Political Platonism and Nativism

An Alternative to National Socialism

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏@Aussie_EliasP

Recently, there has been an interesting debate emerging between Keith Woods and Joel Davis on whether or not it is necessary for nationalists to adopt the ideology of national socialism. Keith opened by critiquing NS for its German Chauvinism and suggesting it could simply be stepped over as a historical curiosity, and Joel has replied with an extensive defence of its ideological necessity.

Since the issue has been raised, I feel that this is a good time to weigh in from an Australian Nativist perspective, not in a spirit of anger or hostility, but simply because National Socialists are undeniably a serious and popular presence within dissident politics in Australia and Joel’s arguments are worth responding to. Further to that, the criticism has often been made of Nativists that they lack a coherent or at least well thought through ideology, and I feel that on the whole there is greater work to be done to expound upon our political idealism from a more academic perspective. This response is my personal contribution to the start of that ideological task based upon my own ideological journey towards what I see as a consistent and coherent nationalist position, and I don’t claim to speak for all Nativists.

Before responding to Joel’s points, however, I want to emphasise that despite underlying ideological disagreements, there is a complete agreement on the need for principled racialism, mass deportations of non-whites from white nation-states, and demographic restoration of our nations. Australia needs that to survive. Agreeing to all that as well as the need to reject liberalism and its anthropology, National Socialism, as a unified philosophy, is still open to a critique from the right as has been made in the past by representatives of the Traditionalist School. I would not argue that pushing National Socialism is necessarily counter-productive, but I think National Socialism has flaws and limitations that mean that it is not as productive to push it as it is other nationalist alternatives, though I mean that in an ultimate rather than a tactical sense. For me, the key problem is that National Socialism is often presented as an all-encompassing worldview, and its quasi-Nietzschean philosophical foundation is asserted without much serious exposition. In this response, I first highlight what I see as some of the fundamental flaws of the National Socialism expressed by Joel and then propose an ideological solution combining Political Platonism and Nativism.

The Need for Ideology

Joel states that his key contention is that the idea of nationalism requires its own ideology which centres that idea. While this sounds appealing prima facie, it's worth asking whether the idea of nationalism actually belongs at the core of a comprehensive worldview. Is Joel suggesting that this should be our first principle, or is it the case that nationalisms follow from other principles that are more fundamental? It seems to me that nationalism is too concrete and particular to form the basis for a truly universal ideology in that it is necessarily operating in a relativistic sphere of different and irreducible national ideas, rather than being a true absolute.

Joel appeals to a Nietzschean idea of life as an existential struggle to philosophically justify his view of the primacy of nationalism, but I believe that appeals to these quasi-Nietzschean views that were based in what was in the first place the National Socialist distortion of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not especially helpful. They are simply window dressing applied to what is ultimately an appeal to the brute fact of biological struggle on an ontic level. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is a serious thinker and one with some helpful ideas. I follow Fr Pavel Florensky and the other Silver Age Russian philosophers in reading Nietzsche as a representative of the primacy of the cult rebelling against the “Socratism” of the rational and abstract worldview of modern science and the rational individual of liberalism, for example, in its Kantian mode. While Nietzsche sought to invert Platonism, in focusing on the sensuousness and meaning creation of cultic activity in the form of Greek tragedy, he actually leads us back to what Florensky called “concrete idealism.” This concrete idealism or sacral materialism sees both human tools and conceptual thinking as derivative from primordial cultic activity. Despite these helpful pointers, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the relativism of his project of value creation speaks against him being a viable option for a standalone worldview due to all the classical objections raised by Plato such as the transcendental necessity of Forms for the possibility of thought and speech or the transcendental necessity of the Good for ethical choice. Furthermore, in bringing the voluntarist project to its ultimate logical conclusion he fails to cut off what is actually one of the key foundations of nihilism.

