The Agony of Polemos E-Book

Carlos Videla

• Herausgeber: Antelope Hill Publishing LLC
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Ancient man lived his life in the perpetual shadow of violence and war, but he did not view this as a cause for fear and mourning. Rather, this constant struggle was once viewed with exultation and awe, especially by the Indo-European civilizations, the masters of war, and in particular the Greeks. 
 
The “agony” is the struggle—physical, spiritual, and eternal—through which identity is formed. “Polemos” refers to war, the “king and father of all” according to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Drawing on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and contemporary scholars, Videla hearkens the reader back to a pre-Platonic understanding of life, in which strife and the heroic virtues that result from it are not errors or pitfalls, but instead the highest duty and most formative experience of humanity. Through struggle, both individual and collective entities come into being by differentiating themselves from formless chaos, and in it they find their purpose and develop virtue. Videla argues that Polemos represents a primordially European philosophical tradition whose hour of resurrection has come, as a means of triumphing fundamentally over globalism and liberalism. He asserts that only a true embrace of heroic struggle, not just as a means to an end but as an end in itself, can save the West from its present infirmity. 
 
Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present the English translation of  The Agony of Polemos, originally published in Spanish in 2017, a contemporary philosophical work that presents a fitting claim to Heidegger’s legacy and a powerful call for a new age of heroism.

Leseprobe

The Agony of Polemos

La Agonía De Polemos

The Agony of

Polemos

— C A R L O S V I D E L A —

Translated by Giammarco Simonelli

A N T E L O P EH I L LP U B L I S H I N G

Copyright © 2017, 2021 Carlos Videla

English translation copyright © 2022 Antelope Hill Publishing

Originally published in Spanish as La Agonía De Polemos in 2017.

This translation is of the Fifth Edition, published in 2021 by:

Ignacio Carrera Pinto Ediciones

www.ignaciocarreraediciones.cl

English translation by Giammarco Simonelli, 2022.

Cover art by Swifty.

Edited by Taylor Young.

Formatted by Taylor Young and Margaret Bauer.

Antelope Hill Publishing

www.antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-956887-45-7

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-956887-46-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface to the 2021 Edition

Polemology

Heidegger’s Polemos

Polemological Ontology

Confrontation

Polis and Polemos

Ontological Nationalism

Polemos and Politics

The Heraclitean Worldview

The Return of the Ancient God

Life as a Struggle

The Destruction of the West

The Violence Of Transparency

The Heroic Heart

The Agonal Culture

A Dangerous Idea

Anatomy of Struggle

Mothers and Warriors

Defending the Border

Birth of the Myth

The Age of the Gods

Diversification of Polemos

The Heroic Age

The Good Eris

The Shield of Achilles

The Agonal Era

The Dualistic Era

Discord

The Strong Gods

Bibliography

PREFACE TO THE 2021 EDITION

A new edition of The Agony of Polemos, four years after it was initially written, deserves a careful revision. This new edition has been arranged emphasizing the ontological aspect of Polemos, a concept which was reclaimed principally by Heidegger from the Hellenic past. This, because the philosophy of the German thinker has been gaining renewed importance in recent years, is the foundation for a philosophical meditation focused on confronting the political and cultural hegemony of what is known as globalism.

The political area known as the “third position” or “national-populism,” which encompasses different political entities that appeared in different periods and continents, has been especially receptive to this Heideggerian renewal. In fact, the greatest political theories have always emerged from deep meditation, embracing many more aspects than just the mere politics. Both the one known as “first political theory,” that is, liberalism, and the “second theory,” Marxism, as well as the “third political theory” of the nationalist movements, have all had true worldviews or ways of seeing the world and the nature of man as the basis for their political unfolding.

Among these, the third political theory is the most recent one. It arose as a revolutionary reaction against liberalism and the threat of Marxism, the latter a theory that was about fifty years ahead of the nationalist movements when these burst into the world’s political scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. It can be said that the precursors of the third political theory date back to the eighteenth century, and the genealogy of these ideas in their modern shape is well detailed by Sternhell in The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition. However, a more convincing political philosophy of such theory came during the first decades of the last century. This process was not coordinated; rather it burst spontaneously into different countries and at different times. German, French, and Italian thinkers were the most important in Europe. However, after the defeat of nationalism during the Second World War, national populist thought acquired the greatest depth in the Americas, and especially in Argentina.

