Speaker 1: If you want to get the show early and ad free,
head on over to the Peak Kinyonas show dot com.
There you can choose from where you wish to support me.
Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me
about this, even though I think on the last ad
I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed,
you're going to have to subscribe Substack or through Patreon.
You can also subscribe on my website which is right there,
gum Road and what's the other one, subscribe Star And
if you do that, you will get access to the
audio file. So head on over to the pekan yonasshow
dot com. You'll see all the ways that you can
support me there. And I just want to thank everyone.
It's because of you that I can put out the
amount of material that I do. I can do what
I'm doing with doctor Johnson on two hundred Years Together
and everything else, the things that Thomas and I are
doing together on condinal philosophy, it's all because of you.
And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank
you enough. So thank you. The pekan Yonashow dot com.
Everything's there. Want to welcome everyone back to the Peking
Yona's show. Thomas is back and we are continuing the
series on continental philosophy. How are you doing todays?
Speaker 2: Thomas right, I'm going to talk about manual cont today.
Initially I was going to discuss the Reformation, and after
providing a background and Aquinas and Thomas thought, but I'm
going to do that after I conclude the main body
of this series, for reasons that I think will become
clear as I proceed. Emmanuel Kann is fundamentally important to
the Enlightenment project. I mean the point before that, in
my opinion, one of the only purely political theoretical contributions
from the Germans to the Enlightenment enterprise was Clausewitz. I
stand by that because Khan wasn't a political theorist. He
wrote precious a little on politics and direct capacities. Yet
he has this enduring and tremendously outside impact on conceptual
matters relating to a political discourse, which makes sense. He
was an intellectual giant. I'm not this session going to
talk about concepts like the categorical imperative and a prona posteriori,
distinctions and the thing in itself as a conceptual postulate.
Those things are tremendously important, but we're getting into very
deep metaphysics there and things like the anthropic principle, which,
in my opinion, I've got an epistemological view of politics,
among other things. That's one of the reasons why I
hold out Heidegger is so significant, not just because of
his ideas on epistemology and things and political ontology that
I view as systemically and very integral. You know, it's
because I don't think that politics is as discreet domain
as you know is often suggested. So it'll probably be
a two part treatment of cont and the Kant was
in conceptual dialogue with Hume, specifically Human's radical empiricism. Even
for an Enlightenment partisan, that was remarkable. But I mean
Hume obviously was not a continental theorist. But we'll get
into that too moving forward. I'm still not feeling great.
That's one of the reasons why I split this up,
but I think it's appropriate. Just not so much for
the sake of brevity, but I think it makes more
sense that way. Otherwise it becomes kind of unmanageable content.
An interesting background, and say the least, he was the
progeny of radical Pietus and the Germans is a deeply
theologically impacted people in terms of their intellectual culture. I
think that can't be overstated. You know, I made the
point before as being of a Heidegger, he's very much
in the tradition of meister Eckart, as with Schopenhauer. In
my opinion, though it's more obvious with somebody like Heidiger
than is a Schopenhauer fricta. But German Pietism is equally important,
and i'd argue was an essential aspect of the modern
German political and cultural mind, and one of the reasons
I think it's misguided. For example, when people posit it,
it's mostly very partisan minded Jewish writers as well as Englishmen.
They enjoy suggesting that the NSDAP was this culturally Catholic phenomenon.
It really was not at all. The National Socialists the
National Socialist heartland was the rural and semi rural Protestant north,
and I believe there's a direct connection between pious thought
and National Socialist ethics, especially as regards the congregational understanding
of communitarian life and the inner witnesses, the arbiter of
the political and social ethics and things like that. You know,
this isn't middling trivia or something. You know, what I'm
getting at is that it's just a way they two
people such as the aforementioned you know, fascism or the
Third Reich is their stand in for Lucifer. So they
and they, you know, the English being rabidly anti Catholic,
and you know the Zionis types having similar prejudices, a
little emergent from a different place. That's the source of
that conceptual prejudice. But even some people should know better.
