is the essential recognition of two types of people, a sort of master and a slave, both needing each other to create the ideal grounds for human cultivation. Nietzsche saw this clearly when he speculated the Homeric works and Hesiod as being like two books of scripture for two strata of society. One speaking of heroism and an almost insane daring confronted with the Gods, the other spreading a message of complacency and acceptance of one’s natural place. The two sides of Prometheus. To be able to hold this apparent contradiction, this was the genius of the Greek world. As Heraclitus put it; some seek everlasting fame and glory, others prefer to stuff themselves like cattle. This is nature, and the most humane and natural order is one that accounts for it. 

Throughout all this, there is an idea of freedom or daring mostly foreign to other peoples. Without this, something like the degenerate liberalism the traditionalists speak of would never be possible. It is not without reason that many today despise this notion —freedom—,  but merely because the results are not as we like is no reason for throwing away the spirit in its entirety. It has been remarked by scientists that the White people are more prone to individualism, and therefore also more open and accepting of other people who are not encountered as an enemy of one’s group, but merely as different individuals from whom one can learn. Presently, both of these elements constitute the West’s great weakness, but they could also once again mean its greatness. As with everything, the weakness is the strength. And what makes strong is the weakness. Absolute doubt, it kills the Underground man. But with Descartes, it leads to discovering God, and it arguably leads to the founding of an entire world on the basis of man’s capacity for self-determination.

Prefacing his book on the early Greek philosophers, Nietzsche writes: “The task is to bring to light what we must ever love and honour and what no subsequent enlightenment can take away: great individual human beings.” The great individual human being, this is the ‘telos’ of the Western spirit, the production of which is encapsulated in the notion of culture or paideia. The disciplining and breeding of the great individual.

As for our openness to other peoples, Nietzsche says: 

“It has been pointed out assiduously, to be sure, how much the Greeks were able to find and learn abroad in the Orient, and it is doubtless true that they picked up much there. It is a strange spectacle, however, to see the alleged teachers from the Orient and their Greek disciples exhibited side by side: Zoroaster next to Heraclitus, Hindus next to Eleatics, Egyptians next to Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras amidst the Jews and Pythagoras amidst the Chinese. As to specifics, very little has been discovered by such juxtaposition. As to the general idea, we should not mind it, if only its exponents did not burden us with their conclusion that philosophy was thus merely imported into Greece rather than having grown and developed there in a soil natural and native to it. Or worse, that philosophy being alien to the Greeks, it very likely contributed to their ruin more than to their well-being. Nothing would be silier than to claim an autochthonous development for the Greeks. On the contrary, they invariably absorbed other living cultures. The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher than our neighbor. The quest for philosophy’s beginnings is idle, for everywhere in all beginnings we find only the crude, the unformed, the empty and the ugly. What matters in all things is the higher levels.” 

It is precisely this openness, this lack of an identity of its own, this lack of a fixed “tradition”, this fluid and mercurial character, that makes up the essence of the European soul. This allowed this people the greatest friendliness, for who knows what one may learn? And it makes it capable of the greatest barbarism; who cares for ruins? what matters is what we do on top of them. We are all interested in where we come from, but the endless search for a first philosophy or a primordial tradition in which we can rest, this seemingly most noble of searches, this too can lead to ruin and to the greatest stifling of all that man is capable of. It can lead to a greater love and understanding of oneself, but if false knowledge is acquired, one might be led to believe it is better to destroy oneself.

Nietzsche adds: “Everywhere, the way to the beginnings leads to barbarism.” What was sought and what some still seek is not the first or the beginning, but the heights, the end, and the soil that can give birth to higher types. What do we find at the beginning of a life? A child, but the Greek is interested in creating men. And what do we find at the beginning of life? Single-celled organisms, apes, and the most stifling primitive societies.

And so the Greek does not search for the beginning, but for those elements that make the heights possible. Surely, the search for the heights must be sustained. But if given the circumstances tradition should lead to a stifling rather than a flourishing, to impotence rather than strength, there should be no doubt that it can be thrown away. This is the peculiar mind that Nietzsche saw so clearly, always asking for the why and the who of the will to power. Of a will to power. Does it strengthen? Does it weaken? Who does it strengthen? Who says it, and why, from a position of power or from the saddest passions? And so thought is protected by the question which makes sure that thought always remains in the service of life. This requires a fluidity, a perpetual activity that can preserve the accumulation of power throughout changing circumstances. It presumes a daring to come in conflict with opinion, both of the day and of tradition. What we find in any case is a way of thinking of such openness that even now nothing can be thought that escapes it. If there is a tradition to be found in the West, it is this peculiar praxis to make good use of what happens. From Plato to Nietzsche, this is the ‘telos’, and this is the Ideal, to make good use of what is given in order to create a greater type of man.