Many philosophical systems and thinkers served as the grounding of the third political theory. Some theories of Aristotle and his medieval Christian interpreters, which covered communitarianism and the political nature of man, were essential in this process. Much was also borrowed from Hegel and his theory of the embodiment of the Absolute in the state. Fichte’s idealism was another essential piece, especially his Addresses to the German Nation, as well as that of Herder and his reclamation of the people (völk) as a historical subject. Nietzsche likewise was of great influence with his Will to Power and the heroic vision of life.

Nevertheless, it appears evident that the two exponents whose political philosophies reached the greatest insight in the field were Martin Heidegger and Giovanni Gentile. Between their ideas, Heideggerian ontology is the one which acquired the greatest importance for the refinement of a firmly grounded political project.

Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche have been utilized by nearly every political current; however, Heidegger and Gentile are far more difficult to employ. It is certain that the Italian theorized about a societal structure that could encompass more than just nationalism, and that the German’s philosophy has served as an inspiration for thinkers outside the nationalist realm, such as Sartre or Derrida. But with Heidegger, something is needed which must go beyond the mere intention of reclaiming certain aspects of his philosophy while leaving aside others. As the years pass on, his most political writings are becoming widely disseminated again. This delay has not been the consequence of ill-intentioned actions of the past; rather, the explanation is that immediately after the war, Heidegger’s thought of the thirties and forties was lost, and even the philosopher himself did not bother to deal with this situation. Part of this nationalist ontology came to light during the eighties, only to return again at the center of various controversies which were sparked by the ambiguity of the various bibliographical references.

Today the scenario is different, as all of Heidegger’s seminars given at the time of nationalist hegemony in Germany and Europe have been recovered and published, including his legendary Black Notebooks. There is now no doubt. Heidegger’s ontology was connected to a way of thinking which considered of great importance a kind of nationalism, sovereignism, or identitarianism, whose roots had to be mainly popular or social. Also, most importantly, the foundation for this ontology is found in the concept of Polemos, translated by Heidegger as “confrontation.” From this an ontology or study of Being originated in which the identitarian aspect was fundamental.

Having said this, it is clear that Heidegger’s polemology has come to present itself as an authentic and radical philosophical principle in the domain of the third political theory.

Heidegger’s Polemos lays the foundations for a new ethic rooted in the heroic vision of pre-capitalist societies. From these foundations emerges a new—yet, ancient—way of understanding man and communities, a collection of ideas and values through which Heidegger tried to oppose the liberal plan of his times, and with which the hegemony of contemporary globalism could likewise be opposed.

Carlos Videla

POLEMOLOGY

Polemos is a philosophical concept stemming from Greek culture that is reminiscent of a tradition and a way of understanding existence as old as mankind.

This natural principle—which was subsequently made culture—has been interpreted in the following complementary ways in different disciplines: ontologically as the experience of existence as confrontation, anthropologically as the struggle for life, and sociologically as the basis of heroic and agonal societies. Understanding and experiencing existence “polemologically” was preserved in the majority of known cultures until the appearance of the European liberal system of values. The replacement of the hero with the merchant and of traditional communities with consumer societies have essentially meant the dissolution of this ancestral way of seeing the world.

In this process, the deviation of the concept of freedom, essential to liberalism, has played an important role in the ontological subversion of the agonal tradition. Freedom, defined for millennia as the sovereign ability to determine personal and community boundaries, generating diversity and identity, has been transformed during the last centuries into precisely the opposite; that is, into the absence of limits.

Freedom was fundamental in the Greek paideia, the educational system based on the virtue of self-control and its extension into the autonomy of the polis. This virtue allowed for the making of autonomous decisions based on thoughtful judgments, with the limitations that community involvement entailed. Classical freedom, therefore, was based on discipline, rigor, control, and limit.

Liberalism, born in the sixteenth century, rebelled against this tradition, even though during its first centuries of existence it kept some ties with classical culture. During this period, authors such as John Locke were dynamiting the foundations of the traditional culture by defining the concept of self-control as something irrational, pre-modern, paternalistic, and even tyrannical. The liberal order’s idea of freedom was based on emancipation from the restraints of tradition, social and economic rules, and even from the limits of nature. Locke, the first philosopher of liberalism, considered freedom as the individual ability to think, stripped of any cultural or communitarian ties. Even belonging to a family, a community, or a nation had to be something thought out by the individual will and accepted or rejected following a personal and detached consideration. Broader views were discarded or put aside as secondary. On this premise, Hobbes stipulated that human beings were autonomous, unconnected, and therefore freedom itself was achieved wherelaw was silenced, and where norms—nomos—and customs and community ties were reduced to a minimum.

