Béchamp’s Microzymas or ‘little bodies’

AS SHOWN IN THE SECOND CHAPTER, Béchamp was the first to prove that the moulds accompanying fermentation were, or contained, living organisms, and could not be spontaneously generated, but must be an outgrowth of some living organism carried in the air.

This much was in his 1858 memoir, six years before Pasteur came to the same conclusions.

Being the first to realize that these moulds or ferments were living organisms, he naturally was also the first to attempt to determine their true nature and functions, and their origins.

On putting some under the microscope, he noted a diversity in appearance of the moulds and was soon involved in a study of cell life.

In his earlier experiments, Béchamp had used several salts, including potassium carbonate, in the presence of which the inversion of cane sugar did not take place. But when he repeated this experiment using calcium carbonate (common chalk) instead of the potassium carbonate, he found that inversion of the cane sugardidtake place, even when creosote was added. This observation was so unexpected that he omitted it from his earlier memoir in order to verify it before publication of the fact.In carefully controlled experiments he found that when chemically pure calcium carbonate, CaCO3, was added to his sugar solutions, no inversion took place, but when ordinary chalk, even that chipped from the native rock without access of air, was used, inversion always occurred.

On heating the common chalk to 300 degrees, he found that it lost its powers of fermentation, and on examining more of the unheated common chalk under the microscope, he found it contained some ‘little bodies’ similar to those found in prior observations, and which he found did not exist in the chemically pure CaCO3, nor in the chalk that had been heated.These ‘little bodies’ had the power of movement and were smaller than any of the microphytes seen in fermentation or moulds, but were more powerful ferments than any he had encountered previously.

Their power of movement and production of fermentation caused him to regard them as living organisms.

He advised Dumas of his discovery of living organisms in chalk in December 1864, and later, on September 26, 1865, he wrote a letter which Dumas published. He stated:

“Chalk and milk contain already developed living beings,  which is proved by the fact that creosote, employed in a non-coagulating dose, does not prevent milk from finally turning, nor chalk, without extraneous help, from converting both sugar and starch into alcohol and then into acetic acid, tartaric acid, and butyric acid...” Which was ample proof that there was a ferment, a living organism, present in both milk and chalk. He said of these:

“The naturalist will not be able to distinguish them by a description; but the chemist and also the physiologist will characterize them by their function. 

Professor Béchamp found that the chalk seemed to be formed mostly of the mineral or fossil remains of a ‘microscopic world’ and contained organisms of infinitesimal size, which he believed to be alive.

He also believed they might be of immense antiquity, as he had traced the block of limestone he had used to the Tertiary Period in geology; yet he found that stone cut from the solid ledge, with all air excluded, had ‘wonderful’ fermentative powers, which he traced to the same ‘little bodies’ that he had found to cause fermentation in his earlier experiments. He concluded that they must have lived embedded in the stone of the ledge for many thousands of years.

In 1866, he sent to the Academy of Science a memoir called On the Role of Chalk in Butyric and Lactic Fermentations, and the Living Organism Contained in it. 

In this paper, he named his ‘little bodies’microzymas,from the Greek words forsmall ferment.

He also studied the relations of his microzymas of chalk to the molecular granulations of animal and vegetable cells, with many more geological examinations, and wrote a paper entitledOn Geological Microzymas of Various Origins, which was abstracted inComptes Rendus of the session of April 25, 1870. 

He proved that the molecular granulation found in yeast and other animal and vegetable cells had individuality and life, and also had the power to cause fermentation, and so he called themmicrozymas also.He called his geological microzymas ‘morphologically identical’ with the microzymas of living beings.

In innumerable laboratory experiments, assisted now by Professor Estor – another very able scientist – he found microzymas everywhere, in all organic matter, in both healthy tissues and in diseased, where he also found them associated with various kinds of bacteria.

After painstaking study they decided that the microzymas rather than the cell were the elementary units of life, and were in fact the builders of cell tissues. They also concluded that bacteria are an outgrowth, or an evolutionary form, of microzymas that occur when a quantity of diseased tissues is broken up into its constituent elements.

In other words, all living organisms, he believed, from the one-celled amoeba to mankind, are associations of these minute living entities, and their presence is necessary for cell life to grow and for cells to be repaired.

Bacteria, they proved, can develop from microzyma by passing through certain intermediate stages, which they described, and which have been regarded by other researchers as different species!

The germs of the air, they decided, were merely microzymas, or bacteria set free when their former habitat was broken up, and they concluded that the ‘little bodies’ in the limestone and chalk were the survivors of living beings of long past ages.

This brought them to the beginning of 1868, and to test these ideas they buried the body of a kitten  in pure carbonate of lime, specially prepared and creosoted to exclude any airborne or outside germs.

They placed it in a glass jar and covered the open top with several sheets of paper, placed so as to allow renewal of the air without allowing dust or organisms to enter. This was left on a shelf in Béchamp’s laboratory until the end of 1874.

When opened, it was found that the kitten’s body had been entirely consumed except for some small fragments of bone and dry matter. There was no smell, and the carbonate of lime was not discoloured.

Under the microscope, microzymas were not seen in the upper part of the carbonate of lime, but ‘swarmed by thousands’ in the part that had been below the kitten’s body.

As Béchamp thought that there might have been airborne germs in the kitten’s fur, lungs or intestines, he repeated this experiment, using the whole carcass of a kitten in one case, the liver only in another, and the heart, lungs and kidneys in a third test. These viscera were plunged into carbolic acid the moment they had been detached from the slaughtered animal. This experiment began in June 1875 and continued to August 1882 – over seven years.

It completely satisfied him that his idea – that microzymas were the living remains of plant and animal life of which, in either a recent or distant past, they had been the constituent cellular elements, and that they were in fact the primary anatomical elements of all living beings – was correct.

He proved that on the death of an organ its cells disappear, but the microzymas remain, imperishable.

As the geologists estimated that the chalk rocks or ledges from which he took his ‘geological microzymas’ were 11 million years old, it was proof positive that these microzymas could live in a dormant state for practically unlimited lengths of time.

When he again found bacteria in the remains of the second experiment, as he had in the first, he concluded that he had proved, because of the care taken to exclude airborne organisms, that bacteria can and do develop from microzymas, and are in fact a scavenging form of the microzymas, developed when death, decay, or disease cause an extraordinary amount of cell life either to need repair or be broken up.

He wrote in 1869:

“In typhoid fever, gangrene and anthrax, the existence has been found of bacteria in the tissues and blood, and one was very much disposed to take them for granted as cases of ordinary parasitism. It is evident, after what we have said, that instead of maintaining that the affection has had as its origin and cause the introduction into the organism of foreign germs with their consequent action, one should affirm that one only has to deal with an alteration of the function of microzymas, an alteration indicated by the change that has taken place in their form.” This view coincides well with the modern view of all germs found in nature, except those in the body, which are still looked on as causing the conditions they are found with, rather than being the result of these conditions, which is their true relation to them.

TheEncyclopaediaBritannica says in the entry on bacteriology:

“The common idea of bacteria in the minds of most people is that of a hidden and sinister scourge lying in wait for mankind. This popular conception is born of the fact that attention was first focused upon bacteria through the discovery, some 70 years ago, of the relationship of bacteria to disease in man, and that in its infancy the study of bacteriology was a branch of medical science. 

Relatively few people assign to bacteria the important position in the world of living things that they rightly occupy, for it is only a few of the bacteria known today that have developed in such a way that they can live in the human body, and for every one of this kind, there are scores of others which are perfectly harmless, and, far from being regarded as the enemies of mankind, must be numbered among his best friends. 

It is in fact no exaggeration to say that upon the activities of bacteria the very existence of man depends; indeed, without bacteria there could be no other living thing in the world; for every animal and plant owes its existence to the fertility of the soil and this in turn depends upon the activity of the micro-organisms which inhabit the soil in almost inconceivable numbers. It is one of the main objects of this article to show how true is this statement; there will be found in it only passing reference to the organisms which produce disease in man and animals; for information on these see Pathology and Immunity.”  

The writer of the above thoroughly understands germs or bacteria with only one exception;the bacteria found in man and animals do not cause disease. They have the same function as those found in the soil, or in sewage, or elsewhere in nature; they are there to rebuild dead or diseased tissues, or rework body wastes, and it is well known that theywill not or cannotattack healthy tissues. They are as important and necessary to human life as those found elsewhere in nature, and are in reality just as harmless if we live correctly, as Béchamp clearly showed.

Ethel Douglas Hume

BÉCHAMP OR PASTEUR?

A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology

Irmin Vinson - Some Thoughts on Hitler

 “Hitler” as Multiracialist Propaganda

The argument advanced by some racial nationalists that any defense of Adolf Hitler, in light of the hostility and even revulsion that his name now evokes, risks alienating mainstream Whites is plausible on its surface and should receive a respectful hearing. But it is still on balance mistaken.

