Oeaohoo

They can’t, because history is a manifestation of metaphysical principles. The connection between history and metaphysics is much older than Hegel. It is found in every spiritual tradition. Hegel just secularised the Christian idea of providence. Like Nietzsche said, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, most of Western philosophy since Descartes is just secularised Christianity. Maybe it is just some irrational English ancestral memory, but I have always detested this pretentious French style, which says so little with so much. All of these writers just make the same point over and over: namely, that our concepts aren’t accurate because they imply a falsely fixed reality — a point which Nietzsche had already made in a much more exciting way. Why not just make that point and be done with it? Like Marxism, it is the kind of philosophy which is designed to be attractive to women. This makes sense since, as I understand it, philosophers in France are treated like celebrities. Tolstoy said: “For the French a woman comes before anything else. They are a weak, degraded people. Doctors say that all consumptives are sensual." I believe that women are rarely interested in the truth, in the spirit of this aphorism of Nietzsche:

This made me laugh. I expect it will be a psychosis of extreme, ant-like conformity. On that note, I saw a close up of an ant’s face recently. It was horrifying. Very devilish… I bet you he is a Trump voter!

Don’t we all? Hard drugs are required to survive through the Spenglerian, civilisational winter! This reminds me of the poem by Baudelaire:

Strange coincidence — you have a very similar energy to a friend of mine, who sent me the song “Holy, Holy” from this album the other day. Who could fail to love this beautiful version of I Know It’s Over?

Sadly, it’s true… Though I think there are other ways to get women — “think” being the key word there! How do they help? And what drugs? I have been considering trying 2C-B, since my friend has some.

“And when you’re tied to your mother’s apron, no one talks about castration…” — The Queen is Dead

Of course, he was. And so am I… “They’ve got a name for the winners in the world… I want a name when I lose!” At the same time, his lyrics are very humorous and his music speaks to a hopelessness which is quite common in English life, especially in the lower classes. It’s just the antithesis of American-style self-help or Nietzschean vitalism, in which one can never be a victim. Interesting point. The only Velvet Underground song I really like is Candy Says, since I have also come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world… What do you think I’d see, if I could walk away from me?

Oh, you handsome devil… ‘There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more!’

Except that it’s a cyclical process of rise and fall rather than a linear and progressive trajectory. The subsiding of survival pressures creates decadence because it allows people to forget the harsher realities of life. This leads to societal collapse, out of which emerges a new, less “free” social order.

Exactly. That’s why they deserve to be ruled by him. Every country has the government it deserves.

Greed is GOOD! Sounds like my idea of hell. I like the bit in American Psycho where he is breaking up with his girlfriend. She says, “What about all of our friends?”, and he says, “You can have them.”

I’ve been thinking about this recently, nice answer.

That makes sense, I just can’t bring myself to play the bit… Maybe someday I’ll have to. What does it look like for you? The trouble with not playing the bit is that you end up in a weak and vulnerable position, more and more conditioned by the very system which you are trying to escape. This has basically happened to me. Well, I feel the same, only the other way around… Then again, I’m not in America! By the way, Trump’s rise reminds me of Spengler’s theory of Caesarism:

I imagine a Wilberian would say that you have regressed to Stage Green. Accepting that model, it makes sense to me that you would do this since you seem quite attached to the pleasures of modern life - partying, girls and so on - which are all very Green in our time. Most “cool” people in European cities are Stage Green. Being Stage Yellow would probably make you feel much more out of the loop…

Yeah, basically.

Interesting. What made you turn away from Ken Wilber? Maybe I had something to do with it… I never got that into Spengler, something about his style always turns me off — it’s like Nietzsche but lacking the same depth of insight. I do like his idea of the “second religiosity”, the debased form of spirituality which one finds in a late and decadent civilisation — it fits the “new age” phenomenon, including most of what you will find in the Spirituality tab on this forum, very well. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll get you reading Guénon and Evola…

“I just want my government to import less migrants.” ”Ah, the dreaded Authoritarian Personality rears its head again! Will we ever learn?! Sit down in my armchair, inmate, we have a lot of work to do on you… Now, tell me about your Mother.”

Why psychologise it? The resurgence of the Right in the West is happening for political reasons, not psychological ones.