Due to all of the above, I believe that we cannot base the nationalist idea on some sort of “life principle” and instead should turn to the primary aspects of Political Platonism, including the metaphysical apparatus of Platonism which I personally accept in its specifically Orthodox Christian form. Other principles, such as the ideal of the “mean constitution” in political theory will also be prior to key ideas of nationalism that Joel raises in relation to the struggle between democracy and liberalism. Ultimately, the primacy of the Good is undeniable, first of all in accounting for the very existence of nations. Nationalism follows only in relation to the determination of the unique “personality” of ethnic groups in relation to Mind as the principle of essence. Furthermore, eugenics should be grounded here in relation to the stable Good as Plato had it, and not in relation to Nietzschean struggle and value creation. Joel’s statement that “the essence of National Socialism is the good of the nation being elevated above any individual interest” sounds more like the essence of the classical Platonic political project of the guidance of the state by philosopher kings. All this is to say that nationalism as National Socialism does not reach the necessary level of metaphysical thinking to provide the first principles for a complete worldview, but nationalism does work as a secondary result of Platonist political principles.

But if nationalism as an ideology is too particular to form the fundamental basis of a comprehensive worldview, it is also too universal to be suitable as something that is true to nations themselves. This might seem bizarre and counter-intuitive, but a one-fits-all National Socialism implies a uniformity of national ideas that eliminates the possibility of a true pluralism of ethnic consciousnesses and political predispositions. To steal from a famous quote, I’ve met Australians, Americans, Chinese, and Indians, but I’ve never met Man or a nationalism suitable for him.

Instead, I want to propose that we reserve the word “Nativism” to identify the particularity and specificity of nations and their absolute cultural and historical concreteness that make them irreducible to universalising projects. The non-ideological nature of Nativism need not be its weakness, but rather its essence as comprehensively grasping the historical course of the folk as a whole, including in its contingent historical contradictions and the varying ideological expressions of its Great Men. Like the German völkisch movement, then, Nativism would be pre-ideological in its focus on the organic expression of the nation. To use an analogy, Nativism is the organic folk song that the national composer of ideology uses to shape his style.

To sum up this section of my response, Australian Nationalists should reject National Socialism as a philosophy or worldview for its limitations relative to Political Platonism, and they should reject it as a “pure” nationalism because it is not an organic expression of our own concrete history and culture as a nation but rather a foreign German expression.

Life as Struggle, Biological Racialism, and a Philosophical Foundation for a Non-Reductionist Nativist Specificity

Joel states that the foundations of the nationalist idea, which he takes to be National Socialism, include biological racialism, folkishness, and social organicism. Accepting social organicism as a good on Plato’s principle of the relationship between unity and the good, I would still like to examine the entanglement of biological racialism and folkishness as I believe that much of what has been said frames biological racialism in the wrong way by making it a foundational principle. To be clear, I do not want to reject race realism but rather put it into what I see as the correct perspective. Biological racialism, on its own and as a primary idea, is problematic in that it is bringing us into the modern worldview of limiting reality to the material and quantitative realm and then aiming to re-erect spirit or mind as an emergent phenomenon. I believe Joel does this several times in referring to the basis of the spirit of the folk as the “blood” or in suggesting that what makes Germans German is primarily their belonging to the “Aryan race.”

In contrast to this, I propose a different project which could be identified with Political Platonism but could also be characterised as a critical and constructive project that starts from the standpoint of Sacred Tradition. In other words, it is a critique of the modern ideologies described by Guénon as the “reign of quantity,” and it replaces the subjects of those ideologies through the restoration of quality (mind, form, telos) to quantity (mechanistic matter). The Liberal “individual” becomes the “person,” Marxist “class” becomes “caste,” and, pertinently, the “race” (a material biological category) of National Socialism becomes the “folk” or “Dasein.” Race, although an inseparable ingredient of the folk, should not be held to be its only basis.

This view also forms the core of a suitable alternative to liberalism. Replacing the “individual” as subject of politics with the “person” or “Dasein” implies the necessity of the community for the existence of the human being, as opposed to the atomistic conception of humanity found in liberal anthropology. The human being is always already “thrown” - to use Heidegger's term - into an ethnic social context with a specific history. If we accept this, we have already moved past not just the liberal individual but also purely biological concepts of race, not necessarily by rejecting race, but by enhancing an “objective” racialism with its “subjective” counterpart of history, culture, and temperament.

