Manifesto for a European Renaissance by Alain de Benoist

Author:Alain de Benoist [Benoist, Alain de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
Publisher: http://inclibuql666c5c4.onion
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

9. The Cosmos: A Continuum

The French New Right adheres to a unitary worldview, the matter and form of which only constitute variations on the same theme. The world is at once a unity and a multiplicity, integrating different levels of the visible and the invisible, different perceptions of time and space, different laws of organisation of its constituent elements. Microcosm and macrocosm interpenetrate and interact with one another. Thus, the French New Right rejects the absolute distinction between created and uncreated being, as well as the idea that this world is only the reflection of another world. The cosmos (phusis) is the place where Being manifests itself, the place where the truth (aletheia) of mutual belonging in this cosmos reveals itself. Panta rhei (Heraclitus): the opening to all is in everything.

Man finds and gives sense to his life only by adhering to what is greater than himself, what transcends the limits of his constitution. The French New Right fully recognises this anthropological constant, which manifests itself in all religions. It believes the return of the sacred will be accomplished by returning to some founding myths, and by the disappearance of false dichotomies: subject and object, body and thought, soul and spirit, essence and existence, rationality and sensibility, myth and logic, nature and supernatural, etc.

The disenchantment of the world translates into the closure of the modern spirit, which is incapable of projecting itself above and beyond its materialism and constituent anthropocentrism. Today’s epoch has transferred the ancient divine attributes to the human subject (the metaphysics of subjectivity), thereby transforming the world into an object, i.e., into an agglomeration of means at the unlimited disposal of its ends. This ideal of reducing the world to utilitarian reason has been coupled with a linear concept of history endowed with a beginning (state of nature, paradise on earth, golden age, primitive communism, etc.) and an equally necessary end (a classless society, the reign of God, the ultimate stage of progress, entry into an era of pure rationality, transparent and conciliatory).

For the French New Right past, present, and future are not distinct moments of a directional and vectored history, but permanent dimensions of all lived moments. The past as well as the future always remain present in all their actuality. This presence — a fundamental category of time — is opposed to absence: forgetfulness of origins and occlusion of the horizon. This view of the world already found expression in European Antiquity, both in cosmological histories and in pre-Socratic thought. The ‘paganism’ of the French New Right articulates nothing more than sympathy for this ancient conception of the world, always alive in hearts and minds precisely because it does not belong to yesterday, but is eternal. Confronted with the ersatz sectarianism of fallen religions, as well as with certain neo-pagan parodies from the times of confusion, the French New Right is imbued with a very long memory: it maintains a relation to the beginning that harbours a sense of what is coming.

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