How Rabid Zionism Split the Libertarian World

 Like archaeologists uncovering layers of forgotten civilizations, the Block-Hoppe schism reveals that beneath every high-minded intellectual movement lies the bedrock of tribal identity, waiting to reassert itself when abstract principles collide with the eternal reality of us versus them.

The quiet corridors of libertarian academia echoed with a familiar tension. Beneath the polished language of universal principles, old loyalties and invisible borders stirred once more. What seemed like an argument over ideas was, at its core, a reckoning of identities no theory could contain.

The recent falling out between economist Walter Block and the Ludwig von Mises Institute was not a routine dispute over doctrine. It revealed something far deeper, a reminder that even among those who preach the supremacy of logic and liberty, human nature resists the purity of abstraction. Intellectual movements, however rational they may appear, remain vulnerable to the same ethnic and cultural divisions that have divided men for centuries.

Walter Edward Block embodied this paradox. He emerged from the intellectual heart of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, a world where fierce debate was a form of devotion. Born in 1941 to Abraham and Ruth Block, he began as a socialist idealist and evolved into one of the most uncompromising defenders of anarcho-capitalism.

Block’s conversion began with an encounter that would shape the trajectory of libertarian thought. Attending an Ayn Rand lecture as an undergraduate, followed by meetings with Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff, he eventually found his intellectual home under Murray Rothbard’s mentorship. This progression from Objectivism to Austrian economics positioned Block as one of the rising Jewish voices in the Austrian school.

His 1976 masterwork Defending the Undefendable established Block as libertarianism’s most provocative voice, willing to defend society’s most marginal figures—prostitutes, blackmailers, and drug dealers— through the rigorous application of property rights theory. The book’s central thesis separated economic analysis from moral judgment, creating a framework that embodied Block’s Jewish character of challenging gentile norms wherever possible.

With over two dozen books and more than 700 scholarly articles, Block constructed an intellectual empire spanning road privatization, water capitalism, and space economics. His positions at institutions such as Baruch College, Holy Cross, and Loyola University New Orleans provided platforms for developing anarcho-capitalism while maintaining respectability within academic circles. Yet beneath this impressive scholarly output lay dormant ethnic loyalties that would eventually surface with explosive consequences.

The October Revelation: Block’s Zionist Awakening

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks triggered an ethnic awakening within Block that betrayed his libertarian commitment to non-aggression and a non-interventionist foreign policy. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed he penned with Argentine economist Alan Futerman “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” Block revealed convictions that had apparently been gestating beneath his libertarian exterior for years.

His call for “total, unrestrictive support” for Israel represented a complete abandonment of libertarian non-interventionism. Block argued that “Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were,” explicitly comparing the conflict to World War II’s total war paradigm. This was not merely policy disagreement but a fundamental rejection of the non-aggression principle that forms libertarianism’s cornerstone.

More dramatically, Block’s “Open Letter to the Children of Gaza” revealed depths of ethnic passion that stunned even his closest associates. Addressing Palestinian children directly, he declared that “your parents launched a despicable, unwarranted attack on October 7” while conveniently overlooking the long history of Jewish expropriation of Palestinian lands dating back to the 1880s—a campaign of extermination that the United States government has fully endorsed through its ongoing flow of military aid, economic support, and diplomatic cover. And of course, he didn’t mention Israel’s oppressive control over Gaza—making Gaza into an open-air prison. Who could live like that?

These positions revealed Block not as a consistent libertarian applying universal principles, but as a Jewish intellectual whose ethnic solidarity ultimately trumped philosophical commitments when forced to choose between abstract theory and tribal loyalty.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Libertarian Contrarian Who Stood Up to Block
Standing in stark opposition to Block’s ethnic particularism was Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German-born philosopher whose contrarian positions place him at odds with virtually every aspect of 20th-century political consensus. Hoppe’s intellectual journey from German academia to American libertarianism produced the most radical critique of democratic governance within the movement, making him perhaps libertarianism’s most polemical voice.

Block’s Wall Street Journal essay, coupled with his longer-running claim that Jewish homesteading and inheritance justify Israel’s territorial rights, put him sharply at odds with libertarians who ground foreign-policy ethics in the non-aggression principle (NAP).

Hoppe answered with a public severing of ties. In his “Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” he charged that Block had revealed himself as “an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster” and that the stance amounted to “a complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle.” Hoppe’s critique went beyond rhetoric. He proclaimed that Block’s position endorsed collective guilt and “indiscriminate slaughter of innocents,” abandoning methodological individualism.

Institutionally, the fallout was swift and decisive. By 2024, Block was no longer listed as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and access to much of his archival writing on affiliated platforms was curtailed. Although not fired in a formal employment sense, his long association with the Institute had effectively ended. Block, for his part, framed his stance as consistent with libertarian property theory and Jewish tradition.

Rather than a purely ideological statement, Block’s pro-Zionist outburst appears to mark an ethnic awakening akin to the one Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg described, wherein the Six-Day War “united American Jews with deep Jewish commitments as they have never been united before, and … evoked such commitments in many Jews who previously seemed untouched by them.”

Hoppe’s sharp rebuke of Block forms only a single episode in a longer saga of intellectual defiance that has rendered him a lightning rod even within libertarian ranks. His 2001 work Democracy: The God That Failed articulates a systematic challenge to democratic legitimacy that extends far beyond typical libertarian anti-statism. Rather than viewing democracy as the least objectionable form of government, Hoppe argues that democratic institutions actively accelerate civilizational decline. His preference for monarchy over democracy places him in direct opposition to fundamental assumptions underlying both liberal and conservative political thought.

Some of Hoppe’s most controversial contributions to libertarian thought also concern his idea of “covenant communities” structured around the notion of “physical removal.” These entities, as he conceives them, would claim an absolute prerogative to exclude those considered misaligned with their norms, effectively transforming property rights into instruments of communal self-definition.

Writing in Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe argues that maintaining libertarian social order requires active exclusion of ideological opponents. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society,” he declares, extending this principle to “advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism.”

Similarly, Hoppe has stirred the pot on the immigration question in contrast to Jewish libertarians like Block who are notorious open borders boosters. Despite describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist who favors abolishing the nation-state, Hoppe supports immigration restrictions, arguing that unlimited immigration constitutes forced integration that violates native peoples’ rights.

The Jewish Intellectual Foundation of Libertarianism

Hoppe’s divergence on immigration highlights how libertarianism’s internal debates often mirror the worldviews of its founding intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and profoundly shaped the movement’s philosophical trajectory.

It’s no secret that libertarian movement’s development has been profoundly shaped by Jewish intellectual leadership. This pattern extends from the movement’s Austrian School foundations through its contemporary institutional structure.

Ludwig von Mises, whose Austrian School economics provided libertarianism’s theoretical foundation, was born to a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. His development of praxeology and systematic critique of socialist economics established the intellectual framework that would influence generations of libertarian scholars. Murray Rothbard, perhaps the most influential libertarian theorist of the 20th century, was born to Jewish parents and founded anarcho-capitalism while establishing the Mises Institute. Curiously, Rothbard had more of a populist turn toward the end of his life, where he advocated for a strategy of “right-wing populism” that endorsed the presidential campaigns of David Duke and Pat Buchanan.

Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize-winning advocacy for free markets brought libertarian ideas to mainstream public attention through works like “Free to Choose,” while his policy proposals for school vouchers and a negative income tax brought libertarian policies into DC think tank circles. Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in Russia, developed the philosophy of Objectivism and wrote novels that profoundly shaped libertarian culture despite her rejection of the libertarian label.

In addition to promoting capitalism, Rand and Friedman expressed strong support for Israel, revealing how ethnic identity influences supposedly universal philosophical positions.  Rand’s support for Israel proved particularly significant given her influence on free-market thought in the United States. In her 1974 address to West Point cadets, Rand declared her support for “Israel against the Arabs for the very same reason” that she supported American settlers against Native Americans. She argued that “Israel is being attacked for being civilized, and being specifically a technological society” while describing Arabs as representing “centuries of brute stagnation and superstition.”

Rand’s position that America should “give all the help possible to Israel” including “technology and military weapons” represented a clear departure from libertarian non-interventionism that often rejects both direct military intervention and the provision of military aid to belligerents in foreign conflicts. Her justification that Israel represented “the progress of Man’s mind” against “primitive” Arab culture revealed how ethnic solidarity could override Rand’s purported commitment to individual liberties and anti-collectivist thought.

