Tagged: Eric Voegelin

q&a 9

KT Answers: Unterwegs zu Heidegger Cul-De-Sac, pt.1

In this episode of our regular q&a podcast we answer reader's questions about the influence of Martin Heidegger on Internet based rightist identiterian movements. In the first episode we give an outline of the current state of Heideggeriana in the mainstream academia which seems to lead us to conclusion that Internet fringe apparently understood him far better than his academic followers and interprets. This was made clear mainly by finalization of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe and publication of the so called "black notebooks" - diaries which, judging by his own evaluation, contained Heidegger's most intimate thoughts and the central point of his philosophy. As the end result is that it is now obvious that he was indeed a committed national socialist, at least in the sense of what he understood as meta-political essence of national socialism, and that this is also at the very least quite close to his project of the destruction of traditional metaphysics, the sizeable chunk of contemporary philosophers now seem to realize how they have been building their academic houses quite near the entrance of the underworld, if not even somewhat further down the hole.

3

Remarks on Eric Voeglin’s Notion of Gnosticism: Yugoslavia as an example of Gnostic Neverland

In this podcast we comment upon some remarkable passages from Eric Voegelin's New Science of Politics explaining his understanding of what he calls Gnostic "dreamworld", carried over from the Ancient world to modernity. In the first half, after providing some preliminary explanations of Voegelin's terminology, we discuss the theoretical, or rather anti-theoretical, assumption that is a calling card of a Gnostic: a prohibition of questions; we talk about this strange attempt to constrain the intellect while simultaneously advocating for unbridled progress, especially in the paradigmatic example of Karl Marx and communist movement. Also, we point out the genuine anti-theist character of Gnostic intellectuals and the way how modern philosophy for the most part assimilated it. In the second part we talk about the very instructive, yet not so very well known, example of the one specific Gnostic neverland: Yugoslavia. We provide the main features of Yugoslav ideology, the mentality of its adherents, both past and present, and put the phenomenon in the context of our day and age. In conclusion we discuss the hypothesis of the prevalence of Gnostic ideologies in the global politics of today.