Although most nationalists in the United States and even in Germany do not consider themselves national socialists, multiracialists and anti-White Jewish advocacy groups call each and every one of us a “nazi.” It is an undeniable fact that in our contemporary political climate any white nationalism, as recent events in the Balkans amply demonstrate, will be labeled Hitlerian and will summon, in breathless media presentations, “the specter of the Holocaust” and anguished fears that “it” might just happen again, if the goyim get too restless. That, after all, is the central lesson taught by the countless Holocaust museums sprouting up, like noxious toadstools, throughout most of the West: that White racial consciousness is literally lethal and must therefore be actively combated, a lesson which we have now enshrined, in deference to Jewry, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, a national memorial to our White wickedness.

We are thus obliged, like it or not, to live under Hitler’s shadow. Our enemies have ensured that any expression of White racial consciousness, however innocuous, will be officially pronounced hatefully Hitlerian and “nazi,” whether we admire Hitler or despise him. It is therefore incumbent on us, as a simple matter of self-defense, to arrive at a balanced view of Hitler and the movement he founded.

Anyone who doubts all this should recall the abuse that Pat Buchanan received at the hands of the controlled media and the organized Jewish community during his campaigns for the Republican nomination. Buchanan is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a national socialist, nor even a conscious racialist. He is, instead, a traditional Christian conservative, with all the virtues and liabilities that entails. But he was persistently labeled a “nazi” nevertheless. His 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention, liberal columnist Molly Ivins opined, “probably sounded better in the original German.” Her meaning was clear: She was identifying Buchanan as a “nazi,” delegitimizing his nationalism and social conservatism with the most potent weapon in the Left’s rhetorical arsenal.

So as racial nationalists we can either manufacture false “anti-racist” credentials by claiming to hate Hitler just as much as Abe Foxman does, a subterfuge that I very much doubt will convince anyone, least of all Abe, or we can tell the truth.

The truth is that the maniacal Hitler of popular demonology is a World War II propaganda fiction, and the principal purpose of the fiction’s incessant repetition more than fifty years after the war is to stigmatize any nationalist movement, NS or otherwise. Hitler now represents not a specific historical figure and the political party he led, but nationalism of any variety, from timid anti-immigration conservatives to angry White-power skinheads. The System’s anti-Hitler orthodoxy, invoked almost daily, is in effect tacit propaganda for multiracialism and a potent device to keep all nationalists perpetually hiding in closets, too afraid of labels like “racist” and “nazi” to openly say what we sincerely believe. We have, therefore, a real interest in demythologizing Hitler, and we have no hope of escaping our association with what he now represents. We can’t run away from Hitler, however much some of us want to.

Let’s Notice the Obvious

The crucial facts about World War II are uncomplicated and readily available in mainstream sources. NS Germany had limited war aims: the recovery of territory taken from Germany at Versailles, the acquisition of living space for the German people in the East, and the destruction of the Marxist Soviet Union, history’s most brutal regime. Insofar as the United States had any stake at all in the outcome of the war, it would have been to help Germany and her Axis allies, including thousands of Russian patriots, accomplish the latter. Absent the campaign conducted by the Western democracies to save Stalinism by defeating Hitler, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.

Since America had no national interests in the conflict in Europe, our government deliberately lied about German war aims in order to manufacture the perception that we did, claiming that Hitler had global territorial ambitions, a plan for “world domination.” Over fifty years later, most Americans still accept the lies.

The predictable result of the Allied victory and the German defeat was Stalin’s occupation of half of Europe. A war that ostensibly began to restore Polish sovereignty ended with Poland, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, being handed over to the Communists. And in quite concrete terms no American would have died in Vietnam if Hitler had destroyed Soviet Communism, arguably the central objective of his political career; American soldiers fought in Europe so that their sons could die in Southeast Asia.

None of this should be the least controversial. It is a symptom of the effect of persistent propaganda that so many of us fail to notice the obvious.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that multiracialism itself, along with our servile deference to Jewry, is founded on the mythical image of Hitler as evil incarnate, Satan’s secular counterpart in modern history. Remove the false, childishly simplistic Hitler myth, and a significant ideological justification for multiracialism would collapse. The simple question, “Were Hitler and NS Germany really as evil as everyone says?,” therefore has huge repercussions, and an entire machinery of propaganda—ranging from Hollywood films and “Holocaust education” in the public schools to off-hand comments in the controlled media (“better in the original German”)—has been designed to discourage anyone from even contemplating the obvious but heretical answer.

National Socialism

Hitler defined his own national socialism as a uniquely German movement: “The National Socialist doctrine, as I have always proclaimed, is not for export. It was conceived for the German people” (Hitler-Bormann Documents, February 21, 1945).

In other words, German National Socialism arose at a specific time in a specific place under the pressure of a unique set of historical circumstances, none of which could ever be precisely replicated elsewhere. In particular, the autocratic Führer state, central to NS Germany, would never be acceptable to Americans; our republican political culture and belief in individual rights are, thankfully, far too strong. Hitler was a dictator and his government authoritarian; Americans prefer their political and civil liberties.

Which doesn’t mean that NS Germany was a police state. It had in fact fewer policemen per capita, and far fewer secret police, than either modern Germany or the United States, despite the misleading image most of us have of legions of sinister Gestapo agents kicking down doors in the middle of the night.

The basic principles of national socialism are, nevertheless, universal: that God (or Nature) has assigned each of us to a racial group and has endowed each group with distinct qualities; that a nation is not simply a geographical concept, a set of lines arbitrarily drawn on a map irrespective of the people living within them, but instead derives (or should derive) its political institutions and national objectives from the character of the people themselves; that a nation organized to preserve a race and develop its distinctive character is therefore “natural”; that the strength and social cohesion of a nation derives from its sense of a common identity, of which race is the most important determinant; that in addition to our individual rights we have larger social obligations, not only to the present generation of our nation but to its past and future generations as well; that the primary purpose of a nation is not economic, but the preservation and advancement of its people, economics being subordinate to the völkisch (racial/national) objectives that should be a nation’s core reason for existing.

“The [Nation-] State in itself,” Hitler wrote, “has nothing whatsoever to do with any definite economic concept or a definite economic development. It does not arise from a compact made between contracting parties, within a certain delimited territory, for the purpose of serving economic ends. The State is a community of living beings who have kindred physical and spiritual natures, organized for the purpose of assuring the conservation of their own kind and to help towards fulfilling those ends which Providence has assigned to that particular race or racial branch” (Mein Kampf, I, iv).

In the generic sense of the term, national socialism is (arguably) not inconsistent with democratic institutions, despite Hitler’s own view of the matter; its true antonyms are multiracialism and capitalist, one-world globalism. Nor is national socialism inconsistent with an American “melting pot” view of ethnicity, provided that the various ethnic groups that comprise the nation are sufficiently similar that each can see a common identity and common destiny in the others—that is, insofar as they, despite their ethnic differences, are branches of the same race and can, therefore, be effectively acculturated to a common set of national ideals.

I consider Hitler less a model to be followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out from under. Never in human history has a single man received such sustained vilification, the basic effect and purpose of which has been to inhibit Whites from thinking racially and from acting in their own racial self-interest, as all other racial/ethnic groups do. Learning the truth about Hitler is a liberating experience. By the truth I mean not an idealized counter-myth to the pervasive myth of Hitler as evil incarnate, but the man himself, faults and virtues, strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve done it, once you’ve discovered the real Hitler beneath the lies and distortions that have buried his legacy, you’ll be permanently immunized against anti-White propaganda, because you will have seen through the best/worst the System has to offer.

http://library.flawlesslogic.com/hitler.htm

András László - a biographical note

 Born in 1941. in Budapes. Traditional philosopher. As soon as he begun his studies of reformation theology, he had to put them on hold, since he was sent to prison because a single statement he made and he was accused of "regime disruption"; still he was only there for 4 months. Afterwards he contacted the Buddhist mission, he was a student, then a teacher (not clear if a teacher of Buddhism or in general). In that time he changed about 20 jobs, ranging from waitering to asphalt worker. He did graduate Catholic theology in the end and got a PhD with his work "Light of space in the man" (1975). When the political situation got better, he became a famous lecturer and teacher with diverse subjects: relation of being and consciousness from the angle of Eastern metaphysical traditions; cosmical and metaphysical derivation of man, his antrophological structure; mortality and immortality; relations of knowing and acting; left-wing politics and traditionalist thought; freedom, democracy and liberalism; society and state; faith and knowledge; metaphysics of sexuality; Christianity and universal tradition... His most known work is "Traditionality and understanding of being" (1995). He's the only expert on Béla Hamvas' work who's also critical towards some of his views. 

I once mentioned his name in one Hungarian magazine, as one of the writers I've translated, they've asked me to leave him out, because it would make me look bad: "He's a right-winger". A label that used to mean that the judgement is already made, which means that the situation in many heads didn't change much.

