thoughts in and out of season
I just finished reading Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. It’s an interesting display, by the French Traditionalist metaphysician (and mathematician), of what can be done through systematic application of simple concepts.
In Guenon’s system, which is heavily influenced by Hindu speculations and traditional metaphysics generally, the concepts … More ...
Not a book everyone would find useful or interesting, but I’m getting something out of it: Ride the Tiger, by Julius Evola.
The author calls the book “a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul,” although in concrete fact I’m not sure there is such a thing in his sense. Still, it’s … More ...
In today’s world it’s natural for there to be a great many accepted turns of thought that encode liberalism and modernity. An example is the “fact/value distinction.” That distinction involves the belief that two quite different sorts of things are involved in the way things are for us: facts, neutral statements about a world that’s … More ...
From the time of Bacon and Descartes, modernity has aimed at simple powerful principles that can be fully grasped, made completely evident, and used for comprehensive control of phenomena. As a result:
What kind of moral life is possible depends on what the world is like. The view educated men in the modern West take seriously is that what exists is (1) the world described by modern physics, and (2) sensation and desire. Those things are somehow just there, and no one understands or agrees on their … More ...
This four-part essay was published in slightly edited form in the Summer 2004 issue of Telos (number 128). There is also a *.pdf version of the essay as published. Comments are, of course, welcome.
We live in a time in which an abstract and basic question like that is relevant to practical political life. Judges today, for example, feel free to overthrow the established definition of marriage on the grounds that the universal understanding of a fundamental social institution is simply irrational. What is accepted as “reasonable” has evidently … More ...
Important thinkers responsible for liberalism and political modernism generally include Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche. The succession of their views set forth the self-destruction of the liberal and modern tradition. That tradition started by rejecting the transcendent and accepting sole concern for the things of this world for the sake of … More ...
Modernity is based on a system of knowledge that starts with logic and clear and unquestionable truths and out of those things claims to construct all we can know. Such an approach to knowledge severely limits what we can recognize as real, and thus profoundly affects our view of what there is and what we … More ...
Rationalized insanity like “zero tolerance” and political correctness suggests there is something basically irrational in social life today that has to do with a conflict between publicly compulsory standards and normal human expectations. Some people try to laugh the conflict off and make jokes about PC or whatever. Others deny it or explain it away—these … More ...