Unsurprisingly, Friedman was also an admirer of the Jewish state. When Friedman visited Israel in 1977, shortly after Menachem Begin’s election, he was invited to advise the new Likud government as it sought to move away from more dirigiste economic policies. His admiration for Israel’s early economic management predated this visit. And like most American Jews, Friedman would look the other way at the plight of the Palestinians facing constant Jewish aggression. Writing in his 1969 Newsweek column, “Invisible Occupation,” Friedman observed during a trip to the West Bank, “Much to my surprise, there was almost no sign of a military presence. … I had no feeling whatsoever of being in occupied territory.” He commended Israel’s “wise policy that involved almost literal laissez-faire in the economic sphere,” concluding that “to a casual observer, the area appears to be prospering.”

With regards to the viability of the Israeli state, Friedman also maintained that “Israel would hardly have been viable without the massive contributions that it received from world Jewry… primarily from the U.S.,” arguing that democratic capitalism, not socialism, made such aid possible: “If these donor countries had been socialist, such support would not have been possible.” Decades later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would adopt Friedman’s free-market ideas as the intellectual blueprint for his own reforms. Netanyahu frequently invoked Friedman, saying: “I am very appreciative of the fact that someone I have the utmost respect for, Milton Friedman, said that, when I was finance minister, that finally Israel has a finance minister that believes in and promotes free market ideas.” In 2005, Friedman reciprocated the admiration, praising Netanyahu for recognizing that Israel had long been held back by “rigid government intervention… socialist policies… and unnecessary state ownership of critical means of production.”

*   *   *

The libertarian movement’s significant Jewish intellectual leadership, combined with theoretical commitment to universalist principles, creates vulnerabilities to ethnic tensions when specific policy questions force choices between abstract philosophy and ethnic solidarity. Regardless of what one thinks about libertarianism, the case of Walter Block’s removal from the Mises Institute highlights the inherently adversarial nature of Jews and non-Jews in political movements. The Block-Hoppe conflict reveals challenges facing intellectual movements with significant Jewish participation. While such movements have witnessed Jewish intellectual contributions, they also become vulnerable to inevitable tensions that arise when Jewish ethnic interests conflict with movement ideology. Block’s passionate Zionism ultimately proved incompatible with libertarian anti-interventionism, leading him to walk away from the intellectual community he had contributed to for over four decades.

Like archaeologists uncovering layers of forgotten civilizations, the Block-Hoppe schism reveals that beneath every high-minded intellectual movement lies the bedrock of tribal identity, waiting to reassert itself when abstract principles collide with the eternal reality of us versus them.

Jose Nino →

Opening Up Frontiers

(in which we discover that the inhabitants of Formosa get around on hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses)

After having studied the different types of nonjourney and some of the situations which might lead us to talk about them, the time has come to put forward some suggestions on how to acquit ourselves in such situations, which as we’ve seen are more frequent than you might think, and which each of us risks having to face at some moment or other.

Seldom having traveled myself and already having found myself having to talk about imaginary places on many an occasion, I am not badly placed to offer some tips to those who fear being confronted with the necessity of having to reinvent space without being contradicted. And we can see that far from falling victim to the situation, it is possible to profit from it and gain a better knowledge of the places in question and of oneself.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an inhabitant of Formosa1 called George Psalmanazar appeared in London and was an immediate sensation, rapidly gaining huge popularity.

He said he had been kidnapped from his island by Jesuits who had taken him to France and tried in vain to convert him to Catholicism. He spoke both Latin and English, and the religious persecution he’d suffered immediately won the hearts of the Anglican community in London, who took him under their wing.

Psalmanazar took it upon himself to promote his native island, largely ignored in Europe. He soon became very successful, partly because of his original style of dress—he wore exotic, baroque outfits—and his diet—he ate only raw meat—but above all for the novel information he was able to supply on his home country. His stories were mind-blowing.

His reputation grew even more after the 1704 publication of his work An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan. It had been preceded by an autobiography, which had swiftly been reprinted and was translated into several languages. The success of the book, which was due to the revelations it contained, led the author to give lectures to learned societies and increased his fame even more, not only in England but across Europe.

It is true that Psalmanazar furnished a considerable amount of firsthand information on this country about which little was known at the time. He made it known that Formosa, whose capital was Xternetsa, was a dependency of Japan and not of China, as had been incorrectly believed for a long time, and that the ruling regime was a monarchy.

Psalmanazar also provided some original insights into the country’s customs. It was thanks to him that we learned that the inhabitants wore clothes that accurately reflected their social rank, that they were polygamous, that they ate their wives if they discovered them to be unfaithful and that human sacrifice was practiced regularly.2We also discovered through Psalmanazar that the inhabitants of Formosa mainly ate snakes, that they lived underground in circular houses, and they didn’t only use horses and camels to get around but also rode hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.3

But Psalmanazar didn’t content himself with providing precious information on life and customs on Formosa. He also allowed us to study its language.4 Not only was he a fluent speaker, but he could also write it without difficulty. He explained that it used twenty characters, different from the characters used in China or Japan; it had six distinct tenses; and variations were made by using auxiliaries and tones.

In order to improve our knowledge, he was able to provide a translation of the Lord’s Prayer which began with the words, “Amy Pornio dan chin Ornio vicy, Gnayjorhe sai Lory, Eyfodere sai Bagalin, jorhe sai domino apo chin Ornio.” Formosa’s language aroused keen interest among intellectuals, including Leibniz, and because of its rigor, continued to be studied by linguists decades after Psalmanazar’s fraud had been brought to light.

Of course Psalmanazar didn’t come from Formosa. Born in France, he had adopted this ersatz identity after first having passed for an Irish pilgrim in order to travel around Europe more freely. He was happy to explain himself in his Memoirs, a book in which he recounted in detail the circumstances that led him to create this fiction.

Despite the success of his deception and the lack of criticism he received, it seems that Psalmanazar ended up feeling guilty about the way he had made fun of the English intelligentsia. While he didn’t denounce himself during his lifetime, he dedicated himself to the study of theology and became a specialist in issues related to the Hebrew religion. It might be assumed that this was what led him to participate in a dictionary of religions for which he provided the entry on Formosa in which he criticized Psalmanazar’s trickery, writing of himself in the third person.

When you think of the number of improbabilities with which he embellished his stories, it is astonishing that Psalmanazar was able to construct this pretense and maintain it for several years. For example, there was the number of children he claimed were sacrificed each year on Formosa—twenty thousand—which led certain skeptical spirits to remark that at that rate, the population would rapidly become extinct.

Moreover, even if few people visited the island at that time, some Europeans did go there and their accounts were radically different from Psalmanazar’s, who, with great composure, replied that they had only visited part of the island, never having ventured beyond the west coast.

The most surprising thing was that Psalmanazar, who had pale skin and blond hair, didn’t correspond in the slightest to the picture one might have had of an inhabitant of Formosa. But the majority of his interlocutors didn’t seem surprised by this—at that time, the concept of race wasn’t decisive in the perception of otherness. And Psalmanazar explained eruditely that members of the intellectual class on the island were pale skinned because they lived underground.

How did Psalmanazar go about fooling so many people? The first reason he managed to convince so many intellectuals and for such a long period of time was the verisimilitude of his description of Formosa and his own personal investment in the simulation.

With Psalmanazar, we rediscover the play of intertwined places that I noted earlier. For the real country of Formosa, which was difficult to visit at the time, Psalmanazar substituted an imaginary country that he knew how to reinvent in every aspect without ever having been there. But this substitution doesn’t become intelligible until we take into account what I proposed calling the “inner landscape” of the author and the eternally lost “original place” that he never stops searching for in vain through all of his confabulations, just like every one of us.

It is notable in fact that Psalmanazar, by engaging in this deception, isn’t only looking for the tangible social benefits he might gain from describing a virtually unknown land; he also attempts to construct a true romance of his origins by inventing for himself a new identity and a new history, going so far as to develop a new language whose rules he had better know, given that he is the only person in the world who can speak it.

To this end, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is a compromise formation in the Freudian sense, like a dream or a delirium. Psalmanazar recreates himself through an imaginary Formosa that allows him to deploy an infantile fantasy of omnipotence—just as Rosie Ruiz and Jean-Claude Romand did in their own ways. He invents his own origins and those of everyone close to him and creates a comprehensive family saga of which he is the hero.

