Comments on: Liberalism and the Folk http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4084&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=liberalism-and-the-folk Liber esse, scientiam acquirere, veritatem loqui Sat, 18 May 2013 18:56:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Cologero http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4084&cpage=1#comment-9715 Cologero Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:20:44 +0000 http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4084#comment-9715 Good points, golgonooza. Pace the New Right, it reinforces in a different way that liberalism is not the logical outcome of Tradition, but rather a pseudo-Tradition, that arose from a rejection or reversal of fundamental principles.

Liberalism denies the existence of truth with the naive assumption it will spontaneously arise in a “neutral and rational public sphere” through debate and conversation. Instead, it became the battleground for different perspectives, subject only to the Will to Power. Those with the most power came to dominate the so-called neutral public sphere. Nietzsche’s thought is the logical outcome of the liberalism: he praises the will to power to embrace and promote perspectives rather than to arrive at Truth. The latter project, he calls decadent.

Nietzsche expected out of the ruins of liberalism that a noble pagan superman would arise. Instead, we ended up with the hermeneutics of suspicion. If the will to power is the ultimate reality, then of course power and violence is the result, both of which Nietzsche praised. But there is no superman to dominate and enforce his will over the rest. Instead we have a society of the petty minded, suspicious of each other, and battling over their respective material and sensual interests.

]]> By: golgonooza http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4084&cpage=1#comment-9714 golgonooza Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:46:13 +0000 http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=4084#comment-9714 The very process of secularization as commonly thought of as a ‘rolling back’ of superstition to create a space for the neutral and rational public sphere has been called into question by radical orthodoxy. It claims that liberalism has been born out of this belief in the neutrality of the secular, when in fact the secular is actually a pseudo-theological creation, replacing the sacred with different ultimate concerns.
For instance Neo-liberalism rests on the idea that political subjects need protecting from each other, from which the notion of rights comes. In this pseudo-theology the fundamental nature of the world is violence and power.
This just replaces the Augustinian view of the world as fundamentally harmonious – violence appears in this view as an intrusion into that order, and humans don’t need protecting from each other, but reconciling with each other.

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