There's some nice parrote that suggestion. But Khan was an
East Prussian from what's now the Countingingred, you know, so
the easternmost frontier of the Prussian state, you know, and
that undoubtedly colored his perspective on you know, high politics.
He lived a very priestly life. He was very much
like in that mold, you know. He never married. He
devoted pretty much the entirety of his waking life to
academic research and writing. He was tremendously prolific, you know,
and I I'm not sure people fully grasp his influence.
You brush up against Kantian perspectives constantly in serious academ
such that it continues to exist in legacy terms, and
it's just something people take for granted, nonsense like democratic
peace theory, which no serious person abides. Obviously, there is
some connection to Kant therein, but it's ambastardized and it's
dumbed down to the point of being infantile, a such
that I don't really think it's fair to claim a
direct lineage. However, CONTs anthropological suggestions about man as a
political actor and what his intrinsic motives are and how
these things can be manipulated are remarkably at odds with reality,
and his conclusions aren't really suggestive of the They're very
kind of self damning. You know, this is a man
who had absolutely no understanding of the political You know,
and Know Most of the Earth by Carl Schmidt is
a substantial portion of that book, which is Schmid's magnum opus.
In many ways, it's a savage repudiation of Kantian conceptual
biases and theoretical models, you know, which is very well placed.
But nevertheless, Knt was complicated, just like Hobbes was. You know,
Hobbes was a pure political theorist contra a manual count. However,
his ontological claims were you know, nakedly at odds with
reality and stuff like this, of course is the the
basis of of of scientism, you know, in the sense
of what getting Smith talked about it, you know, not
not as not a not a not a bias to
the scientific perspective. Scientism is, you know, a conceptual prejudice
that you know, suggests that uh, scientific paradigms you somehow
facilitate a revelation of reality that's essentially curative of all
you know, human shortcomings and things, and that's obviously preposterous
beyond belief the haunts you know again, his direct treatment
of politics, it's largely oblique and derivative relative to the
main thrust of his uh subject matter. Nevertheless, it becomes
central when one immerses himself and comes to truly understand
the core tenants of of conti and metaphysics and ethical postulates,
the three chief warps. Count is most known for our
critique of pure reason, critique of practical reason, and critique
of judgment. For example, a critique of judgment, he speaks
of politics and direct terms literally in one paragraph, and
that's it. When he talks explicitly of politics, he's generally
done so under the guise of metaphysics or law. He
was very much a legal theorist or by resort to
historical analogy or drawing upon what he views as precedent
the historical record to discuss what he views as a
progressive or curative imperative. UH. So, make no mistake, the body,
the main body of Kantian theory is full of practical
proposals and utopian social engineering proposals. But you you if
you were seeking out some sort of statement where I
can't like Hobbes does you know, breaks down what he
views as you know, European man's political mind and uh,
the source of a you know, it's uh, it's it's
it's structure and the nature of uh, you know, the
relationship between ethics and politics in direct capacities. You're not
going to find the two most significant theorists that Kant
was in dialogue with and that impacted his political thought
where we're so and Isaac Newton. I haven't read many
contemporary people who understand this fully. Michael Jones does. Newton
was a strange character, and his entire body of work
is basically an almost kind of petulant attempt to repudiate
Aristotelian logic. Okay, Be that as it may. Newton was
viewed as this intellectual giant who ushered in the signientific
revolution and thus the Enlightenment. This is the way that
you know, partisans of that perspective viewed it, and even
those who were not particularly disposed to take up that
proverbial banner with Zeo, he viewed him as essentially the
progenitor of, you know, kind of the new science, all right.
