The “human race” is mostly not human — i.e., not only numerically does the animal element predominate, but in a given sample of large numbers, the animal plane predominates. Examples: obviously outside the Western culture-area the animal plane dominates the human component in the “human race.” Let him who does not yet know this visit China, India, Africa, Islam. But in Europe itself, in any great city, for example, the greater part of the population is governed by animal needs and ideals, this IN FACT, but not in theory. In America, this is true also in theory.
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Each phase of life has its prime characteristic, and on each plane, each species of life has its special characteristic; among animals, the eagle’s EYE distinguishes him, the dog’s NOSE, the horse’s FLEET FOOT. What, however, is human? What is it that human beings have that no animal whatever has, no other form of life whatever? MIND is the prime characteristic of the human, but mind at its highest potential exists in vanishing few members of the “human race.”
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Life and death are not opposites, not polarized — Life and matter are the poles. Death is only through poetic derivation the opposite of life — in death, the living become matter, the principles of life, spirit, departs. The process of this occurring is called death, or in other words, Death is the last performance of Life.
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Life and spirit are identical.
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Superiority is an attempt; mediocrity is an accomplished fact.
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Philosophy in the 20th Century no longer has the obligation to present a system, but a picture.
Why is philosophy necessary at all in the 20th century, the age of Absolute Politics? Because even we children of machinery and statistics still have our proto-human metaphysical sense — we must fill in the background of our minds, however roughly, however superficially. For most men, this is no problem: the parents transmit their metaphysical notions to the children, and — the child is father to the man. How many men create their own world-outlook, independently of family and immediate environment? Quite factually, with no wish to exaggerate, I estimate one in a million in culture-populations, far less among savages, fellaheen, and barbarians.
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Freud is a fairly truthful picture of the usual man; so is Marx, so is Darwin. The common denominator of these three vile systems is the equality idea. All three of these systems are, in their unconscious origins, revolts against superiority, aristocracy, culture. Darwinism says: “You see, with all your pride, you are only an ape.” Marx says: “All you superior ones are merely richer, and thieves at that, and we shall now expropriate you, and you shall be our servants.” Freud said: “Even your proudest accomplishments are nothing but your sexual impulse.”
The three vile systems have absolutely no validity applied to superior men, higher men, creative men. BUT IT WAS AGAINST THESE THAT THE THREE SYSTEMS WERE DIRECTED. With Darwin, it was purely intellectual, but with Marx and Freud hatred and jealousy are the motive forces, and all the ponderous verbiage merely decks out their “inferiority complexes,” the smoldering resentment of inferiority. How Marx and Freud would have enjoyed the Nuremberg trial!
From the beginning Marxism and Freudianism were polemical systems, never “scientific” systems. They aimed, as did all those who used these vile doctrines, at leveling.
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Both Marx and Freud wanted to described that which they were unequal in terms of something they did understand. What is the imperative of Marx: get rich at the expense of the rich. Marx understood greed, therefore he made the whole world and its history into a sticky mass of greed. Freud’s system makes it obvious he was a monster of unspiritualized lust. If he had been gifted for love or erotic, Vienna would have had a Jewish Casanova. But love and erotic are both unknown to him. His lust is dark and animalistic, and dominated his nature utterly. Because it was coupled with impossibility of satisfaction, owing to his lack of money, position, and personal charm, it was utterly frustrated, and, like the cripple who make himself into a master chess-player, Freud smeared his unsatisfied lust over the whole world, and said “Look at this dirt, this filth — this is what you all are, even when you think you are so refined and spiritual.”
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To Marx, the world is a huge money-bag; to Freud it is a dung-heap; to Darwin a zoo.
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How different was the world of the author of Theologica Germanica! For him the world was an endless striving, a constant tension between the soul’s loneliness in the grey infinite and the soul’s warmth in the feeling of the Perfect, God. For him, the essential is the relationship of man to God, and that of man to man is so plainly a mere reflection of the first that he barely mentions it. And what was the Path of salvation of this man? Surely the most intense and dynamic religious imperative ever formulated: das Lassen der Ichheit, the abandonment of the very principle of Individuality and mystical union with God. This to be attained however, not like an India, by sitting still and refusing to live, but in the midst of active life.