Sava Babić

András László - MAN

 

The one in whom the problems of life, consciousness and death do not arise cannot in the strictest sense of the word be regarded as a human being. Undoubtedly he looks like a man but in reality he is not.

If superhuman principles does not stand behind man’s intention of changing himself then he will not remain in the human state but descend to a subhuman condition.

Without aims going beyond life one does not only go in the wrong way but strictly speaking, one should not be called a man.

The one who is not able to live his life as a constant ascension, which attains its perfection in the period right before death, but from a certain age starts to descend, in reality abuses his life.

He who does not strive upwards, descends.

He who lets himself be taken by the current, is certain to follow the wrong path.

Today even stagnation requires exceptional efforts.

Every stagnation turns to regression, decline or descent sooner or later.

In he, who experiences stagnation in his life, descent has already started, even if it is not so remarkable that he would notice it straight away.

One of the striking signs of stagnation is when man puts off his spiritual tasks.

There are periods in one’s life when there is a considerable likelihood of a halt and of foundering taking place. For the majority it happens around the age of twenty-seven - that is between the age of twenty-four and thirty. As it is maintained »one’s world view has taken shape by then«. Of course it does not mean that it has taken shape, but that it has ended halfway. With regard to people with really insignificant spiritual qualifications this usually happens between the age of fifteen and twenty-one. And it is a considerable achievement if someone founders only between the age of thirty-three and thirty-nine.

Most people, as they reach total development, start to decline right away; not only somatically, but in inner aspects as well.

Most people, as they reach total development, start to decline right away; not only somatically, but in inner aspects as well.

Most people are infantile until about the midpoint of their lives, that is until the age of thirty-six, and immediately after that from one day to another grow senile.

The majority of people are not mediocre, for true mediocrity is considerably above the average. A so-called average man is weak on every plane: the forces of darkness are just as weak in him as the forces of light.

People’s life as a rule fails through mediocre conditions, and not through the most negative conditions - since against the latter everyone to some extent defends themselves. But against mediocre conditions the majority of people are helpless: for these are not so bad that they would revolt against them, but bad enough to impede spiritual development.

Consciousness is an active, creative and cognitive understanding.

Man should read so that he has the opportunity to think, to understand. For when I understand I am more than man. When I understand, I am myself.

In understanding I myself understand - and that is the true value of it: that I understand. It is not insignificant what I understand, but the essence is that I understand.

Everything can be shammed: even miracles, even awakening; only one thing cannot be: intelligence.

Anything can be done with man, he can even be turned into a frog, save for one thing: he cannot be made superior.

A really intelligent man cannot be a follower of destructive ideas - since such an attitude is always a sign of some kind of mental disorder.

He who wants to move cannot be moved. He who wants to stop cannot be stopped.

If man is shackled externally, he is not in graver bondage than if he is bound by his inner darkness.

In the final analysis, man is not subjected to external factors but to his inner psychological states.

That which manifests itself as democracy in the world, appears as automatism, whirling associations, distractions and lack of (self)control in consciousness.

Every individual-personal mania is a usurper, and every mania represents the terroristic feature of the usurped power.

The really negative thing in someone’s raving is not that he is raving, but that in fact it is not him who is raving but something/someone within him.

Not only he commits a crime who by losing his self-control commits something, but also he who following from his lack of self-control does nothing.

If someone does good following sudden impulse, he commits a crime.

[»According to the traditional view there is no bigger sin than the loss of self-control, therefore in Eastern traditionality a premeditated criminal deed was regarded as less serious than one committed following a sudden impulse.« (András László)]
[With cessation of self, there is nothing to control, so sudden wholesome impulses free from negative mental states cannot be classified as a crime, unlike philosophical paradoxes which describe good as bad. V.B]

In he who allows instincts to have an extranormal role, that which is realised is not freedom but the rule of instincts - over himself.

If there is a deed in which there is no trace of an autonomous will at all, that is exactly the one which is under the aegis of »I do whatever I want«.

The fact that man in »self-feeling« to a certain extent experiences himself in the third person singular is manifested most clearly when he feels sorry for himself.

If someone is selfish, in fact he is not selfish in favour of himself, but in favour of that other for whom he mistakes himself, and to whom he wants to grant advantages.

If there is some truth in the statement that »when man mourns for someone, in reality he feels sorry for himself«, then not less true is the statement that when man feels sorry for himself, he feels sorry for someone else.

It is said that »Everyone aims at good, but they do not reach it in the end«. But maybe they do not reach it, for they do not aim at it... It may be that everyone reaches their goals...

Without exception, everyone reaches their goals, if they really have these goals.

Man is always born in the place where he has to be born.

Man should arrange his external world forever so that it fits his inner world.

Between man’s inner world and the more increasingly chaotic surrounding external world there is a definite correspondence.

All that is somatic in man, that is, which is in connection with body and face, mainly expresses the past.

Resignation to one’s fate as well as revolt against one’s fate are lunar attitudes. A truly spiritual attitude aims at transcending fate: one does not resign and does not revolt, but by depriving fate from its importance transcends it.

A first-rate man seeks for first-rate men’s company. A second-rate man that of third-rate.

With his activity, it is always the inferior who disturbs the superior. With his existence, it is always the superior who disturbs the inferior.

Man should in fact stay in contact only with people who open up upward paths in his life.

Modesty is a sign of deviation just the same way as arrogance is.

It is inevitable that respect has almost died out from the children of today. But has there remained even one morsel of venerability in the adults of today?

There is nothing venerable in adults, but even if there were the children would not respect them; and if children respected adults for some reason, that would not mean at all that adults are venerable. One does not cause the other but both have a common root. The world decays from common sectors.

From a spiritual perspective humour is indispensable, jokes are permitted, but making fun of something - especially higher realities - is unacceptable.

Some Thoughts on Hitler - Foreword by Kevin MacDonald

Irmin Vinson is a very talented writer who deserves a wide audience. This is an excellent collection of essays by someone who has thought long and hard about the threats to our people and our culture.

As Mr. Vinson notes in the title essay, National Socialism was indeed an attempt to secure the ethnic interests of the German people, just as Judaism and Israel are attempts to secure the ethnic interests of Jews. It is certainly not necessary to defend all aspects of National Socialism in order to defend the idea that Whites have legitimate ethnic interests, as much as our enemies try to link White identity with National Socialism. As he notes, the opposite of National Socialism is globalism and multiculturalism—an ideal that Jews advocate only in the Diaspora in the West while vigorously opposing it as a model for Israel.

We should not shrink from these comparisons, especially in the light of modern evidence clearly showing the biological roots of race. Races are indeed extended families with an interest in long term survival. There are also well-documented race differences in traits critical for the success of complex contemporary societies. These race differences are on display in this collection, particularly in Vinson’s essay on Africa where he notes Black inability to create productive economies or any semblance of democratic government.

These essays are invariably well thought out and well-grounded in empirical data. His essay on the Indo-Europeans quite rightly emphasizes the contribution of the primordial peoples of Europe prior to the Indo-European invasions of the 4th millennium B.C. Whereas the other areas dominated by Indo-Europeans quickly reverted to the collectivist cultural tendencies typical of the rest of the world, only Europe produced a distinctive culture of individualism with all that that entails in terms of political culture: tendencies that ultimately resulted in individual rights against the state and republican political cultures with deep roots in Western history going back to the ancient world. Any adequate theory of Western uniqueness must include the influence of the primordial cultures of Europe that existed prior to the Indo-European invasions.

Vinson’s comments on the Holocaust emphasize the image of the Holocaust as a creation of Jewish intellectuals with access to the media and as an instrument of Jewish political power not only in defense of Israel but as a weapon against White interests. Indeed, the Holocaust is the ultimate moral justification for multiculturalism and massive non-White immigration. As he writes “If the Holocaust is . . . the Jewish collective memory of World War II, then we who are not Jews are in effect thinking about our past with someone else’s memory, seeing both the past and its implications for the present through Jewish eyes rather than through our own.”

I was unaware of Arthur Miller’s novel Focus, published in 1945. It is quite clearly a classic work of Jewish ethnic activism by someone who was well-connected to the halls of literary power and therefore able to influence popular opinion. The book is a good example of Jewish hostility toward the people and culture of the West. Its subtext is the Jewish alliance with non-Whites that would become the Jewish postwar strategy—which is apparent, for example, in the powerful Jewish support for Black interests.

But its main importance is an early version of the Holocaust as a tool of Jewish ethnic interests. Miller “took it upon himself to teach an early version of what would eventually become the most insidious of the Jewish Holocaust’s numerous lessons, namely that pathological (‘nazi’) hatreds lurk behind the West’s superficially civilized exterior.” It is an image that continues to reverberate throughout the West. The war against National Socialism is now depicted as a huge moral lapse of the West for failing to do enough to help the Jews. German concentration camps were transformed into symbols of “generalized White guilt”—symbols of the “vast moral failure” of Western civilization. It is quite accurate to state that Holocaust scholarship is essentially “an aggressive scrounging for sources of [Jewish] racial grievance.”

