The “Nominalism” of Mohler and de Benoist

(Just a collection of citations and suggestions. Not even notes.)

Thomas Sheehan:

What is new about de Benoist’s theories can be found primarily in the realm of metaphysical or ontological principles and not in the lack of them. Whereas Evola, adapting the tradition of neo-Idealism, saw the world as grounded in an archeological spirit that gives form, meaning, and hierarchy to everything, de Benoist, who prefers Nietzsche and Heidegger to the Hegelians and who declares himself a nominalist and an existentialist, sees the world as fundamentally chaotic and void of meaning (“…we find no ‘sense’ in the organization and configuration of the world. We refuse all determinism, be it ‘spatial’ or ‘temporal’”) [“Myth and Violence”, Social Research, Vol. 48, No. 1, p. 63].

De Benoist’s thinking is indebted to the work of German post-fascist and “neoconservative”—but not in the familiar sense—Armin Mohler. Consider the following from Thorsten Hinz:

Dans un chapitre, intitulé “Du nominalisme”, le Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann explicite les tentatives de Mohler, qui ne furent pas toujours probantes, de systématiser ses idées et ses vues. Il est clair que Mohler rejette toute forme d’universalisme car tout universalisme déduit le particulier d’un ordre spirituel sous-jacent et identitque pour tous, et noie les réalités dans une “mer morte d’abstractions”. Pour le nominaliste Mohler, les concepts avancés par les universalismes ne sont que des dénominations abstraites et arbitraires, inventées a poteriori, et qui n’ont pour effets que de répandre la confusion. Pour Mohler, seuls le concret et le particulier avaient de l’importance, soit le “réel”, qu’il cherchait à saisir par le biais d’images fortes, puissantes et organiques. Par conséquent, ses sympathies personnelles n’étaient pas déterminées par les idées politiques dont se réclamaient ses interlocuteurs mais tenaient d’abord compte de la valeur de l’esprit et du caractère qu’il percevait chez l’autre [“Armin Mohler, l’homme qui nous désignait l’ennemi!” translated from Junge Freiheit, No. 31/32 (2011)].

Mohler rejects all universalisms: for they “drown” realities in “a flood of dead abstractions”. Universalism’s concepts are really arbitrary and obfuscatory a posteriori inventions. Only the concrete and particular is important. These are best captured by images.

Or in de Benoist’s own words:

I seem to recall that it was Niekisch who called Ernst Jünger “the eye man” (der Augenmensch). For me, the eye man was Armin Mohler. […] In fact, it is my conviction that Armin Mohler looked at political life and the unfolding of political ideologies in the manner of an artist, more precisely of a painter. A system of thought was for him above all a landscape opening up, a panorama offered to the eyes. Thus, when he considered the Conservative Revolution, it is first of all in order to identify its Leitbilder, its “leading images.” And in this predilection for painting, at the expense, for example, of music, I also see the source of his “nominalism”—a landscape as an artist represents it always refers to a particular scene, a determinate context. There is no pictographic representation of “general reality” any more than a science of the total object.
 “Only a monster can permit himself the luxury of seeing things as they are,” wrote Emil Cioran. Armin Mohler is such a “monster.” Here as well we discover his nominalism, that is, the look that can only proceed from particular situations, from what we are hic et nunc. Ideas themselves to not escape being put into perspective this way: they are only valid in relation to concrete situations—and the best of them can become crazy or sick [“Afterword to the English Edition”, in Mohler and Weissmann, The Conservative Revolution in Germany (Radix, 2018), pp. 133–5].

Sheehan continues:

Correspondingly, whereas Evola’s ontological archeology comported a “transcendent virility” shaped by the primacy of spiritual intuition and called to the fidelity of anamnesis, de Benoist’s ontology of chaos comports an anthropology based on the primacy of the will—a voluntarism or “heroic subjectivism.” If God is dead, he says, there are in fact no norms, and a fortiori no hierarchy, except those which man creates for himself by the force of his own will. “The world is a chaos—but we can give it a form. What we do has no other meaning than the one we give it.” “The ‘order’ that we establish around us is, in effect, nothing other than what we put there.”
 The chasm between Evola and de Benoist is definitive: “Either there is an order in the universe, and man’s task is to conform to it (and thus the restoration of public order is the same as reseeking the truth…) or the universe is a chaos, and the task that man can undertake is to give it a form.” And it is clear where de Benoist stands: “Order is created, not received”.
 De Benoist’s existentialism, we should note, is not an abdication of ontology or metaphysics but a recasting of it in terms of voluntarism. In place of Evola’s “Being of origins,” de Benoist posits man as will-to-power—and this is a decision about the essence of reality (ousia). He affirms that “man is the quintessence of everything” and that his “aspiration to order [that is, his will] is an essence.” The idea of will-to-power is still an ontology (“In the beginning was action,” he writes), and from that voluntaristic metaphysics there follow his ethical imperatives: man must become the “cause and creator of himself,” he must “become what he can be” and “construct heroically.” Thus fidelity is no longer, as it was for Evola, a commitment to the archeological nature and cosmological function of an a priori spiritual realm which determines everything. Rather, fidelity is simply fidelity to—oneself. “Fix your own norm—and stick to it.” There is no justification for any act, other than one’s choice of it.
 What then of Evola’s other metaphysical principle, that of hierarchy? It too is not preordained but to be constructed, in effect by a kind of Platonic “noble lie.” “If norms are conventions, and if no society can do without norms, then in fact the only possible avenue is to assume and institute a certain collective subjectivity with enough power that it may be perceived in turn as a ‘natural’ norm that functions as an ‘absolute’ in the social structure” [pp. 63–4].

This is an interesting current within the broader “conservative revolutionary” tradition. Considering Nietzsche’s importance on that tradition, one wonders if his rediscovery of the nose is relevant here. As he wrote on the eve of his decline:

Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for a supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia… I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense—smell—the lie as lie… My genius is in my nostrils… I contradict as has never been contradicted and am none the less the opposite of a negative spirit [Ecce Homo, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 2004), p. 96].

The eyes may see the rotten fruit as fresh; but the nose knows. The nose finds the fetid stuff, the truth, beneath the surface whose glitter captures the eyes (or moral sense…).

What follows the Ecce Homo passage is telling: his prophecy of an age of war and “great politics”. When the delirium of self-possessed culture exhausts itself, those with the most finely-tuned senses, who are not reliant on the order that has just crumbled, who can comprehend that crumbling, are best placed.

Relevant: Adam Westra, “Nietzsche’s Nose”.