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All theories and proofs of the soul’s immortality beg the question. The question: “What comes after Death?” already contains in the words “comes after” the idea of Life. Life is Time; the phrase “comes after” is also Time.
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It is a simple impossibility for the Principle of Individuality to assume or conceive its own termination. Every one of us believes instinctively in his own immortality, just as every atheist instinctively believes in God — all he does is bring a change upon names, and God becomes Nature, or something similar. But to assert in the 20th century that either God or immortality can be logically proved is stupidity; this is for the common people and for those minds which have remained stuck in the 17th century. To prove God, or soul-immortality is to insult them, doubly, for every such proof shows a weakening of the instinct belief. Reason KILLS instinct.
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The bitterest of all things is frustration. It is the denial of Life by Life. It is a victory of the outside over the inside, the victory of Accident over Destiny.
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There are degrees of frustration. Defeat is no frustration, provided one has been able to exert his powers to the utmost, to use himself up. Who can say Napoleon, or Hitler, were frustrated? The worst frustration — ask me, I know it — is LACK OF OPPORTUNITY.
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Leonardo Demetrius (Ms published 1891, Milan) used to say that there was no difference between the words and voice of the unlearned and ignorant and the sounds or noises from a belly full of superfluous wind. And he said, not without justice, that it seemed to him to make no difference from which part they emitted their voice, from the mouth or from below, since both were of the same value and substance.
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There are men who deserve to be called nothing else than passages for food, augmenters of filth, and fillers of privies, because nothing else in the world is effected through them, and they are without any virtue, since nothing is left of them but filled privies.
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Keyserling — America Set Free, page 135
Accidents and individual variation mean little. No defeat has every changed the destiny of a nation inwardly strong if it was not annihilated. Nor has any victory which was not founded on moral and intellectual superiority ever lasted.
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Goethe: Reverence, which no man brings into the world with him, is yet that upon which everything depends, if man is to become a man in every sense.
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Keyserling — op. cit., If a man meeting another man begins by thinking, “I am as good as he is and accordingly treats him with familiarity, he will never learn from him, even though the other be a god. On the other hand if reverence is the primal attitude even the greatest can learn, and always does learn even form the humblest.”
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Women are first woman and only then human beings; men are first human beings and then men.
Courtesy toward women: in Europe the respect of the strong for the weak; in America the respect of the inferior for the superior.
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Woe to the general who comes onto the battlefield with a system. Napoleon.
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Will, character, industry, and boldness have made me what I am.
The ambition to rule souls is the strongest of all passions.
Self-interest is only the key to commonplace transactions.
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The Americans are psychologically socialist; so are the aborigines of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. This means merely that within each individual the social impulses predominate over the individual impulses. In this environment, individualism is stamped out, and higher types become almost impossible, because a higher type can only be individualized, psychologically egoistic. This is true also of saints, all of whom were psychologically egoists, even though they were spiritually altruistic. In America, instinctive altruism predominates, but spiritual egoism.
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Prussian Socialism† is the opposite of American socialism. Prussian Socialism, arising as it does in a land and Culture of psychological individualism, absolutely requires an aristocracy to actualize it. An aristocracy is an expression of individualism. Thus Prussian Socialism encourages automatically the arising of higher individuals, since without them, there can be no Prussian Socialism, but only chaos. Prussian Socialism is spiritual socialism, not, like the American variety, psychological. In Prussia, Socialism is a value, a conscious ethic, an ideal, an organization-form, a means of accomplishment. In America it is unconscious, an inhibition, a negation, an inability to be individual, thus a denial of the human in man and an assertion of the herding animal in man.
† Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism (1919). The concept is derived from Spengler, and Yockey also refers to it as “spiritual Socialism” and Ethical Socialism.” It can be summed up in the word: Duty.
Source
https://counter-currents.com/2012/09/twentieth-century-metaphysics/
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