Let’s do some history, I’m in the mood:
What is the crisis of the 20th century and beyond? They say modernism and industrialism which are hard to digest. Maybe I’m dumb, but that’s too esoteric for me to understand. Let’s look at facts, political movements, genealogies.
Communism and Fascism. Where do they come from? What are their ideological founders? What are they a part of?
The impulses behind communism, socialism, are old as dick. Some trace it back to proto-christian values. I buy that. To adore above all the empovrished community, the sort of warmth (I would say: feverish warmth, but whatevs) that gives off, and to rue all things that are against poverty and the communal bands between the poor. Jesus washing his feet and whatever. Carpenting by day, eating scraps with his poverty-ridden fisherman friends by night, having the poverty-ridden women wash their feet, and wash theirs sometimes refusing their own wash, a kind of kindness. It’s weird and freaky. But there you go. Old as time.
And the impulses behind fascism are similar. Much simpler: the frame of mind of a truly disciplined and devoted soldier, from private to general. With all the sadism and numbness and OCD that goes with that.
But these impulses alone do not political revolutions make, neh? After all, they are old as time. Been around forever.
What weaponized these impulses on an industrial scale was the application to them of a certain historical philosophical strain:
Phenomenology.
Husserl. Heidegger. Hegel. Fuck, what’s with the Hs? Marx, Freud, Steiner.
Where do all these varied thinkers have a common origin? What is common in their writings and ideas that led to Communism and Fascism?
Let me tell you the conclusion first. The conclusion is that Phenomenology fits within an even larger, broader historical arc. It is the Third Crusade. A deeply Christian, even deeply Catholic impulse of weaponization for to the world conquest and subjugation of Catholicism. Against the heathens, for the glory of God, and in aim absolute.
They were all students, or students of students, of a fanatical Catholic priest and avant-garde scholastic Franz Brentano.
All phenomenology is is taking Aristotle out of his Greek footing of humility before the vastness of what might be truth (already corrupted by Plato, sure, but Greek to the core still at that point) and placing him in the absolute arrogance, self-assurance and weaponazation-needy position of the Catholic faith. Now, not all catholics are fanatics, don’t get me wrong. In the universe of Christians, they are the most reasonable, least hating and most ready to enjoy the enjoyable things in life. The least angry about it. But also, considering the Catholic Church was also one of the most powerful and violent empires in history, catholicism carries the germ of the most militant of all Christianities. Catholics are the authors of the Crusades, those periods when devote4ed and fanatical priests decided it was time to conquer the Earf for the glory and possession of Christ.
That is what Phenomenology is. The third crusade.
That is also the sense in which Fascism and Communism, despite their deep hatred for eachother, are really the same thing and also hide the same thing: a very innocent, very helpless and very earnest Christianity.
