03-05/03/13

They say that Marx turned Hegel on his head by replacing his theory of historical unfolding in terms of the evolution of geist, or spirit, with an economic theory of history as embodying a dialectical struggle between the owners of industry and the producers of wealth, i.e., between bourgeoisie and proletariat, with the latter destined, so far as Marx's reading of history was concerned, to expropriate and supplant the former in their collective ownership of the means of production and socialistic dispensation of wealth.

Thus from a geist-oriented highpoint in German philosophy, Marx turned Hegel upside down in pursuit of his own degenerate theory of historical evolution as implying the inevitable victory of the urban proletariat as the necessary outcome of the dialectical struggle between capitalists and workers in the class war destined to culminate not in the universal triumph of religious geist, but in the global triumph of scientific communism! The ongoing existence of a 'struggle' between employers and those they employed was a taken-for-granted tenet of this disgusting philosophy, as was the fact that capitalists could, with moral impunity, be expropriated by those to whom they gave work and some kind of living, without anyone's suspecting anybody involved in such expropriations of blatantly criminal behaviour!

Parallel to the degeneration of German philosophy from Hegel to Marx, we find a similar, albeit contrary, parallel between Schopenhauer, that proponent of the world as will and representation but, at the same time, denier of will as the solution to worldly entrapment, and Nietzsche, the sick and lonely preacher of self-overcoming through the affirmation of will and, as the embodiment of power, the coming of the Superman, who would be the successor to man and 'meaning of the earth', that is, of a world rejuvenated by his triumphant self-overcoming through powerful ascendancy as übermensch (a term equivalent to superman), lording it over others, rejecting Christian values, including a compassionate negation of the will, in his vainglorious pursuit of natural dominance in a spirit not altogether dissimilar from Darwin's survival of the fittest, a philosophy doubtless suitable to an imperial age and to those busily engaged upon the expansion of Empire, for which any form of weakness or Christian compassion would be irrelevant, especially in connection with the conquest of non-Christian peoples or traditional enemies of Christianity.

So if Marx was the degenerate retort to Hegel, then Nietzsche was arguably the decadent retort to Schopenhauer in his advocacy, if not exactly embodiment, of willpower, of the supremacy of will and the right of the wilfully supreme to dominance in a world inimical to Christian compassion, a world characterized not merely by the survival but, more importantly, by the prosperous aggrandisement of the fittest or strongest or most ruthless as the natural outcome of the triumph of will over self-doubt or self-regard. Sound familiar?

For Nietzsche, 'otherworldsmen' and 'afterworldsmen' (the terms are roughly his) are a waste of time in a world where only the triumph of the strongest lends meaning to the earth and the earth achieves its justification precisely through their dominance - a philosophy that was to lead, via Spengler, who in some respects resurrected Hegel's geist-orientated theory of history with his 'Second Religiousness', to the triumph of the will in the twentieth-century and to the emergence, at least in Germany, of an ideology that embodied many if not most of Nietzsche's core values, including an abhorrence of Christianity and an almost pagan belief in the power of will, when harnessed to blood and soil, to solve all or most of Germany's problems.

The fact that Hitler esteemed both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – as incidentally did the left-leaning Albert Camus – is a curious, even paradoxical commentary upon the Nazi leader's philosophical tastes. But the fact remains that National Socialism would not have taken the form it did without Nietzsche's and possibly Spengler's decadent contributions to philosophy, which emphasized the need for a rejuvenation of Europe through the superhuman efforts of one nation, one party, and especially one man, in the guise of the Führer himself, the embodiment of the 'will to power' and self-styled first Superman.

Thus if one of the twentieth-century's two main competing ideologies, namely Soviet Communism, stemmed from a degenerate thinker in the pseudo-scientific person of Marx, then the other, namely National Socialism (which some would identify with Fascism), was in part the product of a decadent thinker in the pseudo-religious person of Nietzsche, neither of whom would inspire the thought of Spengler who, although a man of the Right, was evidently no Nazi but, rather, one who hoped for an outcome to National Socialism that would resemble his 'Second Religiousness' and thus stand as a true beacon of enlightenment on the road to if not actually in 'Kingdom Come'.

