Homo Bulla and The Philosophies of Magic

Sit tibi terra levis – May the ground be light on you

“Man is a bubble (Homo Bulla), they say;” writes Varro, the greatest scholar of ancient Rome, in his book on ‘On farming’, “in which case the proverb must be truer for an old man. And I am in my eightieth year, which warns me to pack up my baggage in readiness to journey out of this world.” (Varro, 1912, p. B) From this point on, the philosophies and the thinking I will write about find their best epitaph in these words of Varro.

In other words, “conservatism” now stands apart. [1]. Edmund Burke’s legacy, it seems, single-handedly, with thinkers such as Scruton and Oakeshott, is carried onwards by remaining worthy of the artistic appeal and a feeling necessarily connected with life, i.e., to make a home our dwelling place – enchantment. [2]. The conservatism that is more capable, and which we encounter more in our politics now, of what Nietzsche calls the “corruption of the text”, which in the absence of any deeper thought, appeals to ideas such as ‘the family’, ‘nation’, ‘my kind of people and religion’ and similar things. And, [3]. the conservatism with which I will deal now, the so-called “revolutionary conservatism“, (a denotation which finds its source in the book, and initially the doctoral thesis of the Swiss philosopher, unrepentant fascist and secretary of Ernst Jünger himself, Armin Mohler, “Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932“). While Burke’s conservatism and the latter are similar in at least one way, I will not deal with conservatism caught up in certain ideas because its multiplicity makes it indefinable to deal with it in any meaningful way.

So where is the difference or the sameness between Edmund Burke’s conservatism and the revolutionary conservatism that Mohler testifies to?

I think that the division that Mohler saw between revolutionary conservatives (among whom he counts over 40 well-known thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Klages and others), and nationalism-socialism has little or no legitimacy. However, what can be said, and it is not difficult to conclude, is that revolutionary conservatism arose largely as a reaction to the ideas that liberal philosophies pushed forward, as did Burke’s conservatism. But the way how Burke talks to us about the preservation of heritage is different from the defense of the particular tradition of the revolutionary conservatives. To pay heed to Burke’s remedy with the feeling of enchantment as different from the nostrum of the conservative revolutionaries’ defense, this divide seems to be the case on a miniature scale, even in Albanian literature. For instance, Lukë Bogdani and Gjergj Fishta are the preserves par excellence of that which was and still is (especially the Fairy (Zana), the enchantment of which was preserved so without hostility that it has even entered the Albanian translation of the Bible, [Ezekiel, 3:15]), and definitely, Burke would have agreed when they show honor to life regardless of whose life it is by recognizing and honoring other heritages as well. (It is perhaps to show our love, or the lack thereof, of being a Burkean of conservation that we still call Naim Frashërin, a poet intoxicated by the philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire, as our national poet. Compared to the sublime mysterium tremendum et fascinans verse of Fishta, Naimi sounds like someone who just recently started to write and read.) But when we talk, for example, about the works of Mid’hat Frashëri or even those of Ernest Koliqi (in whom the Fairy (Zana) is now not something to be preserved, but a means to mark the Albanian blood and race, which must be protected according to a certain tradition, always clean of unwanted features), then we are talking about a revolutionary conservatism and thus, a ‘little’ more than a dangerous conservatism. But why?

Burke’s conservatism and revolutionary conservatism agree that they are, ultimately, artistic projects: they use art in a particular way, one hiding itself behind it and the other pushing it forward. But while Burke finds it necessary to speak of a “moral imagination,” just as Oakeshott and Scruton speak of “morality,” they are concerned first and foremost with life – their art, it serves or should serve life. Enchantment is the becoming of the one who is alive. Although revolutionary conservatism started as an artistic project, in political action, it leaves art aside and to use the verses of the poet, whom Mohler considers a revolutionary conservative, and from whom Nazi Germany took concepts such as “the Reich of a thousand years”, “fire and blood” and “Nordic superman”, Stefan George –

“The walls are tapestried with velvet bloom

“– A fashion grown from some ancestral mood (stimmung) –

“Your arm in mine we come into the room

“And tell each other death is good.” (George, 1974, p. 149)