The Holocaust as weapon against the West represents a departure from the World War II rhetoric of good democracies against evil fascism:

The war’s aftermath offered a didactic opportunity to define anti-Semitism as incompatible with the West’s highest ideals, which Allied soldiers had supposedly shed their blood defending. With Hitler’s defeat the enemies of the Jews were placed outside our Civilization, which should have encouraged Jews to curtail their frequent efforts to subvert it.

The Jewish group decision to shape their Holocaust memory into an indictment of Western “anti-Semitism” and “racism”—our “pathology”—was a calculated repudiation of post-war triumphalism. The Jewish Holocaust, as it emerged from the burgeoning identity politics of the 1960s, blurred and even effaced what had formerly been a clear distinction betweenthemandus, cruel dictatorships and civilized democracies, and it set Jewry apart from both.An overarching theme here is the falsification of history in the service of Jewish ethnic interests by Jews with access to the media. Vinson has a priceless review of Steven Spielberg’s TV miniseries, Band of Brothers, exposing its intellectual gymnastics in the service of Jewish ethnic interests. Another essay comments on the historical omissions apparent in the hostile review of the movie ThePatriot by a Jewish reviewer, Jonathan Foreman: omitting crucial details of a World War II German massacre in the service of indicting the West, not to mention Foreman’s antipathy for well-functioning White families and Aryan-looking heroes depicted as defending their people. The essay on Mel Gibson capitulating to Jewish pressure to change a scene in The Passion of the Christ (a scene based on the Bible), in which a Jewish mob calls for the crucifixion of Jesus, makes a larger point about Jewish power in America. Not only did Jews manage to intimidate Gibson, they did so despite the fact that the Talmud clearly states that Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry.

History is whatever Jewish activists in the media (and the academic world) want to make of it. History is what is good for the Jews.

This falsification in the service of Jewish ethnic goals is also apparent in the essay titled “Jews, Islam, and Orientalism” where “Jewish scholarship concealed its anti-European aggression in the learned pages of sympathetic studies of Islam.” The result has been to sanitize Islam as part of a campaign to admit millions of Muslims into Europe and ultimately to displace the peoples and culture of the West. Amazingly, this campaign coincides with neoconservative Jews routinely vilifying militant Islam in the interests of defending Israel against its Middle Eastern enemies. Once again, Jewish activists are able to have their cake and eat it too, in this case representing Muslim immigrants to the West as benign assimilators who do not threaten Western identity while promoting attempts to rearrange the politics of the Middle East in the interests of Israel.

Another form of falsification occurs with Richard Wagner who produced powerful music that brought to life the ethnonationalist mythology of the German people. Wagner’s music is so powerful that it cannot be ignored, resulting in a strategy where his “threatening art must therefore be aggressively reproduced in misshapen travesties of his original vision.” As Vinson notes, all of this rewriting of the past is motivated by fear that the anti-White multiracialist message is inherently weak and unappealing, so that it must constantly be propped up with wall-to-wall propaganda that reaches into every nook and cranny of the cultural landscape, even 19th-century opera:

Despite wielding all this power, multiracialists know that most Whites have not yet embraced their moral system. Any suggestion that there are legitimate alternatives becomes a source of fearful anxiety. Multiracialists try to prevent their opponents from speaking because they believe that most Whites would want to listen, and thus they fear anything, even old operas by a dead heretic, that challenges their totalitarian ideology.

The emperor has no clothes, requiring an intensive, never-ending effort to make it seem like he’s actually very well-dressed.

Finally, I couldn’t agree more that “we should never tire of identifying Jewish hypocrisy on racial issues and never fear repetition.” A major source of the power of the mainstream media is that it endlessly repeats its anti-White propaganda. The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations insist on Israel as a Jewish ethnostate and resolutely oppose any sense that governments should pursue the interests of their European-descended majorities. It is perhaps the most glaring hypocrisy imaginable. However, a measure of Jewish power is that Jewish activists routinely engage in this hypocrisy without any fear of being mentioned by mainstream politicians or non-Jews in the media. Both groups are well aware of the calamitous consequences for their careers that would ensue should they violate the taboo about discussing Jewish influence. Although cracks are beginning to appear, mainly as a result of the rise of the Internet, the fact is that Jews have managed to completely control the discourse about Jewish issues, multiculturalism, and the benefits of racial and ethnic diversity with no fear that their double standards, hypocrisy, or falsifications of history will be noticed in the above-ground popular or academic media. It’s really an awesome display of Jewish power.

We desperately need to oppose this power. Irmin Vinson is a sophisticated thinker and eloquent writer about all of the issues at the heart of the dispossession of Whites. I highly recommend this collection of his essays.

November 21, 2011

Kevi n MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University—Long Beach, is the author of A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994), Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998), as well as Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (2007). He is the editor of The Occidental Quarterly and The Occidental Observer.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net

Alexandru Dragomir - Ways of self-deception

I shall try to speak as concretely as possible, i.e. not ‘philosophically’. However, I am going to take as my motto a quotation from Hegel’s Science of Logic, more precisely from the Preface to the second edition (III, 18):

The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is;
because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing [dieses Sichwissen] is a fun-damental determination of its actuality. (Hegel 1969, 37)

In fact I am abusing the quotation, for Hegel is speaking here of ‘self-knowing’ in the sense of the logical absolute. But this Sichwissen fits perfectly with what I want to say. I hope this will be understood.

Let me begin with the idea beloved of Heidegger according to which we are not what we are, but much more what we can be: Seinkönnen, ‘potentiality-for-being’.

We are something possible in relation to our own selves, we are our own projection, what comes towards us out of the future. The image we build of ourselves is largely composed of the sum of our projects and projections. We evolve, of course, on a ground made up of pre-existing determinations: we are our genes, the time and place in which we were born, the society in which we live, and so on. But beyond all that there remains a Spielraum, ‘room to manoeuver’, a space that is not yet occupied by anything, a niche of the possible in which we can install ourselves and freely settle into one direction or another of our lives. Of course this range of possibilities is to some extent predetermined by circumstances that have nothing to do with our freedom: fashions, ideals floating in the air, readymade lifestyles, which limit our freedom while leaving us with the impression that we are choosing.

However it still remains true that my own projections turn back on me and determine my way of being. I am what I really want to be, as well as being the range of possibilities that lie before me.

And yet it is not enough that I have these possibilities before me. In order to choose between them, I resort to a ‘knowing’—I have no other word—that tells me what it is better to opt for one particular possibility and not some other. Any choice of a possibility presupposes such a knowing—a ‘science’ in the broadest sense— that indicates the best possibility, that which really attracts me, and to which, concretely, I can begin to direct myself. A knowing, an understanding if you like, that gives me orientation.

However from this it follows that there is a deeper link between our existence and knowing or science in this broadest sense: knowing understood not as a totality of data gradually accumulated in the brain, but as a sort of understanding without which I cannot exist. The fact that I orient myself by choosing, and get it into my head that I can and should be this and not that, means that the knowing that precedes my access to what is possible for me is a condition of my existence. That my existence is constructed as a function of this knowing, and that this knowing is a condition of existence. When I choose to enrol in the Faculty of Mathematics or the Music Academy, I do so by virtue of having processed certain data of my own. And if, as in Plato’s Alcibiades, it is a matter of knowing what I am going to become and what it means to choose one’s life, then all the more does the choice presuppose knowing what a good life is. And so my confrontation with what is possible for my life presupposes a ‘knowing of what is possible’: I cannot choose unless I already have such a ‘knowing’, which in fact ultimately becomes the condition of my existence.

But once it is made, the choice implies a Richtungslinie, a ‘direction’ on which I must go from now on, and which, by the simple fact of its existence, eliminates all other possibilities. Having chosen from a multitude of possibilities, I am left with only one: I have limited myself to one, setting aside all the others that lay in front of me before I chose.

This whole game of choosing, which presupposes knowing as a condition of existence, also implies the necessity of testing what you know. If I can demonstrate that I have an understanding of the possibilities, then I can be sure that my choice has a sound basis, and, implicitly, have a guarantee that, through the well-founded choice that I have made, I will exist optimally and maximally.

But can I demonstrate this? Can anyone claim to have a reliable understanding of his possibilities, and thus, implicitly, a knowing by which to choose his life?

Socrates replied that the only thing he knows in this connection is that he does not know. He has the knowledge of his lack of knowledge. The choice of our lives presupposes a knowing, but it is a knowing that we do not have, and nor, from a Socratic point of view, can we ever have it. We strive to choose the best life possible for ourselves, because otherwise we waste our lives and live by chance, hurled this way and that; but on the other hand, when I am asked about the fundamental reference points of my life—courage, love, friendship, beauty, piety etc.—, when I have to put to the test a science of life, the only answers I can give are evasive and insufficient. In all these branches of knowing and understanding we are dunces. This is the dramatic nature of my human situation: I do not know anything, when in fact I have to know, because I have to choose my existence, since my existence itself is choice.