The ancient individual choice based on self-control and the limits imposed by social integrity, culture, and connection to nature was turned into a decision driven by selfishness and devoid of any ethical boundary over individual reason. Man, who once was the political animal of the paideia and classical virtue, gave way to the liberal individualist.

This concept of freedom without limits generated a new cultural principle that pervaded the social, economic, and political domains over the following centuries. In this transformation, productive labor has drifted into a deregulated and transnational financial capitalism, a libertarian and right-wing anarcho-capitalism with deeply negative effects on human nature. Furthermore, this process has cleared the way for a nihilistic culture, promoted by the new progressive and transhumanist left, in which the lack of identity reigns at a personal and communal level.

The globalist world order of our days derives directly from the interpretation of freedom as a radical opposition to the pre-modern virtue of self-control. Globalism is the implementation on a planetary scale of a culture based on the end of the concept of limit, a plan for a society based on universality and undifferentiation.

Any philosophical and political project that truly intends to confront the current system must base its worldview on aspects that invalidate the conceptual basis of liberalism. As such, the ideas that are radically antagonistic to global liberalism are represented by diversity, particularity, identity, and limits. Neither proletarian universalism nor deconstructive progressivism could and will ever be able to stand up to present-day globalism. Therefore, the alleged omnipotence of postmodernism and deconstructionism is not such, and for this reason they have been neutralized and assimilated into the hegemonic globalist bloc since the last several decades.

The background to this situation lies in the philosophical roots shared by liberalism and the so-called “cultural Marxism.” Postmodern authors attempted to use precisely the concepts of undifferentiation, abstraction, deterritorialization, and desubjectification for their revolutionary project, which only reinforced the absence of limits implied in the liberal project. These thinkers did not understand that the foundation of the liberal-capitalist system was not the same as that of the pre-capitalist West and, eager to destroy economic liberalism, they focused their efforts on subverting the traditional culture, which had a bare connection, if any at all, to the mercantile system imposed during modernity. This misconception has made their revolutionary struggles mostly ineffective at weakening the core of their objectives: the global financial power of capitalism. The battles of progressivism, for example, became sooner or later financed by capitalist millionaires such as George Soros or Bill Gates, neutralizing in this way any hypothetical threat to the system. This did not happen as the result of some plan arranged by international finance, but simply because the relationship between philosophies ended up uniting currents of thought that had common objectives. There is nothing more beneficial to the globalist economic system than the deconstructed and boundary-less societies promoted by the new left. From this combination of interests and similarities the so-called “historical globalist bloc” was born, comprising a group of entities and schools of thought of which many can seem antagonistic at a glance, but which in reality have merged neoliberal capitalism and leftist progressivism.

HEIDEGGER’S POLEMOS

Identity and particularity have been important concepts in the political thought of the so-called nationalist ideological movement, that third political theory, the alternative to liberalism and to the byproducts of Marxism. Great philosophers, especially from Germany and Italy, reached important heights in the development of a philosophical foundation that would overcome the cultural hegemony of liberal universalism in each area of influence. Perhaps the most outstanding thinker in this line was Martin Heidegger, with his radical theory on “Being as confrontation”: on Polemos, a philosophy termed by Derrida as “philopolemology”1 and as “polemology” by others.2 Heidegger’s Polemos represented a complete turning point in the spiritual development of modern man. Hence, it confronted the hegemony of the liberal plan that had been in development over the course of the last three hundred years.

Polemos (πόλεμος) is a term that was originally conceived by Heraclitus of Ephesus, a Greek thinker of the sixth century BC. Its most common meaning is struggle, conflict, or confrontation, but always understood in its ontological aspect. In the opinion of the Chilean philosopher Jorge Rivera,3 Heraclitus was the first one that pondered on Being and the creator of a mythical-poetic perspective that was starting to be adopted in theoretical thinking. Heraclitus was therefore the father of ontology or the study of Being; hence his constant dialogue with the German thinker, perhaps the greatest proponent of the Heraclitean view in modern philosophy.

According to Heraclitus, struggle allowed for things to exist instead of not existing, in such a way that struggle was the source of diversity in the world (panta). As the Greek thinker wrote in his famous fragment 53: “Polemos is the father of all and the king of all.”4 Starting from this and other fragments of Heraclitus’ writings, Heidegger conducted his own radical polemological thought.