The view of Kant was that, you know, man had
been essentially mired in ignorance until he was able to
master the kinds of methodologies that were most splendidly synthesized
and systematized by people like Newton. You know this, for example,
you know, without an understanding of the natural world and
how to manipulate its aspects, you know, things like land
navigation or maritime navigation would be unthinkable. You know, even
comparatively prosaic things like building shelters against the elements. You
know this, This is the source of all practical and
curative knowledge relating to how man can master's environment and
improve upon his own mind towards those pragmatic ends. So
constant belief was that there was a method that could
be applied to state relations, most significantly international relations, but
also within the state where peace had been achieved in
discrete and limited capacities at minimum, And once this of
physics of the political had been fully systematized and adopted,
then that kind of architecture of permanent peace could be
implemented and sustained. Why that would be desirable we'll get
to in a minute. In the content perspective, it's different
than what we think of as the secular humanist perspective,
although again there is a relationship there of descent, you know,
not descent like descend isn't descended from the former. However,
again it's I take exception to it when people positive
that these sort of lazy polemical appeals of this secularly
humous left, you know, partake of a meaningful philosophical tradition,
because they really don't. And Kant would have never used
the term democracy because that would be meaningless in context.
You know, he talked, he talked about and enlightened republicanism,
which was not accidental. The relationship between I think there's
actually strains of neoplatanism and Kant, but that's a bit
for Afield. Anyway, CON's political theory, and we consider it
be like a discrete content political theory. It could be
summed up as republican government, enlightened republicanism, and international organization.
Kant had this idea that the doctrine of state, for
it to be not just legitimate but enduring, it had
to be rooted in law above all else. And again
he viewed the law as the sort of discrete science,
you know, whereby basic truths about the world could be revealed,
you know, almost by way of a methodology that you
know that the law and represented a sort of like
science of ethics, you know. And both these formulations, you know,
the idea of republican government and an international organization it
relied on this suggestion of peace through law, you know.
And he drew the distinction within and among states. The
process of coming to order political or or is a
matter of passing from the state of nature, which is
actiomatically a state of war, to a state of higher reason,
you know, which is the permanent or semi permanent piece.
So you, by definition or by essential aspects, the the
lawful state and the legitimate state are synonymous, and the
function of it is a maintenance of the peace at
above all else, which facilitates all other goods coming into being.
And again he appeals to morality and history more than
he does what we think of as a conventional political
theoretical postures. You know, it's it's not so much as
terroric as it is obleak. That's the best way I
can describe it. However, cont viewed the primary tension within
the European political mind and thus within the modern state itself,
you know, the nascent modern state. He view the primary
tension or the primary internal contradiction within that conceptual framework
as involving science contra morality. Like again Newtonian physics, to
con represented a kind of deep and revealed truth about
the nature of reality, its structure, its potentialities, and he
discerned within it like a natural tendency towards balance and order.
It's almost like this little marque and kind of will
within nature and within reality, you know, whereby you know,
the scientist or the physicists, you know, he can divinate
and identify in discrete terms, you know, kind of the
trajectory of this inherent will within uh reality and matter,
and by curating that you know, structures that part take
of of its essence, can you know, become perfected with
the correct mode of intervention and engineering. However, this is
co extent and alongside a moral consciousness which man and
man alone is capable of cultivating, you know, which distinguishes
them from beasts of the field. You know. And the
problem is that the setting of moral activity, how it
comes to be the precedent for it. The only way
we can understand it is by resort to you know,
strife and warfare. You know, that's the precedent. And even
even men who are morally correct in the contient view,
there's going to be coersive aspects to enforcing an enlightened morality,
which is going to call upon a certain zealousness to
sustain those efforts, and two inundate its standard bearers with
the fervor and violence figurative and literal. You know. To
see these things through, can't realize that these two tendencies
couldn't be properly reconciled in conventional ways, but they could
coexist in a complementary fashion, kind of like competing forces
within physics, you know, bound by the same laws of
nature and gravity or what have you if a common
theoretical basis could be identified and an understanding of these
competing forces they're in, you know, and how they could
be cultivated so as to allow some sort of harmonious
resolution to be realized, at least in terms of praxis.
