This is a highlight of Matthew Raphael Johnson’s “Some Thoughts on Johann Herder and Modernism” (originally available at www.rusjournal.com/herder.html; accessed 19 February 2009. That website is now defunct and Johnson is slowly moving his material to the new and highly-recommended www.rusjournal.org).
These posts will try to show why the GOP utterly failed to account for the rise of Trump and ultimately on why neoconservatism/neoliberalism not only is politically shallow, but probably mentally alienated.
- Herder’s Critique of the Enlightenment: the study of man is different from the study of empirical science.
- Peoples are distorted if they are abstracted from their whole.
- The idea of social contract is a false bill of goods.
- For such a contract to exist the civilizational apparatus would have to already be in place.
- This is why attempts to spread “democracy” universally fail.
- We are born into community and cannot exist apart from it. Thus, the idea of autonomous man is false.
- Epistemological premise of Herder: the conceptualization of data must always use poetry and memory as valid modes of knowing.
- Epistemology is intensely social.
- If we divorce it from the social life in which we find it–and the historical consciousness–then we divorce knowledge from reality.
- We cannot remove “romance” from reason.
- The spirit of loyalty and tradition is what maintains loyalty, not mathematical and economic equations. (This is why Donald Trump won the nomination.)
- These are relations of family, church, village.
- These relations are immediate because it is these relations that make conceptual mediation (i.e., reason) possible.
- Aesthetics: to aestheticize nature is to imprint the general will upon it and place it within the cultural vortex.
- Language, tradition, memory must all form a unified whole.
- Failure to do this results in alienation.
- Organic is not pantheistic
- What does “organic” mean?
- Simply that the whole is manifest in the part.
- The nation is not the State.
- Custom, tradition, and nationality are not things one “consents” to.
- They are the conditions for one to consent to anything.
- “Liberal” consent is a fraud. No one consents to be economically ruled by George Soros.