Please recommend works that relate to the worldview described in this picture

OP asked about de Maistre and Girard talks about him. There's nothing wrong with that. De Maistre himself wrote a book about the necessity of the Pope in Europe - shit, he even thought the Spanish Inquisition had its reasons.

If you have problems with Christianity, that's one thing. If you can't understand why somebody would bring up Girard in a thread about de Maistre, who was an ultra-Catholic himself, that's another.

De Maister was literally the daddy of the Counter-Enlightenment.

Basically Nick Land in a wig.

Still Enlightenment. Same pretense.

This tbqh

Anything by this guy, really.

How has being a hardcore Catholic reactionary monarchist the same pretense as muh age of reason progress narrative?

>tfw secretly hoping this becomes a thread about based Catholic intellectuals

are there any others as metal as de maistre?

There is arguably nothing more metal than this, in which Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor btfo's Jesus himself.

De Maistre is pretty extreme. I don't listen to a lot of metal, so I can't give you a good analogy. The guy in the pic above is Donoso Cortes, who absolutely would have worn power armor if it was available in the 19C.

Girard is not especially metal himself, but he will make you want to read Clausewitz to better understand him. I've only recently gotten into Catholic writers, myself, though. If I can think of anyone else I'll share.

There must be others though. Maybe Veeky Forums will recommend them.

I forgot Carl Schmitt. He joined the Nazis in the 1930s but they kicked him out in '36 because they thought he was faking it and was secretly a Catholic and a Hegelian.

Also, Hegel a shit

...

looool

I thought Catholics and Nazis were buddies?

Some were more than others.

Take Heidegger, for instance. He never apologized for his involvement with the Nazis, but converts to Christianity on his deathbed.

Carl Schmitt is a more interesting example because, unlike Heidegger, who people will argue forever had a philosophy that was *maybe* about Nazism and *maybe* not, Schmitt is a political theorist who gives a much better understanding of what the German political establishment was thinking, in terms of sovereignty, 'land and sea,' all this stuff.

Both Schmitt and Heidegger were deeply pious men, and both participated in the Nazi movement.

The thing about this stuff that I find interesting is how it connects to people thinking today about the red pill, stuff like that. I've seen a thousand tumblr blogs that are equally full of Catholic imagery and far-right imagery, nature, Defend Europa, all this stuff. So I think that on some deep level it's because right-wing political religion and Catholicism have some similarities...and they certainly did in Germany in the 1930s.

That's sort of a long and confusing post, but...anyways. I guess the thing is that the term 'Catholic intellectual' seems like an oxymoron at first, but the writers who seem to make it work are really interesting. Even if they're still completely compromised, in many ways. That's what makes them interesting.

What's weird is that a guy like Schmitt can be read today to provide a completely compelling argument for why the Germans acted as they did. And yet, we know historically that this man does not seem to get along well with Nazi dogma. It's the same thing with Heidegger. He joins the party, makes these speeches, and then drifts away.

In the end, the Nazis basically just didn't know what to do with their awesome German education system. Total paradox: the minds best equipped to tell us today how Nazis thought then were least palatable to the Nazis who were around them when they were writing. You can't make this stuff up.

Warren Beatty?

...

Thanks for the informative posts

Buddhist lit

Really liked Reds and Dick Tracy. Maybe I'll check out BM...

y is joe so based?

If you want to read some weird fucked up French stuff look into Georges Bataille, specifically Death and Sensuality.

>OP asks for stuff similar to de Maistre
>user suggests Bataille because he's French and "fucked up"
great job really well done

considerations sur la france - joseph de maistre

Why did he convert?

Thanks.

No probs. Sorry it took me so long to make the point. To be honest, I hate feeling like I've shit up a perfectly good thread by taking it off topic. But this is, like, my favourite stuff. And I love the red pill.

It's hard to say. Commentators have theorized, that he was more or less a Catholic the whole time, but was trying to do the impossible: square that with his very German love of all things Greek. That's never going to be a perfect marriage, but it doesn't stop people from trying. And few have tried harder than Martin Heidegger.

What's interesting, I guess, about the German philosophers and the French is that the French seem to like chivalry and the Middle Ages and the Germans seem to like classical antiquity. I think it comes out in the philosophy. The French are good at talking about desire, the Germans are good about talking about the death of God.

Don't forget that the whole story gets even crazier when you remember that Heidegger had an affair with Hannah Arendt. Just in case shit wasn't cosmopolitan enough.

Anyways, as Girard says, most of Europe is created out of this struggle between French and German thought, right back to Charlemagne, if not even earlier. And it all has to do with Christianity.