And what's essential understandard too is that the state of nature, yes,
it is the state of war, but it also is
a state of perfect freedom, and the you know, free
will can flourish within that setting. The problem is that
there's not ethical restraints, so it becomes this, you know,
if not a war of all against all and not
easy in terms, it becomes a kind of glorified beast
yeary or might makes a roy and the perfection of
the human will and the full flourishing of it, you know,
can't possibly be realized. This relates to what Kant also
the identified as the basis of metaphysics, and this comes
up again and again in his main body of work.
He essentially divided the world into the realm of phenomena
and the realm of noumena. The world of or the
realm of phenomena is the realm of things in their
manifestation or appearance. The world of numena is the world
of things as they are in themselves, or as they
could be known in their essential capacity, if knowledge of
them could be acquired without the mediation of experience, which
is a fascinating postulate. But you know what's irrelevant here
is that the world of phenomena is what science reveals
to us. The world of numena is from where ethics
derived and how these things can be reconciled. If they
can be reconciled, that would be the basis of a
perfectly enlightened politique, whereby a perpetual peace could be accomplished
and thus a full flourishing of the human will, which
in Kantian terms is like the telos of politics, Like
that's why the state exists, you know, that's why politics exists,
you know, of the enlightened sort as he would characterize it.
Of course, that begs the question, and this was Schmid's
big concern, like why why is that important? And more
critically and more immediately, that's not the way humans are,
you know, And politics isn't this process whereby you know,
we we become ethically perfected or we or we socially
engineer man. And do you know something better than he was.
You know, politics is the business of friends and enemies
and why you know, Soirella made the same point, like
why violent is not just intrinsic to man, but why
it's essential to his creativity, you know, and they're going
to convergence of reason, will and passion and violent political
impulses allows man to kind of reach a relative's zenith
of action and conceptual activity. It doesn't really matter why
that is. It just is, you know. And so there's
idea that, well, we're gonna break a man of these
things that allow him to be creative and allow him
to you know, act out heroic values on sort of
the grand historical stage, you know, the idea that we
need to do away with that to realize some sort
of perfect free flourishing of free will for every man
and woman as much as possible. That really can't be rationalized.
And you know, it's it's the problem with all Enlightenment
paradigms and the problem with capital of liberalism is at base,
it takes a splendidly arbitrary set of values and aesthetical
preferences and declares these things are the highest good for
all time, for all people. Because I say so, you know,
and I say so, isn't good enough and appeal to
universal ethics few that these postulist may be a number.
Isn't good enough, you know. And it also and again no,
I'm no libertarian around Mesian, but it also begs the question,
why is this the business of the state? You know?
The state isn't this perennial thing. It's something that was
emergent as we know it that made a mistake. The
modern state is this discreete and unique phenomenon, you know,
it's not. We're not just talking about different iterations of
some identical tendency here or sociological impulse. The modern state
emerged out of the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War.
It endured for a little under three hundred years, you know,
and then gave way briefly to a kind of true
globalism in political terms, which proved to be totally unsustainable,
ing to a combination of fact or some of you know,
some related to humorism, which were historical. But you know,
the state's businesses were in peace. It's not it's not
the perfect a man or to like educate your children,
or to improve you know, the or to like mitigate
the tragedy of the commons or something, or like help
men and women like understand each other better, you know,
frankly suggesting the state should be doing anything other than
what it was taled to do. Co answer with, you know,
the raizondetra of of a collective defense and the need
to mitigate catastrophes such as that that began with the
defense truation of Frog and ended with the Westphalian peace,
you know, like why why is the state and instrumentality
of course? You know, the Schmidtian view is that, well,
the states is a stand in for for God to
the secularist, and it's acts of sovereign authority take on
the symbolic psychologic symbolic psychological trappings of miraculous events quite literally.
And there's also if you accept the content paradigm, you
basically need to accept that this sort of ethical schema
political in nature isn't bound by any territorial imperative, you know,
And a Schmidt point. I keep moving back to Schmidt
because he is the most direct rebuttal tou kan in
you know, in any epoch. Schmid makes the point about
the spatial nature of political life, because that's that's that's
an essential. It's not just conceptually essential. You know, you
can't talk about sovereignty unless you talk about soebrity over
a place. I can't give you coordinates in the middle
of the Atlantic Ocean and say, okay, you see, like
the United States Navy sovereign over these coordinates. You know,
I I can't tell you that just anywhere you are
on this planet. You know that, like the Portuguese Parliament
has the power to tax you, I mean, and being
goberally up twos. But you know, to make a point.