Psalmanazar’s second quality is the possession of a fertile imagination. In this, he fits into the tradition of authors like Marco Polo and Margaret Mead’s female informants—like them he is capable of inventing a plethora of picturesque elements that capture and retain the public’s attention.

It is impossible to hope to speak with any conviction of places you haven’t been to without a vivid imagination. The capacity to dream and to make others dream is essential to anyone wanting to describe an unknown place and hoping to capture the imagination of their readers and listeners.5

This imagination is deployed in several ways that appear contradictory. First of all, Psalmanazar invents a country to suit his taste, gives it a political system, an economy, a language, customs, and even endows it with a unique animal husbandry. What he constructs is a complete world, capable of functioning, like the imaginary realms that populate travelogues and children’s games.

This imagination relies upon a strong sense of faux realism, or what one might call true detail. Like Chateaubriand, with his detailed descriptions of the flowers and insects of parts of America that he took good care not to explore, Psalmanazar nurtures the tiniest elements of his stories to create a credible illusion of an alternative reality.

But, as specific as it is, the place invented by Psalmanazar cannot clearly be situated in any particular locality. Although it has a determined geographical location, it could just as easily be found anywhere at all. The truth is that Psalmanazar combined several travelogues from different continents, and his montage contains elements from the Aztec and Inca civilizations—starting with human sacrifices—as well as from the Japanese and Chinese.6

It is no trivial matter that Psalmanazar transports hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses to Formosa, anticipating Henri Michaux’s gesture when he added camels to his description of Honfleur.7 Transporting animals or objects from one country to another, prevalent in the accounts of armchair travelers, shows that there is a different kind of space here than the one that prevails in the real world, a place that is much more flexible and mobile than the one in which we operate on a daily basis.

This apparently contradictory mixture of precision and ambiguity is essential to the invention of a haven of refuge conducive to the imagination. The details guarantee the existence of the imaginary place and the veracity of the account; the ambiguity allows the reader or listener to project themselves individually according to a particular hook offered by the account and to find a singular space that chimes with their own inner landscape.

But personal investment and imagination would not have been sufficient to explain—any more than in Margaret Mead’s case—that such an absurd fiction could be sustained for so long and accepted by the scientific community like a realist document. A model of individual compromise, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is also, when you take a closer look, a model of collective compromise.

If you think about it, the description of Formosa is just as much a plural work as a singular fiction. As we have already seen, the conversations we can have about places we don’t know do not only concern the places and ourselves, but also involve the people we are addressing ourselves to, often benevolent accomplices.

Michael Keevak showed in the book he wrote on Psalmanazar that the latter’s success can be explained by the fact that Psalmanazar addressed a disquisition to the English that they wanted to hear, particularly in terms of religion, and offered them an image of themselves that they found recognizable:

Psalmanazar, in short, wasn’t just the perfect response to the start of a period of fascination for exotic chinoiseries, but also the solution to a growing desire amongst Europeans to meet exotic specimens who weren’t overly exotic: as Linda Lomeris wrote, foreigners should function as a kind of mirror of the subjective preoccupations of Europeans. Psalmanazar might have been a stranger who ate raw meat and spoke a completely foreign language, but he didn’t present the slightest menace. After all, he was a noble savage, he was Anglican, and (in particular?) he was white.8

Psalmanazar’s Formosa functioned as a collective compromise in the sense that it allowed an entire community—who weren’t necessarily, on the unconscious plane, as fooled as they led us to believe—to think about their relationship to a remote foreign country. As such, this fiction allowed real psychological work to be done, in the same way that Margaret Mead’s imaginary Samoans offered Americans a transitional place onto which they could project their unconscious desires and be a step ahead in thinking about sexual liberation.

Hence the importance of the spatial jamming that Psalmanazar engages in by presenting a place that is just as specific as it is unsuitable. His rewriting of Formosa is all the more liable to please a vast audience because it isn’t too limited geographically, nor too personal in terms of fantasy, but caters to all. In doing this, he places Formosa in the universalized space of a collective mythology in which numerous readers can find themselves.

The bric-a-brac country that Psalmanazar constructs with the support of his benevolent audience shows that, like numerous armchair travelers, he doesn’t play with the real geographical place addressed by science, but with an aberrant space that is the same as the one literature invents to describe the world.

This aberrant space is resolutely atopic—that is to say, it doesn’t experience the limitations that organize the geography of the real world. It possesses great mobility, like dreams do, dominated as it is in the same way by the primary processes of the unconscious. It is possible to move at full speed from one location to another as Rosie Ruiz did, as though no distance was insurmountable.

It establishes communication between geographical places that are not adjacent to each other in the real world but separated by large distances by renewing the frontiers. It is therefore not surprising that in this space, animals are able to move without difficulty from one continent to another and settle in new territories where one would never come across them normally.

And it is equally likely that, profiting from the mobility of the literary space and this opening of frontiers that disrupts circulation in the real world, the characters of certain works of fiction profit from this by passing from one text to another and settling in a world that seems more hospitable to them.

If we don’t take into account the atopic character of literary space, we cannot hope to understand the extent to which it involves a different space from that of the real world, nor grasp the multitude of discrete events that occur, sometimes without even the writer’s knowledge, and which merit our attention.

Paying attention to the atopic character of literary space is essential when describing places you haven’t been to, since this atopia and the new traffic rules it establishes between worlds encourage a generous opening up of the field of descriptions by no longer limiting them to a single evoked area.

In fact, it encourages supplementing described areas with elements borrowed from other real or imaginary worlds as Psalmanazar does, elements that it might be desirable to have in the story in order to make the descriptions of the place one hopes to have others experience more sensitive and relevant.

1.    UP–

2.    Psalmanazar’s book, published in 1704, was reissued in 1705 in a new version that accentuated the cruelty of Formosa’s morals. See the analysis of the two versions in Richard M. Swiderski’s The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 66.

3.    See Swiderski on Formosa’s abundant fauna, which included lions, bears and wolves (ibid., 75).

4.    For a detailed analysis of the language of Psalmanazar, see Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 61.

5.    And Psalmanazar does it with enough conviction to win the support of his interlocutors. In his Memoirs, he tells how he had resolved that, once having made an assertion, he would never to go back on it, whatever unlikelihood might be revealed or contradiction made by witnesses (George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa. Written by Himself in Order to Be Published after His Death (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Ecco Print Editions, Dublin, 2011), 141.

6.    Formosa’s language is a montage, too. Its articles (oi hic, ey haec, ai hoc) are inspired by Latin (see Swiderski, 75).

7.    “In the past I had too much respect for nature. I placed myself in front of things and landscapes and I let them be.

That’s over, from now on I’m going to intervene.

I was at Honfleur and I was bored. So I resolutely added some camels. It wasn’t really called for. Never mind, it was my idea. Besides, I went about this with the greatest prudence. I introduced them first of all on very busy days, on Saturdays in the marketplace.” Henri Michaux, La nuit remue (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1967). English translation by Michele Hutchison.

8.    Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 53.

Pierre Bayard

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Varapanyo's good friend's

 There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters. NGD

[What about the man who admits only disciples?😊]

Half the Holy Life

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was dwelling among the Sakyans where there was a town of the Sakyans named Nāgaraka. Then the Venerable Ānanda approached the Blessed One. Having approached, he paid homage to the Blessed One, sat down to one side, and said to him:

“Venerable sir, this is half of the holy life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.”

“Not so, Ānanda! Not so, Ānanda! This is the entire holy life, Ānanda, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. When a bhikkhu has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path.

“And how, Ānanda, does a bhikkhu who has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path? Here, Ānanda, a bhikkhu develops right view, which is based upon seclusion, dispassion, and cessation, maturing in release. He develops right intention … right speech ... right action ... right livelihood … right effort … right mindfulness … right concentration, which is based upon seclusion, dispassion, and cessation, maturing in release. It is in this way, Ānanda, that a bhikkhu who has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, develops and cultivates the Noble Eightfold Path.