What then is the solution? How can we escape from this terrible paradox of human existence? There is only one way: the solution is to ‘chew over’ the problem.

That is why Socrates engages in discussion, in dialogue. Without a break. All the time. A whole life spent in dialogue. I have to keep discussing what I have to do, namely how I can manage to choose the best life, without for a moment claiming for myself the position of ‘I know’ and of the truth. When we read the Socratic dialogues, this is what strikes us at every turn. ‘Yes, we are talking about courage,’ we hear Socrates say. ‘What exactly is courage in itself?’ But why do we have to know what courage is in itself? And the answer is always the same: ‘So that we can choose, so that we can know how to choose our life.’ This was not just a problem for Socrates; it was a problem for the Greeks in general, one of the great ongoing problems that would not leave them in peace. This was a problem worth ‘chewing over’ endlessly, and one which, for Socrates, pushed dialogue to the foreground.

And yet this is not the path that philosophical thought followed after Socrates. Already with Plato, who basically stages the problem of endless dialogue, discussion is no longer the same thing; rather, as happens constantly among us, it has already become a front for searching for and finding the truth. This postulation of infinite dialogue, generated by the need for a knowledge by which to choose in the conditions of ‘I know that I do not know’, is the first fissure that Socrates brings with him in the history of European thought. (About the other fissure—the question—I have spoken at length on another occasion.1) And on the basis of this fissure, our choice proves to be only a manner of speaking. We want, of course, to choose our existence, and indeed to choose the best possible (see Gorgias, Meno, Alcibiades etc.), but in fact we do not choose because we do not know, and because we know that we do not know.

 Well then, in the context of this issue, of this relationship with one’s own self, I am going to speak about falsifications of the self, about self-deception. I have seen, with Heidegger, that my life is essentially possibility. Possibility both as reaction and as horizon. It is reaction inasmuch as I can react to a given situation in one way or another. This is one of the senses of the possible for me. The other sense is my projecting, that which I could be. My plan is to talk about the psychological horizon of the possibility of life, and within that, to raise the problem of self-falsification.

Let us see how lack of self-knowledge appears within the context of self-image, and what the relation is between what I am and what I think I am. And all this based on a temporal structure of self-falsification. I am now going to propose an inventory of the ways in which we deceive ourselves, based on the temporal hypostases of the future, the present, and the past.

The Future 

Dreams

My dream of what I am going to be is my own projection into a hero, a personal projection par excellence. Dreams begin in childhood. When I was a child, I dreamt of becoming a racing driver. Perhaps nowadays a child dreams of becoming a cosmonaut or a Formula 1 driver like Nigel Mansell. Dreams begin in childhood and continue in other forms in adolescence: in some cases they remain with us all our lives. One form of life-long dream is that of the (as yet) unrecognized genius, the Van Gogh model, let us say. There are people who paint or write poetry all their lives, convinced that they are unrecognized just as Van Gogh was, but that one day… Others are for ever Don Juan: Ortega y Gasset says that there is not a man alive who does not believe that he was Don Juan, at least in his younger days, that he perhaps still is, or, if he was not and is not, that he could have been but did not want to be. There are hundreds of variants on these dreams, and it is they, these dreams, that create the real failures. These, I emphasize, are personal dreams: i.e. they are formed by my projection of myself into a model or ideal type of person.

Fanciful Ambitions

Any fanciful ambition involves an overloaded opinion of my own capability, a wrong evaluation in an upward direction. If, for example, my dream is to become one of the great philosophers of the world, then my fanciful ambition might be to solve the problem of time. Why is it dangerous to nourish such ambitions? Because the precious mirage of ‘I’m going to do’ gets in the way of ‘I do’. The fanciful ambition is thus the project that prevents you from doing. An example would be the project of reading the works of the great thinkers in the most fundamental way. This is a fanciful ambition, because there can be no definitive reading of the great philosophers. This time it is no longer a matter of personal projection: I start with myself and see myself as a great hero. This time we are dealing with a mystification at the level of action. He who nourishes fanciful ambitions is a man of action sabotaged by his own project of doing. He sets out to do in his own space something that he cannot do. He wants to catch a whale with a flimsy fishing line. It is the very grandeur of his project that puts the brakes on its achievement. This lack of adjustment to one’s own possibilities is another source of failure. In my generation there was a guy called Ştefan Teodorescu who was always making up ample tables of contents. He never even got as far as writing the introduction. However the nourisher of fanciful ambitions is not an agonized failure; his life becomes a dolce far niente, a sort of continuous waltz among a host of projects endlessly taken up and abandoned again. There is a Chinese proverb: ‘Every road starts with the first step’.

The nourisher of fanciful ambitions never manages to make that first step. Or if he does, he leaves the road before he has trodden firmly on it.

Plans, Concrete Projects

These represent a third possible source of self-falsification in the context of the future. I say ‘possible’, because not every plan necessarily leads to self-falsification, only one that cannot be abandoned along the way as soon as it proves to be unrealistic or mistaken.

Any activity that I embark on presupposes a concrete plan. However as the activity advances, it may or may not confirm the initial plan. Self-falsification sets in when I lose my flexibility, when I become the slave of a project even when it no longer suits me. To avoid this sort of self-deception, I must, when I have a project or a plan, keep asking myself along the way if it is still appropriate for me to follow it, if it is really good, etc. It is not necessary that things should turn out just as you saw them at the beginning: sometimes you get a better view of them along the way.

 The Present

One’s Own Set of Issues

We cannot talk of an intellectual in the absence of a personal set of issues. You will not obtain Selbstwissen, ‘self-knowledge’, by, for example, sitting in your armchair and asking yourself intensely ‘what am I like?’ (This time I am not going to show you, as in the previous cases, how you can deceive yourself, but rather how you can avoid doing so.) So let us consider the personal set of issues. There are exceptionally quick-witted people who live in a veritable jungle of issues. They keep having all sorts of ideas about all sorts of things. Some can write an article every day or every week with some new idea, and sometimes these are only a fraction of the ideas that come to them. The case of Wittgenstein is an eloquent one. Ideas never stopped coming to him; he would write them on bits of paper and throw them into a drawer. Others came along later, took the papers from the drawer and put them in order, giving them the form of immortal ‘works’. At first sight, all these notes of ideas seem to be a jungle, but in fact this is not the case. It is for this reason that we can speak, if not of Wittgenstein’s system, then at least of his way of thinking. These scattered notes rhymed with something; they had the coherence of a way of thinking, and were, ultimately, ‘systematic’. Nietzsche did the same thing, producing feverish jottings in notebooks, scribbles on pieces of paper. A good part of the works of Nietzsche consists of notes. If you take all the volumes he wrote, you can see what a jungle was in his head. I have taken two extreme examples in order to make it clear that one’s set of issues is a matter of the present, of the ideas that come to one at a given moment. And out of these notes of ideas you yourself appear, and, reading them later, you are able to see what you could not appreciate when you wrote them: that they have a certain structure, that they are not a jungle, and certainly are not a form of trickery—that they are not means of self-deception, but an authentic Selbstwissen.

External Solicitations

In order not to be falsifying, external solicitations should only be accepted if they fit within one’s own set of issues, and refused—as far as possible—if this is not the case. (NB: As you will see, what I have to say here only applies to intellectuals, and hardly at all to other types of people.) Even then, however, compared with the ideas that come from inside me, external solicitations are to a much lesser extent my own, and engage my commitment much less. In fact they have one major failing: as soon as they become systematic, they come to take the form of a chain; they start to represent you, and gradually build up an image of you to which you end up submitting in time. Little by little, you become this mask of yourself that you can no longer deny and that, finally, you have to accept as actually being your own face. How many intellectuals have disappeared in this way (or have never got as far as being born) behind ‘regular collaborations’? 

Concrete Work 

The truth is that, out of the three temporal hypostases, it is only in the present that we can see what we really are. Starting from the present, I can find out who I am. It is in fact the place of the self, and it is here, in the present, that our existence is played out. The future is possibility; the past has gone. The present, on the other hand, is continuously generating us: it is the source of a good knowledge of ourselves that is relatively immediate, and in which the role of self-falsification is reduced as far as it can be.

Hence concrete work. Concrete work can be either a feverish and inspired creation, or a painstaking and laborious one. We have a great deal to learn from both. They oblige us all the time to keep asking ourselves: where do I have difficulties? Where am I not succeeding? This struggle to catch your own thought and formulate it is an excellent method of reaching yourself. To succeed in knowing what you think presupposes an enormous effort, and it is only when you become attentive to the difficulty of exteriorizing your thought that you begin to know yourself. It is sufficient to look at the manuscripts of famous writers to see how different people are, and how different are the pathways by which each person reaches their own self.

