Interesting Copies of Kant’s First Critique and Leibniz’s Discourse

A few weeks before I first went up to university, I was given a haul of old philosophy books by a relative of a family friend. Among them were two very tired volumes full of arachnidan annotations and odd scraps of paper (something I tend to consider a plus).

First, Leibniz, George R. Montgomery (transl.), Discourse on Metaphysics, etc. (Chicago: Open Court, 1931), with the front cover fallen off but still present; second, Kant, Norman Kemp Smith (transl.), Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929), with the front cover fallen off and left who knows where. The latter is a first edition of Kemp Smith’s notable translation, and so a very nice thing, but in a bad state.

R. L. Nettleship’s Uncollected Works

Excepting translations from German, letters to Thring and Bosanquet published in volumes of selected letters of those men, and edited volumes of Green’s works, the publications of Richard Lewis Nettleship not included in the two-volume Remains are, I think, as follows.

“An Italian Study of Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’” Macmillan’s Magazine XXXIX (November 1878–April 1879), pp. 23–31.

“The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato,” in Evelyn Abbott (ed.), Hellenica (London: Rivington’s, 1880), pp. 67–180. Reissued as The Theory of Education in Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935).

“Professor T. H. Green: In Memoriam,” The Contemporary Review XLI (January–June 1882), pp. 857–77.

Introductory memoir in Works of Thomas Hill Green vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1888), pp. xi–clxi.

Infinite cheers to archive.org for the facsimiles! If there’s anything I’ve left out, please do say.

New Acquisition: R. L. Nettleship, Philosophical Remains (1901)

Under this universal house-arrest, couriers scamper hither and yon to sustain the rest of us, who work—or not—from home. Which means that, while bookshops are closed, I was still able to order Richard Lewis Nettleship’s Philosophical Remains (second ed., London: Macmillan, 1901), which arrived, despite warnings of delay from Amazon, in only three days. Thanks very much to Savery Books of Brighton.

“Philosophistisiren” with Novalis, Pater, Nettleship

Novalis, in one of his Logologische Fragmente:

Philosophistisiren ist dephlegmatisiren—vivificiren.

Two translations thereof, with their context. First by Walter Pater in his conclusion to The Renaissance:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

And second by Richard Lewis Nettleship in “The Value of Theory,” one of his Lectures on Logic (cf. Philosophical Remains, second ed. [London: Macmillan, 1901], p. 128):

To philosophise is to get rid of one’s phlegm, to acquire a vivid consciousness of some aspect of reality. This is the value of theory or thinking; but thinking which is not also producing, thinking which leaves experience what it was before, has no value.

To philosophise is to dephlegmatise—to vivify. What would this be in blue-eyed English? The phlegmatic are peaceable, equanimous. To “get rid of one’s phlegm,” then, is to rouse oneself to—passion? But that’s bastard Latin. Perhaps:

To lust after wisdom is to stir up strife in one’s heart, to grow newly alive.

Section 18 of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

(I just found this little note I wrote in May 2019, when I was at university studying Nietzsche. B.T. 18 struck me as a germinal microcosm of much of F.N.’s mature philosophy—including his ideas on cultural-historical cycles, underplayed in Nietzsche scholarship, but a special interest of mine.)

“Voracious” creators fuel their activity with illusion, one of the three principal kinds, which correspond to types of society, themselves fuelled (?) by that type of illusion:

Kind: Illusion: Society
Apolline: Veil of beauty: Hellenic
Dionysiac: Undercurrent of “eternal life”: Indian
Socratic: Knowledge as salvation: Alexandrian

At the end of this Socratic cycle, we are in a time of Alexandrianism. Such a society requires a slave-caste to survive: the properly Socratic element is a flower of the culture, a luxury, and consequently fragile. Cf. F.N.’s essay “on the Greek State.”

There is a danger from below in the form of this slave caste grown discontent; and in this is the germ of his insights into resentment become fertile. This class “learn[s] to consider its existence an injustice,” the mere rhetoric of human rights (e.g.) having ceased to “console.”

There is a danger from above: elite disillusionment; critical philosophy; “the blight that lies dormant in the womb of theoretical culture.” The Alexandrian fears the consequences of his form of life and lacks his former confidence. No longer wanting “anything whole,” he doesn’t plunge but dithers on the shore: “at bottom a librarian or a corrector of proofs,” impotent.

But there is also a way onward and upward: a new “tragic man” of “proud audacity” who would live tragically, wean himself off the “art[s] of metaphysical consolation” and train himself for “seriousness and terror.”

Aleksandr Dugin, “Evola’s Conservative Revolution in Metaphysics” (1994)

My provisional translation of Dugin’s 1994 address to the Fondazione Julius Evola. These fifteen pithy theses expose the bare bones of Dugin’s reading of Evola. Dugin’s political preoccupations at the time are present in the emphasis on Evola’s “metaphysical leftism” and the possibility of an at once spiritual and political “third way” (as in terza posizione, etc.). Printed in Orion 9 (1994) in Italian. This translation was made from a French version in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes 6 (1994).

Of Dugin’s trip to the West, the editor of N.S.E. reports that

In June of this year, Aleksandr Dugin visited France, Spain and Italy. Accosted by the police at the moment of his landing in Paris, Aleksandr Dugin was interrogated for three hours by the boorish rozzers, and was made to hand over issues of his journal, Elementy (so that he was subjected to censorship!), thereby depriving a number of official French institutions (the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, etc.), who had requested review copies, of these texts! Does the police have the right to prohibit researchers from accessing documentation? In Italy, he was received triumphantly at the Institute of International Relations in Milan, by General Jean at the Italian Ministry of National Defence, and by numerous cultural organisations. Our readers will appreciate the difference between a country governed by regular politicians, and a country governed by uncultured thugs, by boors and by scoundrels.