“By the following method too, Ānanda, it may be understood how the entire holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship: by relying upon me as a good friend, Ānanda, beings subject to birth are freed from birth; beings subject to aging are freed from aging; beings subject to death are freed from death; beings subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair are freed from sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair. By this method, Ānanda, it may be understood how the entire holy life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.” SN 45: 2

“Bhikkhus, as to external factors, I do not see any other factor that is so helpful for the arising of the seven factors of enlightenment as this: good friendship. When a bhikkhu has a good friend, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the seven factors of enlightenment.” (...)
SN 46: 50

“Bhikkhus, I do not see even a single thing that so causes unarisen wholesome qualities to arise and arisen unwholesome qualities to decline as good friendship. For one with good friends, unarisen wholesome qualities arise and arisen unwholesome qualities decline.”
AN 1:7

“Then, Māgandiya, associate with true men. When you associate with true men, you will hear the true Dhamma. When you hear the true Dhamma, you will practise in accordance with the true Dhamma. When you practise in accordance with the true Dhamma, you will know and see for yourself thus: ‘These are diseases, tumours, and darts; but here these diseases, tumours, and darts cease without remainder. With the cessation of my clinging comes cessation of being; with the cessation of being, cessation of birth; with the cessation of birth, ageing and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair cease. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.’” MN 75

***
My friends.

1) Suttas as the true representation of the Lord Buddha words.

Nanavira Thera:
It was, and is, my attitude towards the Suttas that, if I find anything in them that is against my own view, they are right, and I am wrong. I have no reason to regret having adopted this attitude. Regarding the Commentaries, on the other hand, the boot is on the other leg—if this does not sound too incongruous.)

Monks, a faithful disciple, having scrutinized the Teacher’s advice, proceeds in accordance with this: “The Auspicious One is the teacher, I am the disciple. The Auspicious One knows. I do not know. MN 70

With the cessation of my clinging comes cessation of being (see↑) The most incredible conspiracy theory cannot be compare with the Dhamma, which undermine the puthujjana's very existence, the thing which, according to Descartes cannot be doubt. But:

This ‘sacrifice of the intellect’, which Saint Ignatius Loyola says is ‘so pleasing unto God’, is required also, incidentally, of the quantum physicist: he has to subscribe to the proposition that there are numbers that are not quantities. It is not, however, required of the follower of the Buddha, whose saddhā—trust or confidence—is something like that of the patient in his doctor. The patient accepts on trust that the doctor knows more about his complaint than he himself does, and he submits himself to the doctor’s treatment. So far, indeed, from saying to his disciples ‘You must accept on trust from me that black is white’, the Buddha actually says, in effect, ‘What you must accept on trust from me is that you yourselves are unwittingly assum-ing that black is white, and that this is the reason for your suffering’.

A man with avijjā, practising reflexion, may identify ‘self’ with both reflexive and immediate experience, or with reflexive experience alone, or with immediate experience alone. He does not conclude that neither is ‘self’, and the reason is clear: it is not possible to get outside avijjā by means of reflexion alone; for however much a man may ‘step back’ from himself to observe himself he cannot help taking avijjā with him. There is just as much avijjā in the self-observer as there is in the self-observed. And this is the very reason why avijjā is so stable in spite of its being sankhatā. Simply by reflexion the puthujjana can never observe avijjā and at the same time recognize it as avijjā; for in reflexion avijjā is the Judge as well as the Accused, and the verdict is always ‘Not Guilty’. In order to put an end to avijjā, which is a matter of recognizing avijjā as avijjā, it is necessary to accept on trust from the Buddha a Teaching that contradicts the direct evidence of the puthujjana’s reflexion. This is why the Dhamma is patisotagamī (Majjhima iii,6 <M.i,168>), or ‘going against the stream’. The Dhamma gives the puthujjana the outside view of avijjā, which is inherently unobtainable for him by unaided reflexion (in the ariyasāvaka this view has, as it were, ‘taken’ like a graft, and is perpetually available).

Nanavira Thera

Here is Camus on Heidegger; perhaps it says more about Camus than Heidegger—and also something about me, since I trouble to quote it.

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.” This profes-sor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that “the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself.” His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his “pure Reason.” This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that “the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish.” This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and “existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness.” It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence “to return from its loss in the anonymous They .” For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins. (Myth, p. 18)

Clearing the Path is a work book. Its purpose is to help the user to acquire a point of view that is different from his customary frame of reference, and also more satisfactory . Necessarily, an early step in accomplishing this change is the abandonment of specific mistaken notions about the Buddha’s Teaching and about the nature of experience. More fundamentally, however, this initial change in specific views may lead to a change in point-of-view, whereby one comes to understand experience from a perspective different from what one has been accustomed to—a perspective in which intention, responsibility, context, conditionality, hunger, and related terms will describe the fun-damental categories of one’s perception and thinking—and which can lead, eventually, to a fundamental insight about the nature of personal existence.

Such a change of attitude seldom occurs without considerable prior development, and this book is intended to serve as a tool in fostering that development. As such it is meant to be lived with rather than read and set aside. These notions are developed more fully throughout Clearing the Path but it is as well that they be stated concisely at the outset so that there need be no mistaking who this book is for: those who find their present mode of existence unsatisfactory and who sense, however vaguely, the need to make a fundamental change not in the world but in themselves.

Clearing the Path has its genesis in Notes on Dhamma (1960-1963), printed privately by the Honourable Lionel Samaratunga (Dewalepola, Ceylon, 1963—see L. 63). Following production of that volume the author amended and added to the text, leaving at his death an expanded typescript, indicated by the titular expansion of its dates, (1960-1965). Together with the Ven. Nanavira Thera’s type-script was a cover letter:

To the Prospective Publisher:

The author wishes to make it clear that Notes on Dhamma is not a work of scholarship: an Orientalist (in casu a Pali scholar), if he is no more than that, is unlikely to make very much of the book, whose general tone, besides, he may not altogether approve. Though it does not set out to be learned in a scholarly sense, the book is very far from being a popular exposition of Buddhism. It is perhaps best regarded as a philosophical commentary on the essential teachings of the Pali Suttas, and presenting fairly considerable difficulties, particularly to ‘objective’ or positivist thinkers, who will not easily see what the book is driving at. From a publisher’s point of view this is no doubt unfortunate; but the fact is that the teaching contained in the Pali Suttas is (to say the least) a great deal more difficult—even if also a great deal more rewarding—than is commonly supposed; and the author is not of the opinion that Notes on Dhamma makes the subject more difficult than it actually is.

The difficulties referred to in this cover letter gave rise to extensive correspondence between the Ven. Nanavira and various laypeople who sought clarification and expansion of both specific points and general attitudes and methods of inquiry . The author devoted considerable energy to this correspondence: some letters run to five thousand words, and three drafts was not uncommon. From one point of view the Ven. Nanavira's letters may be seen as belonging to the epistolary tradition, a tradition refined in an earlier era when much serious philosophical and literary discussion was conducted on a personal basis within a small circle of thinkers. On another view many of the letters can be regarded as thinly disguised essays in a wholly modern tradition. Indeed, one of these letters (L. 2) was published some years ago (in the ‘Bodhi Leaf’ series of the Buddhist Publication Society), stripped of its salutation and a few personal remarks, as just such an essay. The author himself offers a third view of the letters in remarking that at least those letters which contain direct discussion of Dhamma points ‘are, in a sense, something of a commentary on the Notes’ (L. 53).

In this perspective the letters can be seen as both expansions and clarifications of the more formal discussions in the Notes. Those who find the mode of thought of the Notes initially forbidding might profitably regard the letters as a useful channel of entry.