This conservatism is related to the concern, or the request that we lack this concern, about death. They seemed to be heading at the point where, when they talk about the death of the soul and only the body remaining (Klages), about the death upon which new things will flourish (George), being-towards-death (Heidegger) or even with the revival of völkisch movements and the denial of the Christian religion (for the Burkean kind, this religion has been durable and remained and we should be more careful when denying it), they are not afraid of death – but it is precisely this lack of fear in the face of death which, when the political action cleans away their artistic project, they are not afraid to bring it, blessed with Wagner’s music, in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

on-compos mentis – Of unsound mind

I think the conservative mind, the revolutionary mind to defend, and Burke’s mind to preserve are mad (marrëzi). But not in the sense that Mill called the conservative party (“the stupid party“), but in the sense that they are taken (driven mad: të marrë) by a feeling that one can hardly elaborate and that one can hardly live forever without feeling it. Where Burke or Scruton see enchantment in all that is, revolutionary conservatives take only a certain interpretation how things should be and make that the tradition that enchants them. Unlike Mohler and like-minded thinkers, I think that the holocaust is not just an act pushed forward as a result of the violence of Enlightenment ideas on the “soul of the people“. As I have argued, if Burke’s and Scruton’s concern is with the enchantment of the home: something has gone wrong when this home seeks to become the home of the world, for which neither Burke nor Scruton would have agreed; and what’s more, they themselves would say that this “universal [racial or similar of the revolutionaries’ defense] enchantment“, the revolutionary conservatives do not experience somewhere, but rationally create it themselves to respond to a certain tradition they want to protect, a tradition which makes them more similar than more distant to Nazi Germany. It is for this reason that I refuse to call conservatives revolutionaries as such, as Armin Mohler does, and I am of the thought that their designation should be the Philosophies of Magic, while their projects to be called Traditionalism. For if it is to be said, that if these traditionalist magical philosophies had an internal logic and consistency, then this consistency and this logic depends on their conviction that what was had to be affirmed, but only on one condition – if we believe their magic wand that they do not do everything according to the image of a tradition that they themselves created and push forward.

It is true that the liberal philosophies, with their definitions and with their deep traces in almost every constitution of present Europe, perhaps have to admit the hypocrisy and sometimes the same criticisms that they have made for their opponents (the hypothesis of the “natural state” is the groundbreaking hypothesis, that has thrown into the deeps of oblivion the lives of Europe’s best kings and revolutionaries): but in this essay I have not seen it fit to expand on this – because conservatism, although a reaction-to-the-Enlightenment, still calls forth a human feeling which is not a reaction against anyone or anything, except that it is there and we all experience it in the circumstances in which we are wired to encounter it. I think there is still room for this feeling in politics, and the nearer we are to Burke, the nearer we are to being worthy of knowing what we are preserving. But the closer we are to everything else, at least in conservatism, ideas against women, homosexuality or other houses (inhabited by people who also share their own enchantment) or if we accept the ideas from the philosophies of magic with their tradition ready to serve us – I think it is more than dangerous for these ideas to participate in our political and policy-making world. And I think their best place is in art, without the political action. Because in art, what happened to Stefan George is bound to happen now too; to Stefan George, who as the most famous poet and one of the most influential people in Europe of his time, leaves when the Nazis take power – refusing to be part of them. It is not that “revolutionary conservatism” separates itself from art; art separates itself from revolutionary conservatism. And it is this separation of art that leads us to the conclusion that it was the members of Stefan George’s circle who conspired the attempt to assassinate Hitler (Claus von Stauffenberg).

Now, when the more than danger of these nostrums in politics when they cause art to separate itself from them and the concern with death is elaborated, and then when Burke’s meaning stands embodied with life through enchantment, along with the conservatism caught up in ideas that has no idea what it is doing most of the time. I also need to mention that, to return to the beginning, Plato and Heraclitus again speak of a logos; a different logos, but still for a logos. It is Heraclitus, likewise, who speaks against Homer, which does not seem to be acknowledged anywhere by Plato when he mentions them together, but in whichever way the matter may be, in conservatism, Hyponoia does not call a ban on thought. We must also think beyond Burke (he himself would have preferred this rather than his thoughts to turn into a metaphysics of preservation), and we must certainly think beyond what the philosophies of magic try to do with their tradition. And if at all we still find ourselves at the crossroads of giving ourselves consolations for the feeling, or lack of it, of enchantment, I am of the opinion that perhaps we should listen more to Homer than to anyone else—

“παῦροι γάρ τοι παῖδες ὁμοῖοι πατρὶ πέλονται,

“οἱ πλέονες κακίους, παῦροι δέ τε πατρὸς ἀρείους.

