Reading from pages 240-52 of Myth of the 20th Century, the 1982 Black Kite Edition

I should state here that this book is terribly organized and is redeemed by its depth and breadth of thought and the use of a general chronological scheme. Jason Reza Jorjani in his Prometheus and Atlas conducts a much improved survey along these lines.

Rosenberg looks first at Kant’s definition of our existence as our “moral law within us” in relation to the heavenly or cosmic as a form of dynamic duality, reflected in dualistic European faiths and worldviews, which come under crucial examination in the 1830s with the doctrine of Monism, of a universal singularity with no independent parts. “Schopenhauer the Romantic” is the doomed figure of the seeker wielding the flexible sword of reason in his damned quest. The author, however, values the monism of the Romantic, that materialistic longing for rest and reclusion from the dynamic and the “elimination of opposites” which is a key facet of modernity and its secular faiths, being the elimination of the dynamic so that the static might remain at peace. I see monism as the logical conclusion of civilization, of domestication of the once dynamic human into the modern compliance cults of risk avoidance and the greater good.

With the departure into the study of modernist philosophy as a psychotoxin hostile to ethnic identity and masculine solidarity, Rosenberg is creeping up the steps to the final crime scene of WWI that his quest is calibrated to somehow reverse. He is the coroner invited by his conscience and his own well-tempered sword of reason to conduct the inquest concerning the death of Western Civilization, who somehow convinces himself that he can reanimate the corpse once he has ascertained the cause of death. Rarely has a more heroic work of literature been attempted than The Myth of the 20th Century, marking this effort as quintessentially Аrуаn and about as likely to succeed as Leonidas and his 300 at The Hot Gates or the stand of Roland against the Saracens.

He does point out the pitfall of reason, as it is feminine in nature, not being able to give until after it has received. Yet, though such great minds as Schopenhauer might be doomed to wander down shadowed pits of dogma and sink into wells of negation, they do chart a way through the mind of man and at the same time remind us that reason is useless in the man unless it is paired with action. The sardonic aspect of monism as a modern philosophy is that the denial of duality and dynamism dooms its adherents as they use their mind to self-castrate, rather than to direct their actions.

Rosenberg defines will as an expression of acts within the field of Time, rather than some cosmic state of repose. Other philosophers such as K. Fischer and Houston Stewart Chamberlain are discussed and dismissed something like cadavers in a morgue that have failed to impress the coroner. Denial of will is not considered rational by the author. Rather its nature as a force, its definition, drives this investigation into human nature and its expression in the European soul. As it turns out with most modern philosophers, Schopenhauer was obsessed with death, a coward of genius thrashing about like a god that has discovered that Jove the Eternal, reaper of gods and men, has cursed him with mortality. The entirety of Modern Western Civilization as a dawdling of moral toddlers through a garden of the ruthless titans who elevated us above the other races in the field of Time only to abandon us to our own sloth, of a miserable shamble of brats too dimwitted at twilight to make a torch, is well-reflected in this chapter.

Rosenberg finishes with the five spiritual demands of the whole man:

-1. In art, he seeks outward and inward form

-2. In science, he seeks the truth in correlating judgment with observations of nature

-3. From religion, he desires a penetrating supersensous symbol

-4. In philosophy he demands harmony of willing and perceiving

-5. In morality he creates for himself the necessary guiding principles for action

He finishes with a call to preserve “a rich diversity of culture as an expression of a race of definite soul.”

Now, far past the collapse of Western Civilization, in our blaring gaslit dark age, where diversity means absence of distinction and oneness of slavish thinking, Rosenberg, having hanged for the crime of committing this mental exercise in support of the ideal that every people should have a homeland, can be seen as a slain enemy of monism, the unarticulated faith of fools loathe to suffer a seeker in their mewing midst.