Of course, for those who are familiar with Heidegger, the talk of subject and object may have raised alarm bells (for those who don’t care for philosophy, you may wish to skip this paragraph and the next). Heidegger's project in his first and best-known work, Being and Time, was to refute the Cartesian philosophical picture that interpreted the human in terms of a subject that then finds itself in an objective world. Once this philosophical starting point of subject and object is accepted, the classical “problem of the external world” must be raised. How can I prove that there is an “external world” that transcends the "representations” immanent to the subjective experiences in my mind? This problem is developed in Descartes’ philosophical work, comes up again in Kant, and is raised once more by Husserl, Heidegger's teacher. The full explanation of how Husserl's work in the sixth investigation of the Logical Investigations on the categorial intuition of states of affairs raised Heidegger's "question of being” will have to wait another time, but the important point to make now is that Heidegger sought to go beyond Husserl's Cartesian style phenomenology where the investigation of the immanent structure of the subjective mind follows the casting into doubt, the “suspension,” of the transcendent external world. Instead, Heidegger proposed that the human being, Dasein, is always already being-in-the-world. To question one’s world is to presuppose that one always already “has” it. I do not think Heidegger was entirely successful in this project, and neither did Heidegger. His later work departed from what he saw as the limitations and failures of his project of analysing Dasein and reducing it to modes of temporalisation.

The failure of Being and Time is also the point where the contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin departs, by suggesting that Dasein isn't one universal transcendental structure of human experience, but rather that there is a plurality of Daseins. Dugin bases this on Heidegger's statement that “Dasein existiert völkisch” (Dasein exists through the folk). In Dugin's view, if there is more than one folk, then it follows that there should be more than one Dasein. This is where Dugin begins with his elaborate work on ethnosociology, most of which I agree with and will not rehash here and now. Where I disagree is with Dugin's suggestion that it is necessary to do away with biological conceptions of race in order to develop a Heideggerian and Traditionalist understanding of the folk. I take my starting point from Lilian Alweiss’ critique of Husserl and Heidegger in her book, The World Unclaimed. Alweiss makes the point that despite his effort to regain the world “leapt over” by Husserl, Heidegger still “leaps over” the material world of embodiment to reach his ideal of a transcendence dependent on Dasein and its complete finitude. A correct understanding of the human person must take into account not just their thrownness into a community of language and culture that always already contaminates any “individuality,” it also requires us to understand the embodiment of the person in a material world, and that embodiment is equally conditioned by the physical (including neurophysiological) characteristics of the folk.

An objection might be raised at this point that this turn to materialism is contrary to the point of the project of returning to Sacred Tradition and is just another turn back to the pseudo-Darwinian ideas of National Socialism, but I am not suggesting anything like an emergentist perspective on mind where it is generated by matter (blood). Rather, once again we are dealing with Florensky’s sacral materialism. As David Bentley Hart has pointed out in his recent tome on the philosophy of mind, All Things Are Full of Gods, biology with its study of life is the hardest of the scientific disciplines to reduce to the materialist mechanism of the modern world picture. Life always involves complex intentional and relational systems that are purposive and imply a fundamental teleology to the cosmos. In relation to the human being, the focus on embodiment simply brings us back to the fundamental Platonist point that as embodied we dwell in the world of matter and opinion (doxa), opposed to the immaterial world of the Forms where the intellect can access true knowledge (episteme). We could just as well describe the neurophysiology of a human being as a physical expression developing teleologically towards the form of the folk. It is a dialectical play between matter and spirit, but ultimately in an encompassing picture it is matter that is reducible to Spirit and not the other way around.

The practical point of trawling through all this philosophical material is to bring us back to the serious conception of Nativism that I stated above as the focus on the utmost specificity of the nation, one which can stand against affirmations of a crudely materialist “life principle” that belongs with the rest of the trash of modernity. The whole point of being a Nativist is to take seriously our thrownness as Australian people into a concrete Australian community. That is what should be the subject of our political theory as Australian Nationalists. We are a unique folk and that is our existential starting point, including our cultural expressions in art and our existing political institutions. We don't just read Banjo Paterson or Percy Stephensen or Alfred Deakin out of some quaint nostalgia, we read them to understand who we already are. None of this can be reduced to simply the logical outflow of having a certain blood. It is the form of our folk that determines who we are, and we accept that subset of the human species that is compatible to this form, namely white people. That this is our existential starting point, however, does not mean that it is our absolute starting point as I explained above in the distinction between the ideological task and the need to remain true to the nation. With the ideological task we turn to Sacred Tradition and the work of Plato, Guénon, Eliade, Sherrard, etc.