Nanamoli Thera

I seem to have lived my life in three modes: up till the outbreak of war in 1939 I lived it in a very pleasant and mainly graceful rock-pool. The financial insecurity beginning in 1937 and the outbreak of war in 1939 silted the pool up. 1939–1948 was lived in the midst of History: Anti-aircraft volunteer gunner to G.S.O. III, I.B. in Caserta, and afterwards Assistant head of the B.B.C. Italian section at Bush House. From then on it has been lived as an observer, withdrawn and watching. (Nov. 56)

I shall never be able to compose my biography: but let no one else have the presumption to do so; for this would amount to theft. (Nov. 56)
Don’t worry, no one will think of it. (Nov. 57)

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women actors on it” says Shakespeare. But actually only the men and women in the public gaze are actors on it. I, for instance, whom—and this I hold one of my greatest blessings while it is so—the public does not gaze on, am not an actor, but only a scene-shifter: the stage is curtained when I and those like me move on it.
(Addition:) Or that is how I should like it to be always. (Jan. 58)

People seem to approach religion for one of two main reasons or for both mixed together: They are moved either by a wish to discover truth (leaving that vague word vague here) or by a need to find justification for a predilection. Of the first, an outstanding example is, perhaps Kierkegaard. The second is far the more common. In myself I find elements of both. Perhaps the two merge with the incompatibility of two lines that meet at right-angles, and from the meeting-point some set out in one direction and some in the other. (Jul. 59)

Modern analogy: just as the bombardment by neutral mesons is needed to split the atom’s nucleus which is held together by negative and positive charges, as we are told—so perhaps equanimity is the projectile with which to split the individual held together by the charges, of hate and lust. (Jan. 58)

There are certain aspects of truth that one can only discover in oneself; if one is told of them, one will certainly, and in the very nature of existence itself, reject them absolutely. But perhaps they can be shared by those who have discovered them individually for themselves, and perhaps those who have not discovered them can be aided indirectly to discover them for themselves. (The use of the word “truth” here is in the sense of desirability of discovery). (Mar. 58)

“Don’t build yourself an ivory tower” the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain-shielding it from the blows of ‘reality’ so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding ‘me’ from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don’t they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom? (Jun. 59)

Words distort thinking, thoughts distort perceiving, percepts distort acting, acts distort being, [beings distort naught, that I may be the acting of the perceiving of the thinking of the wording of the question ‘who?’.] (Aug. 59)

It is not memory but forgetting which is the positive function in maintaining existence. It is partial forgetting that conceals the contradictions and makes what is not forgotten, to be possible. (Nov. 59)

Existence described as a system of null-functions activated into partial non-nullity by ignorance. (Jan. 60)

From Theravada tradition:

Ajhan Sumedho:

This investigation of time, I think, is a very important reflection because we are a time-bound society; we really believe in the reality of it. We believe our age, the sense of history and the continuity of time. And we believe we have been born; we have this sense of going through the years and yet in some way remaining the same. We just assume that we are the same person throughout this span which we call ‘our lifetime’.

In awareness, however, we realize there is no such thing as time, and that all we do is project onto the experience of now. That is what we call ‘time’. In reality there is only right now, only the here and now. This is where consciousness operates. Breathing is happening right now; feeling through the body and the senses is now; the thinking process is now. We can remember what we were thinking yesterday, but even that is a thought, a memory in the present.

Breaking down the assumptions about oneself and the cultural habits one has in regard to time I found very helpful in learning to trust in awareness and recognizing that liberation is now, freedom is now, nibbana is now ― rather than having this perception of practising now in order to attain liberation in the future. The point is, we create the perception of past, present and future, birth and death, beginning and ending. First we create the words to describe experience, and then we become attached to those words, often not noticing the reality behind them. So we create ourselves as personalities, and we create England, and we create our positions in society. When Christians ask whether we have a Creator-God in Buddhism, we say, ‘Well, not exactly, because “I” am the creator of the world,’ which can sound like a kind of megalomania. If one is claiming to be the ultimate creator, that is a sign of madness, isn’t it? But in terms of the reality of this moment, we are the ones who are creating; we are projecting our habits and feelings onto this moment. So, in terms of reflection in awareness, we call this ‘the creator of the world’.

Ajhan Chah

A devout, elderly village lady from a nearby province came on a pilgrimage to Wat Ba Pong. She told Achaan Chah she could stay only a short time, as she had to return to take care of her great grandchildren, and since she was an old lady, she asked if he could please give her a brief Dharma talk.

He replied with great force, “Hey, listen. There's no one here, just this. No owner, no one to be old, to be young, to be good or bad, weak or strong. Just this, that's all; various elements of nature playing themselves out, all empty. No one born and no one to die. Those who speak of death are speaking the language of ignorant children. In the language of the heart, of Dharma, there's no such thing.

“When we carry a burden, it's heavy. When there's no one to carry it, there's not a problem in the world. Do not look for good or bad or for anything at all. Do not be anything. There's nothing more; just this.”

A visiting Zen student asked Achaan Chah, “How old are you? Do you live here all year round?”
“I live nowhere,” he replied. “There is no place you can find me. I have no age. To have age, you must exist, and to think you exist is already a problem. Don't make problems; then the world has none either. Don't make a self. There's nothing more to say.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

I only say that to find the immutable and blissful you must give up your hold on the mutable and painful. You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the ‘I’ is not.

Why do you worry about the world before taking care of yourself? You want to save the world, don't you? Can you save the world before saving yourself? And what means being saved? Saved from what? From illusion. Salvation is to see things as they are.

Your mind projects a structure and you identify yourself with it. It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfilment. Even a small desire can start a long line of action; what about a strong desire? Desire can produce a universe; its powers are miraculous. Just as a small matchstick can set a huge forest on fire, so does a desire light the fires of manifestation. The very purpose of creation is the fulfilment of desire. The desire may be noble, or ignoble, space (akash) is neutral — one can fill it with what one likes: You must be very careful as to what you desire. And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires. You can only teach them to have right desires so that they may rise above them and be free from the urge to create and recreate worlds of desires, abodes of pain and pleasure.

Q: Is there no salvation for the world?
M: Which world do you want to save? The world of your own projection? Save it yourself. My world? Show me my world and I shall deal with it. I am not aware of any world separate from myself, which I am free to save or not to save. What business have you with saving the world, when all the world needs is to be saved from you? Get out of the picture and see whether there is anything left to save.

Q: I find all this seeking and brooding most unnatural.
M: Yours is the naturalness of a born cripple. You may be unaware but it does not make you normal. What it means to be natural or normal you do not know, nor do you know that you do not know.

Meister Eckhart

A pure heart is one which is worried by nothing and is tied to nothing, which has not bound its best part to any mode, does not seek its own in anything, that is fully immersed in God's dearest will and gone out of its own.

Do you want to know who is a truly poor man? That man is truly poor in spirit who can do without anything unnecessary. That is why he who sat naked in his tub said to Alexander the Great, to whom the whole world was subject, 'I am a greater ruler than you, for I have rejected more things than you have ever possessed. What you think it a great thing to possess, is too petty for me to scorn.' He is far more blessed who can do without all things and have no need of them, than he who has possession of all things and has wants. That man is the best who can do without what he does not need. Therefore he who can do without and despise the most has abandoned most. It seems a great thing if a man gives up a thousand marks of gold for God's sake and builds many hermitages and monasteries and feeds all the poor: that would be a great deed. But he would be far more blessed who should despise as much for God's sake. That man would possess very heaven who could for God's sake renounce all things, whatever God gave or did not give.

Since it is God's nature not to be like anyone, we have to come to the state of being nothing in order to enter into the same nature that He is. So, when I am able to establish myself in Nothing and Nothing in myself, uprooting and casting out what is in me, then I can pass into the naked being of God, which is the naked being of the spirit.

for God is in this power as in the eternal Now. If a man's spirit were always united with God in this power, he would not age. For the Now in which God made the first man and the Now in which the last man shall cease to be, and the Now I speak in, all are the same in God and there is but one Now.

Observe, this man dwells in one light with God, having no suffering and no sequence of time, but one equal eternity. This man is bereft of wonderment and all things are in him in their essence. Therefore nothing new comes to him from future things nor any accident, for he dwells in the Now, ever new and without intermission. Such is the divine sovereignty dwelling in this power.

Collection of born ariyas (according VB)

Antonio Porchia

Caillois, wanting to find out what sort of man had written and sent this surprising volume, had looked into the matter and "found myself in the presence of a man somewhere in his fifties, respectably—though neither studiously nor elegantly—dressed; a potter or carpenter by trade, I forget which, and self-employed, what is more; at once simple and shy, and altogether such that I assured myself, simply as a formality, first by means of certain subterfuges, and then quite openly, that he had never in his life heard of Lao-Tzu or Kafka." (By whom Caillois had suspected his unknown author to be influenced.) Judging by Caillois' observations, the remarkable content of the Voices is a peculiarly pure sense the product of Porchia's own non-literary experience. Of this, or of its circumstances, little is publically known beyond a few facts so bare that they would fit on any tombstone.

Antonio Porchia was born in Italy in 1886, lived in Argentina from 1911, and died in 1968. Voices represents the whole of his writing—some six hundred entries in all. There have been several editions since the first one.