The Nazis persecuted the Catholic Church in Germany quite a bit. After all, it was'nt a "Germanic" Christianity, so it got in the way of their ethno-nationalism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_persecution_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_Germany

Schmitt and Heidegger were both Catholics but around the time they joined the Nazis they were breaking away from their faith. Schmitt in the 20s was basically just carrying on the work of De Maistre, Donoso Cortes, and the Catholic Counter Revolution more generally.

Well...maybe those last two sentences are a stretch. There's more than just the French and Germans going on. I guess what I mean to say is that whatever it is that we call 'Europe' is better understood as those two countries being more or less on the same page, rather than being at war with each other.

What ties them together? The Pope. And this connects to what de Maistre was saying about the revolution. This is what part of what he is talking about in OP's picture, that without something holding people in check, something that is more than purely national - even though nationalism is important - everything goes to shit.

youtube.com/watch?v=bB2U9XXpHP4

A highly biased wikipedia article isn't much proof. The Nazis persecuted anyone who was a threat to their totalitarian rule including both protestants and catholics. Luckily both groups rolled over gladly when they found the Nazis were happy to scratch their bellies.

Pic related is pretty informative.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_persecution_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_Germany

I'll take an article with over 100 citations than a three sentence Veeky Forums post personally.

de Maistre is a phenomenal writer. His scope is expansive and his style is without compare.

For other brilliant Rightist / aristocratic writers I recommend,

A. Ludovici, H. G. Treitschke, C. Schmitt, M. Oakeshott E. Voegelin, M. Heidegger.

Bump for more RIGHTIST writing.
Just read Houellebecq's essays on Lovecraft.

Recommended.

bump

I've read some Evola, he's one of the writers who started this whole modern counter-reformation. Every once in a while I try to read FP Yockey but he always seems like Oswald Spengler after a series of minor concussions. Could be just me though.

Rene Guenon is completely based.

Since Girard was mentioned, let me share this highly stimulating talk with Thiel.

youtube.com/watch?v=MGVVRnM50yY

The talk revolves around ascendancy, and technology and globalism, which are polar antagonisms in Thiel's view.

>he's one of the writers who started this whole modern counter-reformation
No, he's not. He isn't in line with any of the mentioned Catholics.
I'm much more invested in thomism so I've missed out on the "conservative" Catholicism. Kirk was a massive disappointment. I'll read some Tocqueville, Schmitt and de Maistre.

Holy fuck, based user delivers. Girard and Thiel are like two of my favourite people. Going to listen to this right now. Will post thoughts later.

This is a good point. Evola writes about rejecting the modern world, but you're right, not in the ways that the Catholics do. Thanks for the clarification good sir.

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His rejection is asking for something other than a return to God, King and Country, that's for sure.

what was disappointing about kirk

His method, reliance on rhetoric and assumption of common ground.

Reactionary thought is infantile. Its inability to come to grips with modern science has rendered it completely irrelevant since the middle of the 19th century.

I have no idea what this post means, and I doubt anyone else will either. I am sort of looking forward to seeing you try to explain it. In a morbid kind of way.

I'll make this easier for you. If you think 'modern science' can produce political conclusions, I have news for you: the one who is in the middle of the 19th century is you, user. For an enriching discussion of eugenics, /pol/ is right over there.

FYI, Heidegger did express regrets about his involvement with the Nazi regime. He called it one of the most stupid things he ever did, or something to that effect.

damn you're retarded

Yeah, I know. But he's very oblique about it, as in the case of the notorious Spiegel interview. He seems to have wanted it to be something more than it was or could be - or, perhaps more accurately, it always was something he didn't want to see. Which is why people have issues with his philosophy. He brings this all on himself.

Not that he would care, I suspect. And this is the thing. Because he is unquestionably a major thinker, maybe more now than ever with the rise of the right.

why

More mildly retarded than full retard, I think. Full retard would be making pointless ad hominem shitposts, which doesn't have quite the same charm as it used to. But by all means, enjoy yourself. In my own experience it tended to make me look pretty foolish in the long run.

>I'll make this easier for you. If you think 'modern science' can produce political conclusions

Modern science produces the socioeconomic environment in which political conclusions are born.

Reactionary thought is infantile because going back to "throne and altar" is like trying to crawl back into the womb: scientific and economic progress has rendered such a fantasy absurd.

>Modern science produces the socioeconomic environment in which political conclusions are born.

True. It also produces industrial capitalism and wage slavery, which people for some perverse reason 'react' to. In all kinds of different ways.

>scientific and economic progress has rendered such a fantasy absurd.
Here's a puzzle. Is it actually bait if only one of us realizes it?

Rather than be mean, I will just quote from the video posted above. Economic progress works as long as the economic pie everyone shares from is growing.

The pie is not growing, my friend. That is the point. The cake is a lie. If you believe 18C dogma about globalization having the answers you are free to do so, but if you do so in this thread you will have to convince people who do not support those views. Describing it as a fantasy is probably not the way to begin doing so.