But part of it is you know, pragmatic, conceptual, But
part of it also is, you know, human life. The
setting of human life is physical reality. You know, that's
just the way humans are wired psychologically. But also you know,
it's literally the setting of any human action other than
that which is purely psychological in character and in a
category of pure mind. You know, So if you're talking
about it's not it's not accidental that the first political order,
and during really until only a few centuries ago, it
always attached directly to a discrete land area, great or small.
You know. So it's all good and well, I mean,
aside from everything else that's wrong. With these appeals to
what is reportedly a universal ethical schema aside everything else
that's wrong with that. You know, you're it's it's it's
it's located literally nowhere. You know, you're saying and saying that,
you know, there's a sovereign authority over everything. You're saying
that you know you're sovereign over nothing. You know, there's
a need for a concrete spatial orientation, and that's fundamentally important.
Frank Herbert makes that point too, which, uh, it probably
sounds like incredibly like spurgish, but I especially because like
in the Herbert universe, you're quite literally talking about massive
and vast slots of space time, you know, and and
discrete planets situated they're in. But the reason why there's
an emperor of the known universe is because people have
to be able to say, like, you know, there is
a planet, and there's a there's literally a man who
you know sits in in a palace on that planet
and is the emperor of you know, all of these
other worlds. You know. Otherwise, even even if you have
to figurehead and like the Petish, the Petentia emperors and
Doune like some of them have more power than others,
you know, depending on the man on the throne and
depending on the constellation of factors that are kind of
dictating affairs of the lads read. But even if he's
only a symbolic figurehead, there always has to be like
an emperor of the known universe, you know, otherwise there's
not an orientation point. And I remember this is before
like I read Carl Schmidt or anything. So I was
like twelve or thirteen years old when I first read that.
I remember thinking that was really profound because I've never
thought in those terms before. But yeah, that's that's essential.
It's uh, you know, and it's also too obviously. I mean,
I realize spending more time on the critique than I
am the subject matter of which you know, being postulated
by time. But the you know, the just war as
an essential aspect of an ethical schema. Yeah, there's a
very strong Thomas tradition there. But the way people talk
about it, at least in the Anglo sphere, it's a
content concept, you know, at least during like the Vietnam
era and beyond, you know, just speaking to what people
are probably familiar with who are listening to this now,
you know, and the everybody I would assume at this point,
you know, who follows their content knows the schmittyen objection.
You know, you're just talking about the tyranny of values
dressed up as universal imperatives. But aside from that, you know,
cont admits that you know, again, there's there's gonna be
a coercive aspect to forcing racalciff states and peoples to
join this federation you know that has abolished war. So
I mean, if you're gonna, if you're gonna wage war
to abolish war, you're rendering your enemy the ultimate you know,
adversary of humanity, which means that you're exponentially increasing the
level of animical hostility that there would be otherwise within
you know, an accepted you know, moral consensus found by
cultural and territorial parameters. So it's sort of a self
refuting proposition, and the content rebuttal to that is a
kind of special pleading whereby well, you know, the ends
justify the means, so long as you are, in fact,
you know, acting in accordance with an enlightened reason, you know.
And it's like, well, how would I determine that? Do
I like insult a panel of philosophers, and if they
if they give me, if they green lighted, that means
I can do whatever I want, you know, I mean,
that's this is kind of what I mean by saying
that con was kind of the ultimate Ivory Tower academic.
And this is why, this is why these people need
to be kept as far from politics as possible, you know,
because I mean there's anti human aspects of these things too.