The most recent (and in Porchia's judgment the most complete, though it does not include some from the first collection) was published in 1966, and it is from this edition that the present selection has been made. Some of the entries, Porchia has stated, evolved over the course of years; some he has deleted in favor of later ones which, in his opinion, convey the same sense better. But the aphorisms themselves are not, in his view, compositions of his own so much as emanations which he has heard and set down.

It is easy to see why Caillios might have imagined that Porchia owed something to certain Eastern texts, and perhaps to some moderns such as Kafka. A few of the aphorisms have close affinities with sentences from Taoist and Buddhist scriptures; others suggest, among the moderns, not only Kafka but Lichtenberg, or—to some-one whose language is English—Blake. Caillois' determining, to his own satisfation, that Porchia was unfamiliar with such possible mentors is interesting, surprising, and in the end remains for the most part a matter of curiosity rather than a contribution to an assessment of the values and originality of Porchia's Voices. For the authority which the entries invoke, both in their matter and in their tone, is not that of tradition or antecedents, but that of particular, individual experience. Whatever system may be glimpsed binding the whole together is not fashioned from any logic except that of one man's cast of existence. It is this which makes the work as a whole, and some of the separate sentences, elusive, but it is this which gives them their unmistakable pure immediacy— their quality of voice.
At the same time, the entries and the work as a whole assume and evoke the existence of an absolute, of the knowledge of it which is truth, and of the immense desirability of such knowledge. With no doctrinal allegiances, nor any attempt at dogmatic system, Porchia's utterances are obviously, in this sense, a spiritual, quite as much as a literary, testament. And the center to which they bear witness, as well as the matrix of their form, is the private ordeal and awe of individual existence, the reality that is glimpsed through time and circumstance, as a consequence of feeling and suffering. It is this ground of personal revelation and its logic, in the sentences, that marks their kinship, not with theology but with poetry.

And yet the reality of the self, except as suffering, is not an unquestionable certainty. "My final belief is suffer-ing. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer." In any event, the self is less real than that which is greater than it, on which it depends. "We see by means of something which illumines us, which we do not see." The fidelity of Porchia's vision, and its personal embodiment in lan-guage, is too sharp, and frequently too desperate, however, to be tempted to homiletics. On the contrary, the distillate of suffering in some of the entries is pure and profound irony—an irony not of defense but of acceptance. "Every toy has to break." "When I throw away what I don't want, it will fall within reach." It is finally the acceptance, with its irony, that underlies the suffering and the vision and relates them to each other in a way that suggests that the relation may be the privilege of man's existence. "Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow." —w. S. MERWIN

https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Porchia?m=0

Fernando Pessoa

I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.

Cioran

Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time.

In the slaughterhouse that morning, I watched the cattle being led to their death. Almost every animal, at the last moment, refused to move forward. To make them do so, a man hit them on the hind legs.
This scene often comes to mind when, ejected from sleep, I lack the strength to confront the daily torture of Time.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Nicolas Gomez Davila - very good friend (ariyan or not - not enough data to be certain)

—An ethics that does not command us to renounce is a crime against the dignity to which we should aspire and against the happiness which we can obtain.

—The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space and time.

—There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.
[What about the man who admits only disciples?😊]

—Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.

The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond. 

—Once I believe I have mastered a truth, the argument which interests me is not the one which confirms it but the one which refutes it.

The Desert Fathers

A brother was leaving the world, and though he gave his goods to the poor he kept some for his own use. He went to Antony, and when Antony knew what he had done, he said, ‘If you want to be a monk, go to the village over there, buy some meat, hang it on your naked body and come back here.’ The brother went, and dogs and birds tore at his body. He came back to Antony, who asked him if he had done what he was told. He showed him his torn body. Then Antony said, ‘Those who renounce the world but want to keep their money are attacked in that way by demons and torn in pieces.’

Macarius once told this story about himself: When I was a young man, and living in my cell in Egypt, they caught me, and made me a cleric in a village. Because I did not want to minister, I fled to another place. A man of the world, but of a devout life, came to help me, and took what I made with my hands and ministered to my needs. It happened that a girl of the village was tempted by the devil and seduced. When she was seen to be pregnant, she was asked who was the father of the child and she said, ‘It was this hermit who slept with me.’ They came out, arrested me, and brought me back to the village; they hung dirty pots and jug handles on my neck, and made me walk round the village, beating me as I went, and saying, ‘This monk has seduced our girl. Away with him, away with him.’ They beat me until I was almost dead but another hermit came and said, ‘How long have you been beating that stranger monk?’ The man who used to minister to my needs followed behind, much ashamed, and they heaped insults on him, saying, ‘You supported this hermit, and look what he has done.’ The parents of the girl said that they would not let me go unless I found someone to guarantee her support. I spoke to the man who used to minister to me and asked him to be my guarantor, and he gave a pledge on my behalf. I went back to my cell, and I gave him all the baskets I had, and said, ‘Sell them, and give my wife some food.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Macarius, since you have found a wife for yourself, you need to work much harder to support her.’ So I worked night and day and passed on to her the money that I  made. When it was time for the unfortunate girl to bear a child, she spent many days in labour, and still did not produce the baby. They said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ She said, ‘I know why I am in agony so long.’ Her parents asked her why. She said, ‘I accused that hermit falsely, for he had nothing to do with it; the father is a young man named so-and-so.’ The man who ministered to me heard this, and came to me with joy saying, ‘The girl could not bear her child, until she confessed that you had nothing to do with it and that she had told lies about you. Look, all the villagers want to come to your cell and glorify God, and ask your pardon.’ When I heard this, I did not want them to trouble me, so I rose and fled here to Scetis. That was why I began to live here.

Once Theophilus of holy memory, the archbishop of Alexandria, came to Scetis. The brothers gathered together and said to Pambo, ‘Speak to the bishop, that he may be edified.’ Pambo replied, ‘If he is not edified by my silence, my speech certainly will not edify him.’

Antony once heard about how a young monk showed off on a journey. He saw some old men walking wearily along the road, and he ordered some donkeys to appear and carry them home. When the old men told Antony about this he said, ‘I think that monk is like a ship laden with a rich cargo, but it is not yet certain that it will reach port in safety.’ Shortly afterwards, Antony began to weep and pull his hair, and groan. When his disciples saw it, they said, ‘Why are you weeping, abba?’ He replied, ‘A great pillar of the church has just fallen.’ He said this about the young monk, and added, ‘Walk over and see what has happened.’ So his disciples went, and found the monk sitting on his mat and weeping for a sin that he had committed. When he saw Antony’s disciples, he said, ‘Tell the abba to pray God to give me just ten days, and I hope to be able to satisfy Him.’ Within five days he was dead.

The monks praised a brother to Antony. Antony went to him and tested him to see if he could endure being insulted. When he saw that he could not bear it, he said to him, ‘You are like a house with a highly decorated outside, but burglars have stolen all the furniture by the back door.’

A provincial judge once wanted to see Poemen and he would not allow it. So the judge arrested his nephew as if he were a criminal and imprisoned him, saying, ‘I will release him when Poemen comes to ask about him.’ The boy’s mother came to her  brother Poemen and began to weep outside the door of his cell. Bitterly unhappy, she began to reproach him, saying, ‘You may have a heart of cold steel, you may be pitiless, but at least have mercy on your kin and relent.’ But he told her, ‘Poemen is not a father of children.’ So she went away. When the judge heard this he sent a messenger to say, ‘You have only to ask and I will release him.’ Poemen sent back this message, ‘Try his case legally. If he ought to die, let him die. If he is innocent, do as you say.’

Good books on practice

Epictetus - Discourses, Encheiridion
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Seneca - Moral letters
Pierre Hadot writings

Higher ethics, higher culture

French Moralists: Joubert, Chamfort, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère
Stanisław Lec,
Guido Ceronetti
Pascal, Montaigne,
Jacob Burckhardt

Thinking against

Akio Nakatani - Exploding the Nuclear Weapons Hoax
Holocaust - www.HolocaustHandbooks.com, www.NukeBook.org

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Our team consists of several scholars and numerous volunteers from various countries. Unless Western societies stop persecuting and prosecuting scholars and laypersons who peacefully voice their skepticism about aspects of the orthodox Holocaust narrative, we will not disclose the identity of any of these individuals.