Now, in this ‘what I am doing now,’ it is very difficult to falsify myself. Reduction to the present means potentiating the self, obtaining an identity with one’s own self, which has managed to integrate and to master the past and the future too. This is the ideal of ancient and medieval wisdom. The present, the past and the future need to be grasped and held together as a whole; in other words, the present must be answered by a cleansed past and future. In every moment of the present, I must be wholly as I am. I must reach the point where everything I do represents me. However there are few things that we consider represent us when we do them. That is why there are so many people who all their lives are completely unaware of what they are doing, while there are not a few who give moral lectures after doing things that shock everybody.

But in the ideal of wisdom that I have been speaking of, the risk is that of closure: I possess a total knowledge and control of myself, and the capacity to translate my own wisdom into action. I thus have a perfect circle, a closure of myself permanently sealed by my knowledge and my action. Well, no! To avoid this danger, the present must be kept ever open, or rather we must always be open whatever our present may be. The motive is quite simple: I know that ultimately I know nothing.

The image of Socrates is clear in this respect: Socrates was a wise man who lived all the time in the present, keeping the present ever open. He lived the present in the market place, like a sort of time-waster. He could begin any discussion with anyone, just in order always to remain open to the outside. To keep the present open, not to close it, means in fact avoiding the position in which the present no longer means anything. And the present no longer means anything when the truth is beyond discussion and I am in possession of it—when the truth is known beforehand and the discussion is only for the sake of demonstration.

The Past  

The Mistakes of the Past, Covered Over or Forgotten by the Subconscious Will 

This is the most serious source of self-falsification that comes out of the past. No-one is more of a ‘trickster’ than we are with our own selves. I have never met a greater deceiver than a person with their own self. Any mistake has an impact on the image that you make of yourself. However it is curious to see how it is always the image that wins and never the mistake. The latter is either concealed, blamed on someone else (women excel here), or forgotten by the subconscious will. And it is amazing to see how well this subconscious will to forget functions. People can clearly remember their moments of success, but it takes a great effort to remember the serious mistakes they have made.

Why does this happen? Because a mistake is in fact never finished. It has to be closed somehow, and the simplest way of closing it is to forget it. It is hard to finish a mistake. It is very easy to finish a success: you climb on top of it and look down with pride. But what can you do with a mistake? Do you acknowledge it? Do you recognize that you made it? I would kindly ask you to learn what to do with your mistakes! You have to look them in the face, seeing them as the most fertile well-springs of the self. There is no better source of self-knowledge than dialogue with your own mistakes: acknowledging them, seeking to avoid repeating them, transforming them, healing their source.

One’s Own Defects 

We speak casually of our own defects and accept their repetition with ease. We do not get rid of them precisely because we consider that we can cure them at any time. I know that I am indiscreet, that I am greedy, but—or so I keep telling myself—I can stop being so at any time. I only have to want it. The solution is in my hands. Some time I am going to stop and start taking myself seriously… But I do not take myself seriously.

Beautification of One’s Own Past: Making Myths and Legends 

Here we have to deal with the opposite side of the tendency to forget our mistakes. You keep alive in your memory and endlessly go over those events in your life that show you in a good light. By constant retelling, they become veritable myths. We have all had a grandfather who, when we were children (children love repetition!), used to tell us over and over again about some great deed in his youth (something he did in the war, how he caught a thief, or something like that). The danger here lies in the fact that you start to hang onto these things. It is not just because of a sort of self-love that you mythologize the episodes that show you at your best, but rather because of the unacknowledged doubts about yourself that you gather over time. Some rely all their lives on the fact of having once been pupils of Heidegger. We all do this, one way or another: we hang on to something that is favourable to us, and make a myth of it in order to counterbalance our smallness, the inner doubt that we have about ourselves.

That’s all!

Reference Hegel. G.W.F. 1969. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin.

The World We Live In

Alexandru Dragomir (auth.), Gabriel Liiceanu, Catalin Partenie (eds.) 

Utter Metaphysical Banalities

This title may give rise to misunderstanding.

What I want to speak about is banalities that have a metaphysical value, in the sense that they are the banalities that we all experience. And the supreme banalities that we all experience relate to the fact that we are always in a spatial and a temporal environment, that we are caught in these two environments as in a woven fabric.

This is the theme of the conversation that I propose, and we shall follow an utterly banal schema:

(1) The spatial environment; (2) The temporal environment.

The Spatial Environment

The spatial environment is both closed and open. Biologically speaking, any environment is closed, limited. Everyone has heard of Konrad Lorenz and the way in which he describes the delimitation of the environment of ducks and other small animals; a delimitation that extends to the smallest detail (the end of a branch, a bush, a certain stone, etc.). And so we shall begin our discussion of the spatial environment from this point.

1. Limit. This is no more than my ‘range’, the ‘point’ up to which I can extend myself. By my nature, I am not enclosed merely within corporeal limits; I am not walled within my body. I can move here and there, see up to a certain distance, hear various things. As long as I am awake, I am open to the outside, but I am open in a limited manner. No matter how ‘mobile’ the things I do, they remain limited because it is as limited that I myself in all my being—corporeal, dynamic and intellectual— am. In fact we are limited a priori, in the sense that each of our gestures and actions has a certain predetermined measure. I can take a step of one metre, and if I push myself I can manage a little more, but I am not capable, with my human legs, of taking steps of five metres. I am limited da capo, and so I am from every point of view.

This is so evident that it no longer even enters our consciousness. Many unlimited things appear in our minds, while the consciousness that I am as limited, as something limited, is not clear precisely because it is so very evident. I do not realize that I am the way I am with the clarity with which it would be observed by someone looking down on us from somewhere high above, as we look down on ants, for example, immediately grasping the limits within which they can move.
Moreover, we can do so many things nowadays that my consciousness of limit as my first and supreme determination is far from clear. It is not at all obvious to me all the time that I cannot do anything unlimited.

2. For all that that is how things are, for all that I am limited in all directions, the environment is a plus; it is something more that the sum of my limitations. Going beyond the totality of my limits, it is somehow the consciousness of that totality. I live in this totality qua totality, not as the sum of my margins, and this is what I mean by ‘my range’. It means that the nature of the environment is not concretely physical, although the environment is concretely physical. The environment as my ‘range’ presupposes a modifiable and approximate nature. For people, the environment is mobile; its limits are not fixed as with Lorenz’s animals. They can be changed; my whole environment can be changed; even my language can be changed.

Thus it follows that, though there is a totality of the things that make up my environment, a totality that can be inventoried (the totality of things in the room), the environment is something ‘in the mind’, a totality of a spiritual nature.

3. As the totality of my limits, the environment is at the same time inscribed in something wider: in my ‘horizons’. For, being limited, the environment is limited in relation to something. If the environment is my ‘range’, if it is as far as I can extend myself, that means there is also a beyond in relation to how far things go for me. In this beyond there are things which, being unable to encompass them, I do not know very well or even at all. There may even be an abyss there. But what I know very well is that my environment is inscribed within a much wider circle about which I do not have to be clear at all costs. What matters is to be clear about the things in my immediate environment, not also about those that lie at the other end of the world, of the universe etc. All that matters is to know—and nothing more—that my environment is situated within a larger sphere.

And how exactly is it inscribed? It is always inscribed as my own environment.
The environment always belongs to someone, is someone’s own. It is true that in any environment there are concrete things that interpenetrate, but they are the concrete things of my environment. This fact too is one of those evident matters that are passed over precisely because they are too evident.

This character of ‘one’s own’ of the environment operates in a strange way on the objects that the environment contains: in appropriating them, it causes them to fade. Any environment does this inasmuch as it is my own environment: it frees me from the things that it contains, relegating them to the taken-for-grantedness of their existence, and helps me to save my lucidity for new and important things. If I am able to concentrate on something, if I am able to work in my room, it is because the things I know are laid to one side and allowed to wither into too-well-knownness.
When I sit at my desk, I am not in dialogue with the lamp on the table, with the paper on which I write, or with the computer on which I work. The fact that I completely appropriate what I know, all that is part of the familiarity of my environment, does not take away its existence, only its foreignness.

4. That which is known of a thing means its withering, and this means that one’s own environment implies, as its opposite term, foreignness. This is the opposition: what is one’s own and what is foreign. What is foreign is all that is not in my environment, all that is not known, the beyond. From this point of view, anything can be foreign: an animal, a plant, a thing (a Coca-Cola bottle for a tribe in the tropical forest), all that is unheimlich, unfamiliar, while the classic concrete expression of the familiar environment par excellence is the house, the home, das Heim. I make a house in order to have my own environment, to be at home there. But ‘being at home’ comes before the home itself, from the need to have a secure environment. It is not the house that creates an environment, but the need for an environment that creates a house. The shelter-house, the hotel for example, is not my environment and precisely for that reason I am not ‘at home’ there. Now just as ‘at home’ is a feeling, ein Gefühl, so that which is foreign, foreignness, is a feeling. And if we are attentive and still have some freshness, then the foreign and foreignness appear in any meeting with an unknown person. There is something unheimlich, uncomfortable and thus strange and unpleasant, in any first meeting with a person. This is the case in which we still feel foreignness: that is to say, what is foreign about the other. For in fact few of us still feel the foreignness of a dog—how foreign it is to you –, and even fewer the foreignness of a flower or a tree.