And I'm not assigning this to Khan. His loose ideological
descendants are more often than not of a a certain stripe,
ideological stripe that is incredibly destructive and abides the kind
of anti human, anti cultural zeitgeist that quite literally wants to,
you know, wipe out the ability of people believe. Historically,
it wants to annihilate the basis of human identity. I mean,
really monstrous stuff. But even in lesser iterations, you know,
you're dealing with you're, you're, you're, you're dealing with zelots
who are kind of like a child who, in their
inability to understand some relatively complex puzzle or something besides this,
set it on fire, you know, or like upset the
table maybe is a better analogy, you know, That's why
I'm always coming back to the fact about dangerous it
is that I mean, I think, I think, I think,
I think the president is kind of a cipher and
a lame duck, but the office still does still hold
some concrete authority beyond the merely symbolic. You know. One
of the one of the really bad things about Trump
is that demand demands an idiots, you know, in politics.
I mean, he's got zero understanding of high politics. You know.
It's it's like a monkey holding a book on high
school algebra, you know. I mean, aside from the fact
that he's just kind of a bad guy and has
some really questionable commitments. You know, you can't have people
like that rennering decisions. That's it's preposterous, you know. And uh,
these things can't be remedied off of times. You know.
It's I'm gonna make a point again and again. However,
anybody feels about Bush forty one and Baker, they had
a viable model for the new global order moving forward,
you know, whether you and again, I mean, I don't
think globalism is a good thing, but uh, because it
was the reality of the intergem and border came down,
I'd rather have it be viable than not. And I
certainly rather have Bush and Baker at the Helm than
some crazy Zionists and some and some game show host
who's a an absolute Cretan on matters of my politics,
you know, the a uh an abject Cretan, you know,
white inward like Piggy Bill Clinton, deciding with these uniform
fetishists fuckheads like Wesley Clark, you know, to a for
all practical purposes like assault the Russian Federation in the Balkans.
They destroyed a decade of good will proceeding and eradicated
any possibility of full disarmament of strategic nuclear forces. They
basically poisoned the twenty first century, you know, by sheer hubrists.
And in the case of Piggy, just like abject, like
staggering degrees of stupidity. You know, you can't. I mean
Bill Clinton, the fact that Bill Clinton, you know, the guy,
the guy should have been like face down in a ditch,
like no I'm not getting violence or like fed posting
or fed speaking, but like the guy who are totaling
the believe like sub human piece of shit. So I mean,
that's like an extreme example, but you can't. You can't.
You can't let these people anywhere near the levers of power.
That's where I got today. Like, I'm sorry that this
was kind of brief, man, And I'm still kind of
recovering from not feeling well, and I've been burning the
candle on both ends sort of because I'm trying to
get stuff done before the fourth and I've got people
coming to town and which I'm excited about. There's like
a lot of fun stuff on the agenda, but I'm
trying to get my health back so that i can
be a proper host and stuff. So forgive me. If
this didn't go as long as you were, the subs
would like.
Speaker 1: Oh, no worse, no worse, just tell people where you're
at right now, and yeah get here.
Speaker 2: Well, no, thanks, you're you're very generous, I mean always,
but yeah, I'm My website is in the project being
retooled and it's almost done. But it's an up to
date feed now of like everything I'm doing, like here
with Pete and with our dear friend Jay Burden, and
with my friends Adam and Nick, and with my my
phaser pod. It's like a it's like a one stop
kind of site where you can find everything I'm doing.
It's Thomas seven seven seven dot com. It's number seven
h S seven seven seven dot com. I'm I'm told
that the mobile version is still kind of janky. That's
being worked out. But if you try and load it
like on your smartphone or on your you know, your
droid or whatever, it doesn't work. Don't like blow me
up like it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's just
might be fucked up on the mobile app. Other than that,
you can always find me in Substack. That's what my
pod is, and like long form stuff and all kinds
of other good things, and we got like an active
chat going there. It's real Thomas seven seven seven at substack.
Like go to those two places and you can find
all my other stuff, you know, like myke I've got
a t gram and an Instagram and things like that.
But yeah, go to go to my website or go
to substack.
Speaker 1: All right, So the next episode, thank you, Thomas, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome h