Monday, March 16, 2020

The philosophy of theological materialism in contrast to the radical spiritualist philosophy of history


John Mosbey writes (“Reception” of Dugin) : “Carl Schmitt, paraphrasing Max Weber, claimed: “it is possible to confront irrefutably a radical materialist philosophy of history with a similarly radical spiritualist philosophy of history.” In his Fourth Political Theory, Dugin articulates just such a claim.”

The deeper problem with Aleksandr Dugin's worldview is that in reality there is no non-material spiritual world, there is only ascetic interpretations derived from spiritual language and strict ascetic disciplines that overcome or block all material desires, which bring feelings of great bliss to the ascetic that is exaggeratedly described as a spiritual union with God. The inward God of the beatific vision of Christianity, or the Samadhi in Hinduism, was/is an ascetic peak material experience and not a spiritual union with God.

If we take the word “metastasis,” the spread of something, like a disease, from an initial site to a different or secondary site, and apply it to the split between the material and the spiritual, we can see the numerous problems this led to, not the least of which was, ironically and tragically, the decline of religion.

The liberals and progressives more or less rejected religion mainly because Western science could find no trace of the spiritual or a spiritual God. And they were right. But they were wrong to reject religion and Godhood.

Although few have heard of it the philosophy of theological materialism affirms a religious materialist philosophy in contrast to the radical spiritualist philosophy of history.

Rather than killing religion and God or going backward to a traditionalist school which in truth repudiates all the great Western achievements of modernity, we might have gone back to the point of the metastasis and rejected the the split between the material and the spiritual. There is no non-material spiritual God but we can reach ascending levels of supermaterial Godhood by way of material and supermaterial evolution, as seen in the philosophy of theological materialism. Real Godhood is reached by material evolution and not by the symbolic experience of bliss reached in ascetic practices.

So given Dugin's combined Russian imperialistic West-hating Neo-Eurasianism and his version of the anti-life Guénon/Evola Traditionalist School, and although I respect the breadth of his thinking, I don't have much time for Dugin. I live in the West and I am proud of the West. Patriotism has been unfairly lost in seeing only the flaws of the West, which are redeemable. For example, an ethnopluralism of ethnostates or regions could be established, legally, in the United States, in line with real kin and ethnic centered human nature, with our constitutional separation of powers and states or from an amendment, strongly protected by a defensive federalism, which opposes global empires.

Ethnostates were examined courageously in clear prose by Wilmot Robertson back in 1993 without veering into Heideggerian metaphysics. A humane religion from science was valiantly mapped out by Raymond Cattell. And Edward Wilson's sociobiology makes it impossible for honest people to sidestep the biological origin of social behavior---which includes religion. These men deeply respected the culture-creating West and the Western gene pool and they inspired the development of my pro-Western religious philosophy of theological materialism.

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