>but converts to Christianity on his deathbed.

source, right now!

wishful thinking

Well, I'd like a source because I've never heard it and it would pretty much refute his entire philosophy.

"A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg university professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of the conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated."

As with all things Wikipedia, we will never know for certain. You can find lots of other connections to Catholicism in Heidegger's life: wanting to enter the priesthood, take over professorial chairs, etc.

It's not like this is confirmation, I'll grant you. But this thread of Catholicism runs from one end of his life to the other. You can never really be on completely solid ground talking about someone else's mystical intuitions. You can only look at what remains.

Again, I think he wanted to do the impossible: combine Greek and Catholic thought. It's the same thing that his favourite poet, Holderlin, was doing, and Holderlin became a recluse and then went mad. I think Heidegger went to similar places. Not crazy. Just compromised and trying to get out of it by talking about authenticity and Being. But that's just me, and I'm not a scholar.

I agree with your entire post about his relation to Catholicism, I just didn't know about the priest.

Do we know what were Heidegger's last words?

If I knew that I would publishing scholarly papers on Heidegger right now. I'm reasonably sure it wasn't "420 blaze it YOLO."

Even if, as well you know, he *would* say that you only live once and that you should make it count. This is why he is what he is, and even if people disagree with him they still have to read him. He certainly changed the way I look at things. Even if I think he probably doesn't have as much to say to us today as maybe thirty years ago. But philosophical legacies go up and down like that, I think.

But yeah, Heidegger's final words. You can only imagine.

>But yeah, Heidegger's final words. You can only imagine.

So we have no decent biographers?

There are definitely lots of biographies worth reading, if you're really interested. People seem to like the Safranski one, but I found the one by Zimmerman to be much more helpful in finally understanding Being and Time. I didn't read B&E until after I read Zimmerman, and things became a lot less obscure...at least, as much as can be expected when reading Heidegger, who is famously arcane in the way that he writes.

Of course, it's helpful to read Nietzsche as well, since he also plays such a huge role in Heidegger's thought. I am currently in the process of rather cruelly shitting on Derrida in another thread right here on Veeky Forums, but only because I think Derrida himself tries to carry on Heidegger's project in ways that make Heidegger's own philosophical project into a postpolitical narrative. Basically, the last thing Heidegger would have wanted would have been SJWs, but there is no way you can conclude otherwise from reading Derrida.

In fairness, Heidegger himself supported the original and prototype SJWs: the Nazis. So it's all pretty recursive.

I know Heidegger's philosophy very well. I just figured he stayed a radical Lutheran obscurantist and didn't try to get closer to Catholicism after his break from in it his 30s.

B&E, Jesus Murphy. B&T. Duh.

He had regular contact with theologians and I know Ratzinger had a great interest in him because of it.

this quote isn't real

Why does the black space between the two paragraphs looks like it's flashing?

Optical effect from the bright white text above and below I guess.

I'm really wondering what part of set theory made reaction "infantile".

"A city is close to an immortal being." Excuse me while I gather up the fragments of my exploded skull. My thanks for sharing this, user.

He took quite a bit of inspiration from de Maistre and Cortes though. I got into the latter from reading Evola and noticing him citing those two in his major works.

Can you explain the logically necessary connection between our level of socioeconomic progress and non-monarchical forms of governance ?

bumping

How about, oh, I dunno, actually reading de maistre.
This little epigram gets posted everywhere by non-Catholic heathens who still believe in democracy and secularism, they are just drawn in by the grimdark language and could never understand the deeply thomistic rationale behind his vision of life.

Fuck no, hitler hated the pope's guts, meanwhile pius was running an illegal underground operation smuggling people out of nazi occupied land.
Meanwhile the yung soon-to-be-pope A$AP John Paul II was saving babes from nazi trains in poland and got run over by a nazi truck and got a concussion, then got another concussion from a rifle butt.

> 'Catholic intellectual' seems like an oxymoron at first
Only to illiterates desu.
There was a time when Catholics were the de facto intellectuals of europe.

That's because thomism is not understood by most. Liberalism (conservatism) of the American/English type are not compatible and this deep misunderstanding of what ought to be conserved and on which basis is best shown in the work of Russel Kirk. Liberty, property, political tradition are just passing fads for the thomist as the basic axiom is not giving everyone the rights to persue their own goods, but tailoring society to guide people to Virtue.
Reading the Conservative Mind and Whose Justice? Which Ratonality really shows this.

Where to read things like this? All his stuff seems focused on authoritarianism specifically, and not violence, which is what I'm interested in.

Not in a n edgy way, but in...exactly the same way as pic related. I'm already reading Clausewitz.

I'm interested in this question also. Long post incoming.

There is always a relationship between authority and violence. Laws - even unwritten laws - in the end have to be backed up by something. Force is the gold in every political gold standard.

I think a lot of this actually comes from Hegel. In Hegel, the master-slave relationship is necessarily one of violence and physical courage: if the master had not defeated the slave and appropriated him, body and soul, the slave would not be who he is. He lost the fight.

Violence is inscribed on authority in both its outward political forms and arguably its interior dimension as well. What Marxists usually fail to understand about themselves is that class struggle is another form of ressentiment. The revolution is necessarily violent, and the fact that it can be justified on the grounds of being directed against Evil Capitalists is yet another scapegoat.

What I would say is the problem today is that people have created the cult of the victim. Because violence is always a possibility, violence is therefore inherently bad. It's not. It is simply a part of mimesis.

Back before I started reading Girard I found this guy interesting. He's not popular today anymore because actual Marxism morphed into cultural Marxism, and Marxists like Baudrillard turned into Nietzscheans to look for an answer. In the end he concluded that everything - even violence - was simulacral, which was an interesting but I think confused response. Derrida couldn't explain meme violence, but Baudrillard couldn't explain terrorism, either.

>What Marxists usually fail to understand about themselves is that class struggle is another form of ressentiment. The revolution is necessarily violent, and the fact that it can be justified on the grounds of being directed against Evil Capitalists is yet another scapegoat.
You are misunderstanding a big part of Marxism here. In Marxism, violence will make the Proles so desperate that their own violence will be the best thing for them to do. In other words, instead of happily chomping on their grain like the good donkeys they are, their masters' spurs will drive them into kicking back themselves. The idea is not that the workers SHOULD rise up and overthrow the greedy capitalists; it is that they MUST.

I do not agree that this will inevitably happen, but I agree that it is the inevitable result of such things happening.

There's no problem today. This is what you must understand if you accept violence, because if you accept violence you accept everything; everything is as it "deserves" to be.

But people have always had the cult of the victim. We called them martyrs. Before, the Romans had Lucretia. And so on.

>There's no problem today. This is what you must understand if you accept violence, because if you accept violence you accept everything; everything is as it "deserves" to be.

I have some serious doubts about 21C Nietzsche. Not that he himself was wrong. More that people accept him unquestionably.

There has to be a limit. This is what de Maistre is saying. In order for there to be a limit, people are going to have to at some point stop being mimetic and agree on something. Even *this* process, Girard will say, will involve yet another murder. And so on.

Peter Thiel got it right. The danger lies in everybody virally copying everyone else. So did Clausewitz. In a world where everyone is constrained by the logic of the duel, you don't get the Ubermensch or even tragedy. Maybe some people have powerful, even transcendent experiences. But everything else dies.

are you mocking me?

100% not mocking you. That line was gold, and the entire video was excellent. Sorry if it came out that way.

what books do i need to read to understand analytical thomism

Anything Etienne Gilson.

You know who else is interesting? Frank Herbert. The romantic hero of Dune sees all too clearly that all his roads lead to jihad.

This is why people say that Dune is the #1 SF novel of all time, and why 40K borrows so much from it. The later novels do not compare but they're basically all meditations on the limitations of totalitarianism.

There's a plethora of authors, Edward Feser being the best introduction. After that Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe are the important names. You'll need to read Aristotle before that. Aquinas is hard as fuck and honestly leave him for last.

is dune all a guy needs to read in the series? are the other books necessary?

On de Maistre
Back again. This time with another great video.

youtube.com/watch?v=T_rI9ETu0gI

Plants don't think there's anything wrong with killing why should you?

40K is like jihad in all directions. Which is what makes it not jihad.

It's jihad-postmodernism, which is exactly what being an actual jihadi is opposed to. Joining ISIS is LARP 40K to the nth power. No cool models to play with but 72 virgins brah

No wonder they ban art in the Middle East. Nietzsche says we have art in order not to die of the truth, but if you are a fuckface ISIS cuntlord that is exactly what you want.

Based Western culture go go go.

Gird thy loins, seigneur.

It depends on how highly you rate Herbert as a thinker-artist. The fact that the writings of one man gave us both 40K and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (granted, not in the same book, but whatever) makes me think he was on to something. 12 million neckbeards later it's hard to argue with that.

I find the later Dune novels tedious, to be honest. But that's how it is. If you want to see how a person's mind works, read everything of them. Or as much as you can handle. Good philosophical speculation doesn't always translate into good philosophical speculative fiction. So Tolkien is a big deal and we like seeing movies based on it. Herbert is a big deal but his themes are imho much more dark, which is why they're harder to adapt.

Herbert's stories are more *overtly* religious while Tolkien wrote epic fantasy, which is only tacitly so. Also LOTR ended, or had the sense of an ending. The important parts of Dune end with the Paul Atreides saga but continue after because Herbert was still thinking about ideas that because they were about the political nature of myths could not be wrapped up within a myth themselves.