Bridging Nativism and Political Platonism

I mentioned at the start of the previous section that when we take our standpoint on Tradition, class analysis is replaced by caste analysis. This is the bridge from the folk, or Nativism, to Tradition, or Platonism. I adopt much of Dugin's understanding of folk, which is structuralist. His view of the diachronic development of peoples is that each successive stage of development is retained in a synchronic structure. The first stage is the primitive ethnos, whose central personality is the shaman. Here we are quite dependent on certain theories of Eliade regarding shamanism, the worldview of the shaman, and how the enchanted reality of a tribe of people is constituted. These theories are built on ethnographic work by Sergei Shirokogoroff, hence the close affinity Dugin has to Eliade here. In this view, the shaman regulates the life of the primitive community, exorcising evil spirits, providing advice through the mediation of good spirits, and healing members of the community through his spiritual powers. I would again connect this back to Fr Pavel Florensky’s view that it is the cult that is the primordial principle of any human society (Eden as Temple). The ethnic group clearly already exists and has an orientation towards the transcendent Good, but vitally all this is in the pre-ideological form of the completely enchanted archaic world.

In the development to the next stage of human community, the folk, the shaman becomes the figure of the priest. This movement from the ethnos to the folk occurs through the subjugation of one tribe by another, or through the internal development of a hierarchical caste structure, which amounts to roughly the same thing in the end. Thus, we move from a tribe with a shaman to a more clearly defined tripartite structure of priest caste, warrior aristocracy caste, and peasant/artisan caste. This is all familiar from Guénon and Dumézil. At this point, we have the development of civilisations and cities, and the creation of elaborate theologies and philosophies. It is in the retention of the contemplative principle embodied in the shaman in the caste of the priest that we maintain the organic relationship between the folk in its existential concreteness and the Absolute. Of course, the most relevant theology and philosophy for Australians today would be Christianity and Platonism. These are the foundational aspects of the Tradition that permeated through the different folk groups of the West and came down to us. Since I have written about both of these things in relation to Australia before (here and here), I don’t feel the need to repeat myself on all the subtleties that belong to the discussion of those topics right now. The point once again is that our existential starting point is not the same as our absolute starting point.

The absolute starting point is God, His natural and special revelations, and His idea of and providential care for our people. The bridge between these two things is the priesthood that preserves a regular tradition of initiation. The only such source of initiation in Australia is the Orthodox Christian Church. Go to Church, find a priest, and that man is your connection to Tradition. Books and internet posts cannot initiate you. To bring this back to the topic of National Socialism, however, it is obvious that National Socialism as a movement or an ideology never achieved this clear relationship to God. Perhaps if one considers certain movements such as Legionarism to be NS, then there is a conversation to be had, but the German National Socialism that is most widely fetishised clearly had only an ambiguous position in relation to Tradition, and then only in the more marginal positions of a Hermann Wirth or Heinrich Himmler. Joel mentioned Himmler’s aim to recreate some sort of knightly order in the SS - thus only realising the active principle and not the superior contemplative principle - but he doesn’t have an actual continuity even to that. Modern National Socialists have to turn to bizarre figures like Savitri Devi in order to turn their political idol into a religious idol. From a Traditionalist standpoint, this is an obvious instance of counter-initiation with no divinely ordained lineage and thus is to be completely rejected. Once again, major elements of both original National Socialism and its contemporary adaptations must be rejected.

I think this response has gone on long enough, but I would like to respond in the future to Joel’s points on Hegel, Romanticism, and the Problem of Parliamentarianism with reference to Carl, as with Hegel and Schmitt I believe that we do have interesting contributions to our ideological task - but only if contextualised in the above worldview. I will reserve this for another article, because I think these things should be dealt with in relation to the history of Australia and our own institutional forms which were derived from the British Empire. This would be to go into too many different directions in what is already a long response, so perhaps that will form a part II to this or a standalone focused article. The point of what I have covered here is merely to question the fundamental bases of National Socialism as a comprehensive worldview or ideology, and to propose a superior alternative.