For intellectuals, there is something foreign (and strange) in any new book that you take in your hand. It may conceal who knows what; it is foreign in the sense that it is inhabited by a foreign spirit, which is completely other than yourself. However I repeat: this foreignness is a Gefühl, a sentiment, and does not arise from the fact that I am afraid of a dog or that a flower is unusually beautiful. Moreover, the foreignness of a thing may be felt also in front of something that I have seen hundreds of times, but which only now, suddenly and unexpectedly, jumps out at me. 

What is the difference between any pair of worn boots and Van Gogh’s boots? The latter put on stage, so to speak, the foreignness that in the case of the other boots I have never perceived. It takes Van Gogh’s painting to show me to what extent a pair of boots can be foreign to us, and, as such, strange.

What I want to emphasize is that any foreignness is determined in relation to something that is one’s own—let us continue to call it an ‘environment’ –, and that conversely any environment creates the possibility of something foreign. That is to say, in relation to the environment, in relation to this ‘place’ where the known is (the known that withers), the unknown shows itself. In withering, this known does not make a thing cease to exist; however it makes it no longer perceptible. Because we have seen each other so many times and because we know each other quite well, we no longer perceive each other as vigorously as we would perceive an unknown person who suddenly entered the room. In this environment of ours which is this room, they would be foreignness itself. But I was saying more than this when I mentioned Van Gogh’s boots: that there is a potential for foreignness in anything. If you can take from your eyes the veil of the too-well-known, then anything can appear in its fundamental foreignness, ultimately even you yourself if you look at yourself in the mirror as if you were seeing yourself for the first time. And it is this power to penetrate the space of the known that makes it possible for us to rediscover a thing, a person, a piece of music, a book.

However it remains essential that the foreign is determined in relation to the own—what I have called the ‘environment’—and, conversely, that the environment creates the possibility of the foreign. And these two terms are in a perfect equilibrium, which we grasp when we realize that we have an equal need for an environment and for the foreign, and that the predominance of either one of them leads to a sort of despondency. When the known predominates, the result is boredom; when the foreign predominates, the result is alienation. All of us have experienced this boredom with our own home, with all the things we know, our books, our clothes etc.: that is to say, all the things through which the environment overpowers you with the withering of everything that has lost its bloom for you. And of course we have all experienced alienation when we have gone abroad, to a place where everything, absolutely everything, is foreign, to Nigeria let us say. And then you miss the very things that until then had come to bore you. You miss your town, your home, your bathroom, the armchair in front of the desk where you work. Kierkegaard talks about this balance in one of his books, the Treatise of Despair: despair in the finite and despair in the infinite. And Heidegger deals with boredom in a splendid lecture, in which boredom, Langeweile, appears as a crevice, an abyss.

5. The spatial environment is not chaotic, but ordered, or, more precisely, oriented. I know very well the state of things in my environment, literally and figuratively speaking. Any thing has a place in space, and in the combination of things I can at any time find or create an order. The chaotic and order are not, in this sense, objective. The chaotic often arises from the foreignness of a setting, just as order is often the result of being used to it. No environment is chaotic for the person who lives in it. There is a perfect order on this desk for the person who works at it, although it is overloaded with books, sheets of paper, notes etc., while for the woman who does the cleaning it is completely disordered. Any apparent disorder can be tamed. Supposing that there was disorder in this room, if I spent more time in it and started to get used to the things, I would begin to distinguish in the disorder which struck me at first the order that the person who lives here has imprinted on them. Little by little I myself would penetrate this environment and transform it into my own. On the other hand, where I am and remain foreign, it seems to me that everything is chaotic. A perfectly ordered room can remain totally foreign for me, because for whatever reason I cannot appropriate it spiritually.

6. Orientation is based on the schema of centre and surround, that is to say me and my environment. In fact in our case it would be correct to say that ‘me and my environment’ is the basis of the ‘centre and surround’ (or ‘ordered surround’) schema. I am always in an environment, because I am always ‘outside’: I see, I hear, I take a step… The ‘me–environment’ schema is fundamental, and it ultimately reproduces the simple schema of the cosmos. As understood by the Greeks, the cosmos is that which has a centre, and, precisely for this reason, has a well ordered surround. It is a world. The same schema works with all the breadth and depth of its
treatment in Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), especially in the form of Worum-willen (‘for-the-sake-of-which’). In saying this, I only want to show that these philosophical ideas of great breadth start out from an extremely simple immediate reality. It is sufficient to think a little about the immediate in order to fall upon the great philosophical solutions.

The Temporal Environment

Common sense tells us that our temporal environment is the age in which we live— which, let’s face it, is vague. If the ‘age’ is the century, for example, then the interval is too large and too chrono-arithmetical. And if it is smaller, then how small can it get? Our language describes this short respiration of time in the expression ‘from today till tomorrow’. And in fact it is impossible not to live from today till tomorrow. Each of us knows what we have in mind to do today and what we propose to do tomorrow. I always have a programme, even if the programme is to take it easy. In other words, I am always busy.

But that is what I do with my time. When we discuss the temporal environment, we need to consider what time makes of us.

1. The first thing that must be said is that man lives in a contemporaneity and cannot do otherwise without forcing reality. Contemporaneity is the social environment from a temporal point of view, but it is not the same thing as synchronicity. I cannot live without having a contemporaneity, but it is quite possible for me not to live in contemporaneity understood as synchronicity. Children, for example, are not yet contemporary with contemporaneity, and the elderly have ceased to be so.

Let us pause a little over the case of the elderly. They take into themselves, and carry with them a certain contemporaneity, that of their youth and maturity. And they keep this contemporaneity deep in their heart until they die: the artists who were famous in their time, the music, the food and all that belongs to ‘Ah, back in my day!’. Whence it results that contemporaneity, too, is a sentiment, a Gefühl.

Over and above pure synchronism, an unknown web binds you to the time in which you lived to the full, a web impregnated by all that characterizes that time in relation to the time that immediately followed it. The Greeks did not approach someone’s biography with reference to the years of his birth and of his death, but rather in terms of his ἀκμή, meaning his ‘peak point’, the time of maturity, when the person attains the fullness of his being, the best period of his life. We do not know very well how these affective bonds are woven between us and the peak period of our lives, which we then feel to be contemporaneity.

Of course, someone may say to me, regardless of this Gefühl and this remaining behind that is presupposed by old age, we still all live in contemporaneity: we turn on the radio and hear the news, we watch television, we listen to what this or that person says, we see the same fi lms, read the books that come out, talk together… 

But to what extent do these things become everybody’s ‘web’? To what extent are they all still grafted onto my being and metabolized? For an elderly person, all these things are pale reflections of the similar things that they experienced in their maturity and that inscribed themselves in them with full vivacity. They see a famous dancer of today, but in fact they remain convinced that there is no longer a dancer like Fred Astaire and never will be. They see Richard Gere and exclaim: ‘What a handsome man Gary Cooper was!’ They look at a fashion parade and think nostalgically of the clothes ‘of their day’. Of course they are contemporary with the rest of us, but only in appearance. In reality, they are all the time there, ‘in their day’.

For this reason, contemporaries are not just people who have lived at the same time, but those who have shared a certain temporal environment: a history, habits, technical means, fashion, cultural prejudices. And all these things have inscribed themselves in their hearts, have been co-experienced. And when they change—and hélas, all things change!—they no longer feel at home. Everything that has changed has changed, for them, for the worse, and they have remained foreign in relation to the evolution of the temporal environment. The Germans have a good verb: mitmachen, to make something together, to participate in its birth. Well, the elderly no longer mitmachen, no longer give things a starting push. ‘Er macht das nicht mehr mit.’ ‘I’ve lost him along the way.’ He is no longer, practically and affectively, along-side me. (I am speaking, of course, in general terms, of simple and usual cases. I do not mean to say that there do not exist elderly people who are every bit as contemporary as could be. Dinu Noica, for example, is contemporary, and not just in a mimicking way, but authentically.) This nicht mehr mitmachen sometimes takes insurrectional forms, becoming a protest, a refusal, a deliberate form of non- participation in what is happening. Things being as they are, elderly people are foreign to the world in which they only live de facto, while in their hearts it is foreign to them.