“ἀλλ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὐδ᾽ ὄπιθεν κακὸς ἔσσεαι οὐδ᾽ ἀνοήμων,

“οὐδέ σε πάγχυ γε μῆτις Ὀδυσσῆος προλέλοιπεν,

“ἐλπωρή τοι ἔπειτα τελευτῆσαι τάδε ἔργα.”

(“Few indeed are the children like their father: / Most are worse, but few are better than their fathers / But since you will not be worthless or foolish, / Nor is the wisdom of Odysseus that has forsaken you altogether / (This is why you should have) hope that you will succeed in these things.”, Odyssey, Book II, verse 276-280.)

If there was at least one thought that would unite the preservers of the home from Homer, Heraclitus, Emperor Julian, Christianity (the latter one), to Burke and beyond, it is this – when we lose home, the journey to it – is ours and only ours alone. Anyone who starts talking to “us” to comfort us they are showing you a home that isn’t yours. Conservatism, in essence, is an alone and lonely journey. Conservatism is a misopogon (μισοπώγων, misopogon: beard-hater), like that of Emperor Julian to laugh at his own philosopher’s beard while showing others what they are forgetting. If a conservative can’t laugh at the lack of one’s own articulation – then that conservative is not enchanted. But just like in the political world, so in the art world, if one hasn’t translated or preserved the sense of enchantment so that others can at least understand it – one has failed. For by failing to reveal to the other the enchantment you experience, you have thus failed to feel your own enchantment yourself – to feel your own life yourself.

Conclusion

What is conservatism? My intention in this essay was to show not only that this wonder does not send us to a mere compendium or gathering of different views but that it sends us to a common human feeling. The feeling in which our belongings and our dwellings’ places take on a life of their own and become our homes is what Scruton rightly calls enchantment. The reasons why we have different histories about what it means to be conservative are to be found here (Scruton sees English Common Law as the embodied enchantment for the English). I have argued, then, that this feeling is central to understanding Burke and his legacy (which is furthered, single-handedly, by Scruton and Oakeshott) – and that these thinkers relate to each other because their thought is stranded on aesthetics first and foremost.

I have elaborated that we can find the antagonism towards this feeling even in the first drama of rationality and heritage, which Burke’s heirs have not considered enough, with Plato (Socrates) and Heraclitus and Homer. Where on the one side with Socrates, we have unchangeability, the good, the dianoia and the sacred or inner voice spirit (daimon), to achieve happiness, while on the other side with Heraclitus and Homer, we have what is and the deities as in becoming or changing, the hypotonia, the human daimon and the difficulty that in a world of perpetuity flux to have the hopes of embodying a paradise on earth – a paradise defined by those who cannot bestow another paradise except what they know as their own paradise (the regimes of the last century).

On Edmund Burke, I have dwelt more to show his difference with the liberal philosophies of the time, i.e., his thoughts on the social contract and what – here is also to be found why Burke’s legacy is that of enchantment – the nature of man is (art). Starting from his uses of the word art and elaborating on his views, I have succeeded in showing that the “cherishing” of “prejudices” is not wickedness as it is now often understood, but that it is the condition of the enchanted man, who opposes even the king, his kingdom, and the thought of the time – to show and appeal to the feeling of what his home is. The ban on slavery, the opposition to the abuses of the kingdom, the non-taxation of the American colonies, the state not interfering in its citizens’ lives, the non-divine law, and many other things are to be found here. Burke does not talk about power and defending the “status quo”; Burke preserves the enchantment and, thus, the feelings of one’s own home.

My argument why Burke’s philosophy is not an ideology but rather a method of policy-making is to be found in my distinction between heritage and tradition; that gives us two bodies of how they present themselves, that of preservation and defense. Heritage is only those things that remain, which we preserve even and primarily unconsciously, because we are enchanted by them, this is why Burke says that change is possible: given that human nature is art, everything is changeable, as long as we don’t have the confusion that arises when changing things brings old difficulties. Conservation has no enemies: conservation is simply an extension of the feeling of enchantment of things we experience as they are. Tradition is something else, tradition is a certain interpretation of the world, engraved and consciously defended. Tradition must have enemies because otherwise, it cannot exist. Burke speaks of heritage: the so-called “revolutionary conservatives” speak of the tradition.