It’s not about “mankind”, it’s about America. Whatever role America had in “advancing mankind”, it has long lost it.

Just here to wish all of you beautiful Americans a splendid next few years living under Adolf Satan Trump! Democracy triumphs, yet again!

This graph explains EVERYTHING: Change, Progress, Evolution, Growth, Development, Actualisation, Becoming, the Future, the Path… Copyright: This graph is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s little known work Integral Progress. It shows all of the Stages of Development in their dignity and simplicity.

This is one of the central delusions of this place: anything other than invoking a constant state of existential crisis through psychedelics or nihilistic deconstructionist philosophy is a “mind game at the avoidance of truth”. The implicit heresy here is the idea that the mind and Truth are diametrically opposed to one another; the reality is that the rational mind is a lesser emanation of Truth, subordinated in the hierarchy to intellectual intuition, the divine Logos and the Absolute. There is no real antithesis here, only degrees of realisation.

This is another thing that I find quite odd about Wilber: he inhabits a strange middle-ground between espousing the esotericism that you are describing and selling out to whatever is trending in postmodern academia. I think he probably thought - as Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Louis Massignon and a few other academics had done before him - that by combining the Perennial Philosophy with contemporary academic developments, he might be able to reintegrate genuine metaphysics into secular academia. This seems like a rather futile effort to me; I suppose we will have to see…

Yeah, that is definitely the reason. There is the additional component that - since Hegel and the adaptation of his ideas by Marx, along with the “enlightenment” Philosophes - modern philosophy in general has tended towards progressism. Even here, though, we could wonder why Schillber fails to integrate all of the criticisms of these developments, for example those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the first case and Burke and Carlyle in the second. It would seem that all of this is just dismissed as belonging to a “lower stage of development”: this is a false argument, however, because the people who created the theories of progress to which these people were reacting belonged to the same “stage of development”! To me at least, it all comes off as an arbitrary personal preference for liberal progressism masquerading as “integral” thought. I must admit that I am not so familiar with developmental psychology. I do know, however, that it was a field based on the most extreme form of positivistic rationalism and scientific materialism. It is not surprising that, if genuine progress was to be found anywhere, it would be found in a field with these premises: nobody could deny that, within certain limits and in merely material terms, progress can be demonstrated. The trouble is that, even when this material progress does not serve to actively deny spirituality, it generally only serves as a comparatively empty compensation for a lost spiritual potency. It also seems very strange to me to combine the discoveries of this field with the revelations of what Schillber himself calls the Perennial Philosophy, whose epistemology is completely antithetical, as though there is no real discrepancy here? @A_v_E I don’t understand everything that you have said. I suspect that we have slightly different reasons for objecting to Schillber; nonetheless, some of what I do understand is very funny and on-point! Particularly: This is my impression too. Schillber seems more concerned with creating a cosy private fantasy world - in which lines, streams and waves of developmental growth and evolutionary progressivism must infinitely ascend into the clouds of relativistic integration, forever and ever - than engaging with reality as it actually presents itself… Thanks for the suggestion. I watched a little bit of this video when it came out, though I didn’t get very far… I will consider watching it again!

Of course. To paraphrase one of Leo’s favourite phrases: “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!” At the same time, whilst there is an obvious affinity between reactionary thought and Perennial Traditionalism, they aren’t the same thing. Wilber himself opens his book Spectrum of Consciousness with a quotation from Frithjof Schuon and the first footnote in his book Integral Psychology is a reference to the main exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, who I have mentioned above. Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”? Schillber’s writing can be very beautiful but it’s essence is: progressive. When it isn’t an appeal to a purely hypothetical future in which the degradations of postmodern nihilism and deconstruction have magically given rise to a spectacular New Age inhabited only by Tier 2 Systems Thinkers, “honouring” and “embracing” every “stage of development” (for lack of any humans left still worth honouring and embracing!), his defence of modernity is literally just the same old tired appeals to “liberal democracy” and “feminism”… Why does he fail to “integrate” any of the completely valid objections that have been raised against these demonstrably terrible ideas? I call him Schillber because, as I have demonstrated, his so-called “Integral Theory” is conveniently selective as to what it “integrates”…