It sometimes happens that we leaf through illustrated magazines of 60 years ago. What strikes us is not just the fact that the world there is different from ours, but that to a large extent it is comical. There is always something comical about the immediate past. This mixture of the tragic and the comic is particularly striking when we happen to meet unknown elderly people in the street. They are left in the world of today like so many revenants, like so many ghosts. Contemporaneity thus gives a certain superiority to the person who knows ‘what…’: what is worn, what is said, what is known, what is done and is not done, what is chic and what is not. It is the superiority of the up-to-date. And this superiority of the one who keeps up with things is much more visible in our times, precisely because the changes are much more rapid. The idea of progress nowadays brings with it an obsession with contemporaneity. This is no longer a point that separates the past from the future, but a ‘now’ that has become absolute in relation to the past. What is past is ipso facto dated, out-of-date; whatever is contemporary becomes the place of the ‘last’ judgement. For being contemporary gives you the right to judge the past. What I mean is that the past comes to be at the beck and call of the present simply by virtue of its temporal position. Such judgements usually start with ‘Nowadays we no longer…’, and they express all the arrogance of the fact of being contemporary. What is now decisive is not logic, but temporal position. We have reached, in our day, a sort of domination on the line of time, in which what is new or seems to be new is superior precisely because it is new. This ‘new’ is raised to the rank of a symbol of the future, and thus raised in its temporal grade. In a symmetrical manner, all that is past becomes antiquated. Of course there is a logical naivety about this way of appreciating things. If nowadays what was superior yesterday is antiquated, then tomorrow what is superior today will be antiquated, and so on. And then there is no point in anything. How can we escape from this provincialism of contemporaneity? The safest solution is to know the thinkers of the past. Why? Because only if we are conscious of them can we reposition contemporaneity in its proper place: that of a chance limit-point in an evolution with which we have to be contemporary. You are contemporary if you have the culture of today not through what is today, but together with the whole unfolding in which ‘today’ is a chance happening that concerns us. The hardest thing is to grasp progress where it is not merely quantitative.

Let us take the example of the computer. The calculating machines that made up the first generation of computers were huge and slow. They are antiquated. There is no doubt that they are out-of-date in relation to the computers of today, which can sit on a single table, can do many more operations, and can be operated easily. All that I have listed so far are quantitative aspects. In the case of the computer, it is absolutely clear that progress is quantitative. As far as I am aware, however, no-one has yet demonstrated that in matters in which quantitative appreciations cannot be made, this force of temporality (the superiority of the new) should operate without any other criterion. However I would like you all to be aware of the power of this temporality, or to be more precise, the superiority that is felt by the person who lives in contemporaneity. Here, in contemporaneity, seems to be the end of the world, or even its culmination. Being a feeling, this is not objective but subjective. All those who live contemporaneity to the full have a tendency to confiscate time. They all have the feeling that they are at the culmination of something. Hegel was not immune to this (der absolute Geist), and nor was Auguste Comte or Nietzsche. For each of us, the completely legitimate feeling that we are at the furthest extreme of the world, that we are the last in time, can transform into the less legitimate, or even utterly illegitimate feeling that the world is coming to fulfilment in us, or at least entering a decisive phase. This (illegitimate) feeling is based on the following reasoning: if we, knowing all that our predecessors have done and thought, do something else, then this ‘something else’ is ipso facto superior to what was done before, since no-one would consciously do something worse. Thus a confusion, in the sense of an unjustified identification, is created between ‘new’ on the one hand, and ‘superior’ or ‘advanced’ on the other. Modern temporality—and we shall see how it came into being—brings about an enhancement of the new as a purely temporal value, an intrinsic value. The new is constituted as new, proclaims itself as such, and, conscious of its temporal value, affirms itself as a negation of the past. The term ‘modern’ is more than a 1000 years old, as is the ‘ancient–modern’ opposition, only that it did not previously have its accent on temporality.

2. Since the word ‘modern’ has become too vague, the ‘ancient–modern’ opposition has been replaced today by the conflict between generations. The opposition on which the psychology of generations is based can be summed up in the expression ‘different from’. Thus the beatniks were ‘different’ from well-brought-up young people. Everything they did was in opposition to what they had been told when they were little. ‘Go and wash your hands! Go and take a shower!’—they didn’t wash anymore. ‘Get a haircut! Can’t you see how long your hair is?’—they didn’t cut their hair anymore. ‘Tell the maid to iron your trousers!’—they didn’t wear ironed trousers anymore, and so on. 

Research has shown that all these beatniks, including those who rioted on university campuses, turned into decent people, with jobs in respectable companies, committed family men who cut their hair, wore ironed trousers etc.

The generation conflict seems to elude engagement in the temporal environment, and it is tempting to see the opposition as one between group solidarities created around certain ideals, beliefs, points of view, or behaviours, implying problems of ‘taste’ rather than of period. But it is not at all so. The generation is always fixed in a certain time and given a date. It cannot escape from time. Previously there was la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes; there were the ancients, who continued to uphold traditionalism, and there were the moderns. Then the generations began to impose themselves: we had the ‘forty-eighters’ (so called from the year 1848), and in France in our own century there was the ‘sixty-eight’ generation, the generation who threw lumps of tarmac at the police in the spring of 1968. Here in Romania, in literature, as far as I understand from the periodicals I read, each decade now has its own generation.

3. In the same way as with the spatial environment that belongs to us, so in the temporal environment in which we live, life unfolds in a predictable way. We live, in other words, with a certain temporal security. But here too, in the temporal environment as in the spatial, the foreign element may intrude: the happening, the event. 'An hour can bring what a year does not,’ goes a well-known saying. The event quite simply explodes against the background of the temporal environment. But the proportion of happening, of event, is dictated by the degree of solidity of the temporal environment. In a traditional, archaic temporal environment, any violence is an event. A common assault there is the subject of discussion for weeks on end, while in New York it passes unnoticed.

Thus if the temporal environment is well ‘sealed’ and things only repeat themselves, happenings are unlikely to occur: this is the place where nothing has happened (as in Sadoveanu’s novel1). In such a reiterative world, whatever happens as a deviation from repetition happens abruptly; it seems like an explosion and takes on huge proportions. In our world, on the other hand, men have to go to the moon for it to be an event on the scale of a knife attack among neighbours in some small village. It all depends on the solidity of the temporal environment. In New York, it is changing all the time. All sorts of new things keep appearing; nothing is predictable as it is in a small community, as it is, for example, in the provinces. Think what a solid temporal environment the citizens of Königsberg lived in when they saw Kant walking every day at the same time.

Intervening as it does, the happening is a sort of opening of time, or rather of the temporal environment. This time that, in the temporal environment, flows regularly, repetitively, and in a familiar manner, is interrupted when the happening breaks its way in. Time that is thus opened acquires another dimension—a vertical dimension in place of the horizontal one—and the present is turned into something overpowering. Not only in the sense of an intensification of the present moment, but also in the sense that time is forced open towards what may be dreadful in the temporal. This is when the feeling arises that anything can happen. The happening has the same degree of unheimlich, of ‘strange-terrible’ as the foreign has in the spatial environment. The temporal structure in which I generally live, one that is familiar to me, in which things are predictable, in which I can make plans and programmes and in which everything happens in order, accustoms me to a mild and gentle face of time.

All of us who have lived in the provinces are familiar with this face of time. When the happening intervenes, the face of time is changed. It takes on a quite different dimension, one you have not suspected up till now. It appears in your life in a quite different form, one that is completely unfamiliar: in the form of the extraordinary, the totally unusual.

And this is the end of my talk on ‘utter metaphysical banalities.’ I wanted to show that we are caught in a spatio-temporal environment exactly as in a trap. This means that our actions are not only limited: they also limit us. The environment is perhaps precisely this turning of our fundamental limitation back on ourselves, a turning back that results in the enclosure of our lives within limits that are no longer physical- natural, but spiritual. I wanted it to be understood somehow that philosophy is not something that deals with the problem of the infinite in the paralogisms of Kant’s pure reason. Oh no! Its place is right here in the immediate. In other words Mr Liiceanu’s ‘limit’ is not a matter of peratology.2 It needs to be thought hic et nunc. It is for this reason that you cannot live without doing philosophy. In a way, we can live without thinking about the infinite, but we cannot live without thinking about our trap. For the simple reason that we live in it. Philosophy is thinking about the trap in which we live. I agree, of course, that there are many ways out of this trap; the principal escape routes are religion, philosophy, science, and art. In the case of philosophy, I escape from the trap exactly to the extent that I want to be clear in my mind about it. You can, of course, live in this trap content that ‘they’ give you warmth and food, I mean without feeling any need for philosophy. But for me that is not a life that I can choose. No! I want to be clear about my world. And this is called doing philosophy.

1 The book referred to is Locul unde nu s-a întâmplat nimic (The place where nothing happened), 1933, by Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961), a well-known Romanian novelist.
2 See Gabriel Liiceanu’s chapter ‘The Notebooks from Underground’ in the present volume.

from the book The World We Live In by Alexandru Dragomir (auth.), Gabriel Liiceanu, Catalin Partenie (eds.)