Whether the Heideggerian interpretation of Heraclitus was correct or not has been largely debated. This doubt will probably remain a matter of discussion for many decades, if it will ever be resolved at all. What is important now is that Heidegger achieved, through Heraclitus’ inspiration, a profoundly radical philosophy, and that this opens the possibility to establish it as the system of values capable of opposing liberalism and its variants in the twenty-first century.

In the Heideggerian polemology of Heraclitean roots, men and beings in general shared one thing in common: they all existed, they all were beings. Therefore, Being was something common to all entities, the underlying foundation without which differentiation and ontological limit could not exist. Being (with a capital letter) was the universal quality and the wellspring of all that has existed, exists, and will exist. Heidegger, like many other philosophers, relentlessly sought the essence of existence; that which made being, instead of not being, possible. He found the answer in Polemos. To Heidegger, Being was not about the beings taken individually, nor the sum of all beings in a unified entity. Being was the ability to be different.

In the Heideggerian perspective, coming to be meant emerging from uniformity into a shape.5 Being or existing meant for Heidegger to emerge, to acquire visibility and contrast. Consequently, all beings had in common the characteristic of having distinct boundaries, limits that made having an identity easier for them. Emerging from the “not-Being,” or unified and undifferentiated Being, into tangible existence generated an identity which would inevitably dominate or clash with other identities. Heidegger believed that this was Polemos: an ontological conflict, and a new—or renewed—radical way of understanding man and the world.

Polemos—or confrontation, as Heidegger meant it—represented the fundamental principle of man and nature. Thus their essence was confrontation—confrontation when it comes to rising as individuals, families, clans, and the people of a nation; confrontation for long-term survival and preservation as perpetual entities; and confrontation when interpreting and understanding the world.

This radical ontology that understood the way of life or human existence—called by Heidegger “being-there,” or Dasein, in German—as conflict, presented itself as a cultural foundation that was absolutely antithetical to the figure of the free and universal human being depicted by liberalism. Polemos as a way of being was a revolutionary idea that, if assimilated by the human spirit, would destroy the foundation of the current universalistic civilization, restoring the value of diversity, limits, and identity. The modern restoration of Polemos, therefore, presented itself firstly as a radical ontological foundation from which would then inevitably stem an alternative cultural project to liberalism. Heidegger himself acknowledged that his polemology was so radical that even considering it revolutionary would be very a conservative claim.6 Polemos, intended as Being or as the foundation of existential experience, was an idea that could not only cancel out the liberal project of the last three hundred years, but also bring down the cultural foundation built in the West since the “oblivion of Being” which had occurred. According to Heidegger and a rich tradition of thinkers, this oblivion began with Plato’s metaphysics onwards.

As the American professor Gregory Fried claimed, Heidegger’s Polemos encompassed the entire problem of the conflict between nationalism and ideological globalism, and the debate between the sense of belonging and exclusion, and between particularity and universalism.7 Polemos, therefore, was the most radical conception to set against the liberal system, certainly much more than the “radicalization” of postmodernism, as pointed out by Fried when evaluating the new left of the twenty-first century and its plan of deconstruction, which, as it has been argued, ended up consolidating the globalist order. Stated Fried:

I shall argue that their radicalization of the assault on modernism,8 the liberal regime, and the Enlightenment only aggravates the dangers facing us. The postmodernists often fail to realize how much more radical are both Heidegger and Nietzsche than they.9

Polemos was undoubtedly the cornerstone of Heideggerian philosophy in the thirties and forties, a key historical moment for Germany and the world. With the help of Polemos, Heidegger constructed a political philosophy that has come to light only in recent years. For example, the text of Nature, History, State, his most openly nationalistic seminar, along with On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was discovered by coincidence in 1999, finally published in German in 2009, and printed in Spanish only in 2018. So too happened with the Black Notebooks, Heidegger’s intimate writings, dating from 1931 to the sixties. To date, only his notes that date back to 1941 have been published, but they have been sufficient to trigger a wave of controversies over his political orientation. Undoubtedly, Heideggerian nationalism and its involvement with National Socialism will keep sparking both new and renovated controversies in the decades to come, while the study of his philopolemology will allow for the laying out of a more insightful philosophical foundation, useful to identitarian political projects.

POLEMOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY

Heidegger’s Polemos was a philosophical intuition that came early in the German thinker’s life. However, it would not take its true form until the early 1930s. Fried saw traces of polemological ontology in Being and Time, dated 1927, despite the fact that Heidegger himself repeatedly admitted that his magnum opus was an unsuccessful attempt at establishing his true philosophy. It is of common knowledge that as the Weimar Republic entered in a spiral of decadence, to collapse later on with the National Socialist seizure of power, Heidegger’s polemological thought began to take an increasingly clearer shape. Because of this, one could speculate that Heidegger’s early involvement in National Socialism10 was linked to the development of his polemological ontology. If so, it would not be surprising if he saw in National Socialism the arrival of the spirit of Polemos on German soil, in the same way as the great psychiatrist Carl Jung saw in these events the return of the ancient Germanic god Wotan.

In 1933 Heidegger announced to Carl Schmitt that his studies on Heraclitus had provided him a new ontological conception of conflict. The following yearhe made his studies on Polemos publicly known for the first time in the course on the German poet Hölderlin, which coincided with a re-evaluation of his philosophy called the “turn” (kehre).11 At that time, he still called this philosophical principle “struggle” (kampf) or “strife” (streit), replacing it later with “confrontation” (ausereinandersetzung). Struggle, dispute, and confrontation will be always similar principles in Heideggerian polemology. By the time of his seminar on Hegel in 1934 and the one in 1935, later published as Introduction to Metaphysics, confrontation was already clearly the Polemos of Heraclitus:

The word polemos with which the fragment begins does not mean “war” [Krieg], but rather what is meant by the word eris, which Heraclitus uses in the same sense. But this means “strife” [Streit]—but strife not as quarrel and squabble and mere discord, and most certainly not the violent treatment and repression of the opponent—but rather an Aus-einander-setzung of a kind in which the essence of those who step out against each other in con-frontation [die sich aus-einander-setzen] exposes itself to the other [sich aussetzt dem anderen] and thus shows itself and comes into appearance, that is, in a Greek sense, into what is unconcealed and true.12

Later on, Heideggerian polemology would unfold in other seminars such as the aforementioned Nature, History, State in 1933–34, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language in 1934, On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1934–35, The Origin of the Work of Art in 1935–36, Contributions to Philosophy in 1936–38, the seminars on Nietzsche in the late thirties, the ones on Hölderlin in the early forties, the one on Parmenides in 1942–43 and the first two seminars on Heraclitus in 1944, which denote a philosophy with markedly political overtones, where the determination to form peoples with a historical destiny, the importance of the leader and of the state, the popular elites, and the answer to the question of “the One” as an authentic identity in front of the Other, all acquired great depth.

CONFRONTATION

Polemos was a concept that referred to the rise of beings as differentiated entities. It also implied the struggle for the preservation of this difference. Lastly, it meant a way of being, of existing, a way of living in the world as human beings capable of interpreting reality:

[S]truggle is the innermost necessity of beings as a whole. . . . beings come to Being through struggle. . . . For struggle proves to be setting things into Being and holding them there, by making them emerge yet holding them fast. . . . the essence of Being is struggle; every Being passes through decision, victory and defeat.13

According to the Heideggerian analysis, the Heraclitean term panta, meaning the diversity of beings, would reveal itself because of Polemos, the confrontation. It was Polemos who forced the unified Being to differentiate and manifest itself in its plural character. According to Heraclitus, it was Polemos who set off confrontation within the stillness of the One, “obliging” this undifferentiated nothingness to take on a multiplicity of shapes, each one facing off the other in order to obtain its own identity. In the absence of conflict everything melted into a stable nothingness, motionless and unchanging, lacking struggle and without a shape. Heraclitus believed that the prerequisite for things to exist and for the world to be experienced, in its differentiated and diverse aspect, was existence in conflict, in the confrontation that allowed two different entities to position themselves facing each other. Starting from a tiny insect or inanimate entity up to man, nations, and cultures, everything that could be recognized or named as something distinct was a child of Polemos.14

Fried gives an account of how the word confrontation (Auseinandersetzung), in German, has its root in the concepts of a setting or positioning (Setzung) out and apart (aus) from another entity (einander). So, confrontation is “a laying out and setting forth that establishes and differentiates” in which “sides distinguish themselves from one another and take up positions confronting one another, in everything from respectful, vigorous debate to trench warfare.”15Polemos or confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) was an ontological concept that described the way in which beings emerged, came into being, and how they related to each other.

Polemos does not mean “war” (Krieg) in the sense of “battle” (Schlacht), not even “fight” (Kampf), but rather “decision” (Entscheidung); that is “confrontation” (Auseinandersetzung), “decision” (Ent-scheidung): to let emerge from separation, to let appear in natural contrast—to let the differences of the beings rise. . . . This is the same: Logos, Pyr, Eris, Polemos.16