Company Philosophy

Freedom of Speech (in any form) needs to be defended where it is threatened. The expression of non-controversial views is basically never threatened, hence needs no pro-active protection. Only views considered controversial or even offensive by those in power, or by an intolerant lynch mob, are threatened. However, as long as the views expressed do not advocate, promote, approve of, justify or condone the violation of anyone’s civil rights, there is no objective justification, and thus no legitimacy, to limit the expression of such views. If anyone strives to suppress them anyway, they turn into oppressive powers meriting every human being’s stiff opposition.

Criticizing an individual (such as a witness to a claimed historical event) or a group of individuals (such as survivors of a historical tragedy) for their behaviors or attitudes, and scrutinizing their expressed views, is NOT a violation of their civil rights. Disagreeing in a civilized manner with the views people expressed, and with their actions, is a fundamental part of Freedom of Speech. Anyone infringing on this right needs to be met with peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi.

This is the very core of our engagement.

So called Antisemitism

Kevin MacDonald 

Andrew Joyce https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Andrew%20Joyce?m=0

Herve Ryssen https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Ryssen?m=0
Oliver Revilo

Intelligent Project

William A. Dembski
Michael J. Behe
Jonathan Wells

9/11 Jewish crime

Christopher Bollyn https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Bollyn?m=0
Nicolas Kollerstorm https://varapanno.blogspot.com/search/label/Kollerstrom?m=0

History

Thucydides, Tacitus
Jaeger Paideia
Annales - French school (history of ideas)

Respected and admired writers

Shalamov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Lichtenberg, W.H. Auden, Bela Hamvas, Bobkowski, Witkacy, Ortega y Gasset, Henryk Elzenberg, Edward Stachura, Leopardi 

Only Cripples Will Survive

 ONLY CRIPPLES WILL SURVIVE

Unthan’s Lesson

That life can involve the need to move forwards in spite of obstacles is one of the basic experiences shared by the group of people whom, with a carefree clarity, one formerly called ‘cripples’, before younger and supposedly more humane, understanding and respectful spirits of the age renamed them the handicapped, those with special needs, the problem children, and finally simply ‘human beings’.13 If, in the following chapter, I persist in using the old term, which has meanwhile come to seem tactless, it is purely because it had its traditional place in the vocabulary of the time that I am recalling in these explorations. Abandoning it for the sake of sensitivity, and perhaps merely over-sensitivity, would cause a system of indispensable observations and insights to disappear. In the following, I would like to demonstrate the unusual convergence of human and cripple in the discourses of the generation after Nietzsche in order to gain further insights into the structural change of human motives for improvement in recent times. Here it will transpire to what extent references to the human being in the twentieth century are rooted in cripple-anthropological premises – and how cripple anthropology changes spontaneously into an anthropology of defiance. In the latter, humans appear as the animals that must move forwards because they are obstructed by something.

The reference to rooting provides the cue, albeit indirectly, for the reflections with which I shall continue the explorations on the planet of the practising stimulated by Nietzsche – and, in a sense, also the contemplations on torsos introduced by Rilke. In 1925, two years before Heidegger’s Being and Time, three years before Scheler’s The Human Place in the Cosmos, the Stuttgart publisher Lutz’ Memoirenbibliothek printed a book with the simultaneously amusing and shocking title Das Pediskript: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Leben eines Armlosen, mit 30 Bildern [The Pediscript: Notes from the Life of an Armless Man, with 30 Illustrations]. It was ‘penned’ by Carl Hermann Unthan, who was born in East Prussia in 1848 and died in 1929 – in truth, it was written on a typewriter whose keys were pressed using a stylus held with the foot. Unthan unquestionably deserves a place in the pantheon of reluctant virtuosos of existence. He belongs to those who managed to make a great deal of themselves, even though his starting conditions suggested that he would almost certainly make little or nothing of himself. At the age of six or seven the boy, born without arms, discovered by chance the possibility of playing on a violin fastened to a box on the ground. With a mixture of naïveté and tenacity, he devoted himself to improving the method he had discovered for playing the violin with his feet. The right foot played the part of the left hand, fingering the notes, while the left foot moved the bow.

The young man pursued his exercises with such determination that after attending secondary school in Königsberg, he was accepted as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. There, mastering an enormous practice workload, he reached a notable level of virtuosity. He expanded his repertoire, soon also including showpieces of the highest difficulty. Naturally the handicapped man’s violin playing would never have attracted such attention far and wide if it had been carried out in the usual form, without the element of acrobatic improbability. Before long, a vaudeville entrepreneur showed interest in Unthan. In 1868, still a minor, he began to go on concert tours, which, after stops in rural towns, took him to the European capitals, and later even across the ocean. He performed in Vienna, where he was introduced to the conductors Johann Strauss and Michael Zierer. In Munich he impressed the Hungaro-Bavarian military band leader and waltz king Josef Gungl by playing Gungl’s brand new composition, the ‘Hydropathen-Walzer’; he was especially flabbergasted by Unthan’s execution of double stops with his toes. After a concert at the ‘overcrowded grand ballroom’ in Budapest, he was reportedly congratulated on his virtuosic performance by Franz Liszt, who had been sitting in the first row. He patted him ‘on the cheek and shoulder’ and expressed his appreciation. Unthan notes on this incident: ‘What was it that made me doubt the authenticity of his enthusiasm? Why did it seem so artificial?’14 One can see: in this note, Unthan, who was already over seventy by the time he wrote Das Pediskript, was not simply touching on imponderabilities in relationships between older and younger virtuosos. Those questions, written down half a century after the scene they describe took place, were significant as a symptom: they reminded the author of a distant time when the illusion that he could be taken seriously as a musician, not merely a curiosity, was still intact. Even fifty years later, the author still felt the cold breeze of disillusionment in Liszt’s paternally sympathetic gesture; Liszt, a former prodigy himself, knew from experience what kind of life awaits virtuosos of any kind. So he would have known all the better what future lay before a young man who was to travel the world as a victor over a quirk of nature.

There is a widespread cliché among biographers: that their hero, who often has to go through arduous early years first, ‘conquers the world for himself’. In his mode of self-presentation, Unthan takes up this figure by following each anecdote with another and recounting the saga of his successful years as a drawn-out travelogue, moving from city to city and continent to continent. He tells the story of a long life in constant motion: on Cunard steamers, on trains, in hotels of every category, in prestigious concert halls and dingy establishments. He probably spent the majority of his career on dubious vaudeville stages, from which he would blow the baffled audience kisses with his feet at the end of his performances.15 The dominant sound in Unthan’s public life seems to have been the cheering and applause of those surprised by his presentations. Unthan’s ‘notes’, which can neither be called an autobiography nor memoirs – the closest category would be that of curiosities – are written in a language at once naïve and sentimental, full of stock phrases, echoing the diction of the factual account in the mid-nineteenth century; one can imagine the author’s tongue in the corner of his mouth while writing.

On every page of Das Pediskript, Unthan demonstrates his conviction that the success of his life is revealed through an overflowing collection of picturesque situations he has experienced. Unthan lays out his treasures like a travel writer of the bourgeois age – his first concert, his first bicycle, his first disappointment. These are accompanied by a host of bizarre observations: a bullfight in which the bull impaled several toreros; a sword-swallower who injured his throat with an umbrella; garishly made-up females of all ages in Havana in 1873, with ‘an odour of decay hovering over everything’, with dancing negresses: ‘We saw the most forbidden things imaginable’; a lizardeating event in Mexico; ‘sold out’ in Valparaiso, with the recollection that ‘the sun slowly sank into the still ocean. As if it were finding it difficult to leave …’ Seven hours of brisk swimming ‘without turning on my back’, and heavy sunburn as a result; his encounter with an armless portrait painter in Düsseldorf, a comrade in fate who painted with one leg – ‘there was no end to the questions and answers’, ‘he was full of vitality and good cheer. But most of our chats touched on deep matters nonetheless.’ His mother’s death: ‘there was a praying inside me, though I did not and do not know what it was praying’. Appearances in the Orient, where people are more distinctive: ‘a list of my most striking experiences alone would fill entire volumes’. Disappointment at the Holy Sepulchre, where ‘the most degenerate riffraff’ appeared to have gathered; arrest in Cairo, nicotine poisoning in Vienna, rifle shooting with his feet in St Petersburg, in the presence of Tsar Alexander III, guest appearance in Managua – ‘the city of León bore the character of decline’; a comet over Cuba; participation in a film entitled Mann ohne Arme [Man Without Arms]. On board the Elbe to New York as a fellow passenger of Gerhart Hauptmann, who has a brief conversation with the artiste. Then the New World: ‘Americans show a stimulating understanding in the face of the extraordinary.’ ‘ “You’re the happiest person I know”, said a man they called John D. “And what about you, with your money, Mr Rockefeller?”, I asked him. “All my money can’t buy your zest for life …” ’

Das Pediskript could be read as a sort of ‘life-philosophical performance’, using the latter word in its popular sense. Unthan steps before his audiences in the posture of an artiste whose special virtuosity on the violin, and later with the rifle and the trumpet, is embedded in an overall virtuosity, an exercise in the art of living that pervades all aspects of life – it is no coincidence that the picture section of the book primarily shows the author carrying out such everyday actions as opening doors and putting on his hat.

