(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.