Sadly, Nazism was not to be that. For any pretensions to its being a new dawn in religion were quickly eclipsed by political reality and by the obvious need to combat Communism both at home and, subsequently, abroad, thereby detracting from the possibility of a cadent resolution to the historical process that would have been the goal of any movement sensible enough to take advantage of degeneration in the State to strengthen the Church, albeit not along conventional lines but, on the contrary, along revolutionary lines commensurate with the possibility of 'Kingdom Come'.

Nazism was, in Koestler's memorable words, a 'god that failed' precisely because too much of its efforts went into combating 'godless communism' from a standpoint insufficiently cadent to prove a truly viable alternative, a standpoint in which a peculiar kind of mental decadence went hand-in-hand with a neo-generative barbarism epitomized by the Nazi Party's accommodation with – some would say 'sell out to' – the largely Prussian-dominated military as the means by which, under Nazi auspices, Germany's rejuvenation as a 'great power' and, above all, right to imperial expansion would be guaranteed, and achieved, not least, at the expense of the degenerate Communist East, epitomizing, for Hitler, a subhuman failure worthy of domination by a superhuman power entitled to more than mere survival.

The West may have declined, to paraphrase Spengler, with the threat to if not actual communist suppression of church/state liberalism and the degeneration of liberalism itself through the incorporation of socialism, but Hitler was no friend of the Church, and the want of a truly cadent alternative to social degeneration leaves us in a position today where – if we except the Third Reich as being no more than a precursor or racially localized manifestation of eschatological promise - 'Kingdom Come' has still to come, and where Communism, in a more covert or underground and even apparently liberal guise, wears a Social Democratic mask, though still very much a part of the degenerative fabric of Western civilization, the global retort to which, though manifestly existent on an alpha-stemming basis, cries out for a genuine cadence truly commensurate with the resurrection of church-hegemonic values under what I term Social Theocracy, and firmly believe to be the ideology most likely to accord with the coming of the 'kingdom' whose values lie within, in the deepest recesses of metaphysical self, but only if and when that self has been liberated from the clutches of both will and spirit, achieving, at the expense of ego, the soul's beingful delight.

Neither the Hegelian triumph of spirit nor the Nietzschean triumph of will, nor even the twisted ego of Marxist dialectics can bring to the world that resolution of history which Spengler, like Bunyan before him, glimpsed from afar, albeit without an ideological definition to seal the fate of those who would capitalize on its vagueness to uphold the temporal (coupled to the pseudo-finite) alternatives to Eternity (coupled to pseudo-Infinity) by continuing to bow before the Infinite (coupled to the pseudo-Eternal) in order to enslave the finite (coupled to the pseudo-temporal), thereby precluding their deliverance, on both positive and pseudo-negative terms, from this world to the next.

Picasso – that degenerate bourgeois artist with predictably left-wing sympathies but a decidedly heterosexual disposition – at least to all appearances. For who knows what goes on underneath?

As for Dali, a much finer artist with a capacity for spiritual values and even a higher form of religious art.

If Picasso is the alpha, then Dali is the omega of twentieth-century Spanish art, an artist who, as is well known, politically leaned to the right and even flourished under Franco, becoming less surrealist and correspondingly more Catholic.

In contrasting the alpha left with the omega right, one still needs to distinguish the extreme forms of each from their so-called moderate counterparts, as between the noumenal objectivity of science and the noumenal subjectivity of religion in relation to the extreme left- and right-wing positions (or antitheses), and between the phenomenal objectivity of politics and the phenomenal subjectivity of economics in relation to the so-called moderate left- and right-wing positions (or antitheses), so that the alpha left, divisible between science and politics, can be more comprehensively contrasted, to an antithetical degree, with the omega right, divisible between economics and religion.

In relation to Picasso and Dali, I would argue that Picasso was more an artist of the political left than of the scientific left, more corporeal than ethereal, so to speak, whereas I would hold Dali to be - and this despite appearances to the contrary – more of the religious right than of the economic right, or more ethereal than corporeal, and therefore the polar opposite, within the axial context of Spanish Catholicism, to Picasso, whom one can associate with the lower-order left as opposed, like Dali, with the upper-order right – that of course being extreme (noumenal) right (and religious).