If one wanted to translate Unthan’s more general intuitions into a theoretical diction, his position would have to be defined as a vitalistically tinged ‘cripple existentialism’. According to this, the disabled person has the chance to grasp their thrownness into disability as the starting point of a comprehensive self-choice. This applies not only to the basic auto-therapeutic attitude as expressed by Nietzsche in Ecco Homo, in the second section under the heading ‘Why I Am So Wise’: ‘I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again.’ Unthan’s choice applies to his own future. He places the following words in the mouth of the twenty-one-year-old who felt he had been released into independence: ‘I will seize myself with an iron first to get everything out of myself.’16 He interprets his disability as a school for the will. ‘Anyone who is forced from birth to depend on their own experiments and is not prevented from performing them […] will develop a will […] the drive towards independence […] constantly stimulates further experiments.’17The consequence is emotional positivism, which is accompanied by a rigorous prohibition of melancholy. Unthan’s aversion to every form of pity recalls similar statements in Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. Only constant pain, for example, might be capable of wearing down someone handicapped: ‘All other obstacles are defeated by the will, which forges ahead into the sunshine.’18 The ‘sunny attitude to life’ of the cripple who was able to develop freely leads, we are told, to a ‘higher percentage of zest for life’ than is the case for a ‘fully able person’.19Unthan ends his account with a summary in which he presents his confession: 

I do not feel lacking in any way compared to a fully able person […] I have never found anyone with whom, taking all conditions into account, I would have wanted to exchange places. I have certainly struggled, even more with myself than with my surroundings, but I would not give up those exquisite pleasures of the soul, which came about precisely through the struggles caused by my armlessness, for anything in the world.20So it is ultimately only a matter of giving the cripple a chance to develop freely: this thesis is the culmination of Unthan’s moral intuitions, which fluctuate between the urge for emancipation and the longing to participate. This free development should not be mistaken for a licence to aesthetic excesses, as called for in the Bohemian ideologies appearing at the same time. Allowing the cripple ‘enough light and air in his development’21 rather means giving him a chance to participate in normality. For the handicapped person, this reverses the relationship between bourgeois and artistes. Unlike bourgeois rebels against the ordinary, he cannot dream of following the people in the green caravan.22 If he wants to be an artist, it is in order to be a bourgeois. For him, artistry is the quintessence of bourgeois work, and earning a living through it is what gives him a sense of pride. On one occasion, the author remarks that he would not want to receive a fur coat for the winter as a gift from a noble sir, as Walther von der Vogelweide did: ‘I would rather earn the fur coat with my feet.’23 At the ethical core of Unthan’s cripple existentialism one discovers the paradox of a normality for the non-normal. What makes this existentialist in the stricter sense of the word is a group of three motifs whose development only took place in the twentieth century: firstly, the figure of self-choice, whereby the subject makes something out of that which was made out of it; secondly, the socio-ontological constraints affecting anyone who exists under ‘the gaze of the other’ – this produces the impulse of freedom, the stimulus to assert oneself against the confining power coming from the foreign eye; and finally the temptation of insincerity, with which the subject casts its freedom away to play the role of a thing among things, an in-itself, a natural fact. 

From the perspective of French existentialism, Unthan did everything right. He chooses himself, he asserts himself against the enslaving pity of the others, and remains the perpetrator of his own life rather than becoming a collaborator with the allegedly dominant circumstances. But the reason he does everything right – perhaps more right than can be expressed in any philosophical jargon – cannot be sufficiently illuminated with the thinking methods found left of the Rhine. The inadequacy of the French approach lies in the fact that the existentialism which developed in France after 1940 formulated a philosophy for the politically handicapped (in this particular case, for the people of an occupied country), while in Germany and Austria, the last third of the nineteenth century had seen the growth of a vitalistictherapeutically coloured philosophy for the physically and mentally handicapped, namely neurotics and cripples, that charged itself up with political, social-philosophical and anthropological ideas after 1918. While the occupation taught the French to associate existence (and existential truth) with resistance and freedom in the underground, Germans and Austrians had begun two generations earlier to equate existence (and existential truth) with defiance and compensatory acts. Thus the drama of ‘continental philosophy’ – to draw this once on the laughable classification of content-oriented thought by formalists across the water – in the first half of the twentieth century can only be understood if one bears in mind the contrasts and synergies between the older and more comprehensive Central European existentialism of defiance and the younger, more politically restricted Western European existentialism of resistance. The first goes back to pre-Revolution times, for example the work of Max Stirner, and continues – after its culmination in Nietzsche – until the systems of Freud, Adler and the later compensation theorists who became active in Germany; the second, as noted above, took shape under the 1940-4 occupation, with a history extending back via the revanchism of the Third Republic to the anger collection movements among the losers of the French Revolution, that is to say the early socialists and communists. Once one has understood the German model, one will easily recognize it in its caricatured forms left of the Rhine. What circulated on the Rive Gauche after 1944 as the doctrine of the Anti was the political adaptation of German cripple existentialism, whose adherents were committed to the ethics of the Nonetheless.

Unthan undoubtedly belongs to the earlier defiance-existentialist movement. Because of the special nature of his circumstances, however, he was not fully subsumed under this tendency. What sets him apart is a special form of ‘living nonetheless’ that isolates him from the heroistic mainstream and brings him into the company of artistes. His heroism is that of a striving for normality. Part of this is the willingness to be not simply an involuntary curiosity, but a voluntary one. One could therefore define his position as that of a vaudeville existentialist. Its starting point is the cunning of fate that commands him to make an artistic virtue out of an anomalous necessity. Driven along by strong initial paradoxes, the vaudeville existentialist searches for a way to achieve a form of ‘decent exhibitionism’. For him, normality is to become the reward for abnormality. In order to be at peace with himself, he must therefore develop a form of life in which his pathological oddity is transformed into the precondition for a successful assimilation. Hence the ‘armless fiddler’, as Unthan was known on American stages, could under no circumstances perform as a mere cripple, as was the custom in the European circus and even more in the freakshows across the Atlantic. He had to present himself as the victor over his disability and beat the gawking industry at its own game.

The achievement of this success confirms Unthan’s unusual position, which is once more occupied by various outstanding artists today. By managing to develop the paradoxes of their mode of existence, the handicapped can become convincing teachers of the human condition – practising beings of a particular category with a message for practising beings in general. What Unthan conquered for himself was the possibility of becoming, as a cripple virtuoso, a subject that can be beheld and admired to the same extent as it can be exhibited and gawked at – exhibited primarily by the impresarios and circus directors often mentioned, seldom favourably, in Das Pediskript, stared at by an audience whose curiosity often gives way to moved enthusiasm within a short time. When the existentialism of defiance is heightened into its vaudeville form, we see the emergence of the cripple artiste who has chosen himself as a self-exhibitable human. In the race against the voyeuristic curiosity of the normal, which must constantly be won anew, his self-exhibition pre-empts mere sensation. For him, the dichotomy between life and art no longer exists. His life is nothing other than the hard-won art of doing normal things like opening doors and combing one’s hair, as well as less normal things such as playing the violin with one’s feet and dividing pencils in the middle through a gunshot triggered with the foot. The virtuoso of the ability to be normal can rarely indulge in the luxury of depressive moods. Living in the Nonetheless imposes an ostentatious zest for life on those who are determined to succeed. The fact that things may be different on the inside is no one’s business. The land of smiles is inhabited by cripple artistes.

(...)

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE

On Anthropotechnics

PETER SLOTERDIJK