I have distinguished three types of conservatism: [1]. that of Burke, [2]. that which is more similar to what Nietzsche calls “the corruption of the text”, the conservatism of the ideas of ‘family‘, ‘nation‘, ‘my kind of people and religion‘ and similar things, which refuses to explore its enchantment, [3]. and the revolutionary conservatism. I was not concerned with that conservatism, which refuses to examine itself, and I was more concerned with the distinction between Burke’s conservatism and the conservatism of the revolutionaries. Concluding that conservatism, whatever it may be, is an artistic project and relates more to our (if we are to talk about things through an outdated model) “irrational” than “rational” part. I have gone so far as to call all conservatives taken (driven mad, të marrë). The difference between Burke’s conservatism and revolutionary conservatism is to be found in the way they manifest themselves in policy-making. Burke’s conservatism and the revolutionary one are both artistic projects, but where Burke’s artistic project (with “moral imagination” and similar stable points) serves and is such because it should serve life, the project of revolutionary conservatism is concerned or seeks the mood to lack the concern, about death. I have argued that Auschwitz and Treblinka are not only reactions to the violence of Enlightenment ideas but that they are also artistic projects where art has been detached from them, and they have ended only with their only concern – death. Which they are not afraid to bring or experience.

I refuse to call conservatives revolutionaries as such, and I have labeled their thinking as the philosophies of magic and the compendium of their views as traditionalism, for they seek, by a magic wand, to conceal that they are interpreting what is in the way they think what is should be, and they are defending the tradition just, rationally, created (given what I have just said, one might reconsider putting Heidegger here: all the while, one has to recognize that his political actions, make his thinking more alike than dissipating before this tradition.) I have concluded the whole essay by saying that there is still a place in politics for Burke’s artistic project of life (naming his attitude a remedy), but not the conservatism of revolution or traditionalism with their artistic, nostrum-ridden projects of death. The latter have their place only in art (because art can domesticate them), and to them, as much as I have made a misopogon with Burke’s philosophy towards them, I have also shown them what they are forgetting. – The conclusion of their art (with Stefan George) and the verses of Homer.

References

The post The Remedies and Nostrums of Conservatism: A Misopogon Part II appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The difficulty of “What is conservatism?” is not merely a difficulty to navigate amidst a compendium of summaries and views that preserve or defend something that was and still is. As we have come to see, “conservative” is called from the defense of constitutionalism and legality (Aristotle, Blackstone); the defense of kingship by Divine order (Filmer); past experiences, and the stability to have freedom (Hume, Johnson); the preservation of the heritage against the spoils that rapid change would bring us (Burke); equally form the meaning of conservatism and responsibility (Scruton, Kirk) – to what has been called, without any deep revision with the legacy of the concept, and made famous by the doctorate of the Swiss philosopher Armin Mohler, – “revolutionary conservatism” (Heidegger, George, Klags, Schmitt, and others who were intoxicated by the völkisch and volkstum movements).

But what is conservatism? My intention in this essay is to elaborate not only on the genesis and main features of conservatism but also to show how much of what is called conservative is not at all something that conserves. To fulfill this intention, I have divided my essay into three parts. In the first part, I will write about the “Genesis of Conservatism” – pushing forward, above all, a re-reading that perhaps all that Plato presents against Homer and Heraclitus can help us here. In the second part, I will write about the philosopher who single-handedly laid the most enduring and inspiring foundations for all the “conservatisms” to come – “Edmund Burke and the Preservation of What Is” – with the main question being whether Edmund Burke’s “conservatism” is, in one way or another, merely an ideology for policy-making or something much more. At the very end, in the third part, I will write about conservatism after Burke – “Homo Bulla and the Philosophies of Magic” – where I will try to elaborate what happened to “conservative“, especially German, philosophy in the last century. (Due to space and relevance, this essay will not deal with special cases such as Julius Evola and Yukoi Mishima.)

In this essay, I will also preserve the view that not necessarily everything that is conservative is also political. I think that this has to do with a lack of distinction between defending a thing and preserving a thing. That is, when the emperor Julian preserved the pagan gods and opposed the closing of the temples and the “Christian arrogance,” invoking something close to Tacitus’ attitude to call them “people without a home“: he was invoking what the ancient Greeks – which he thought that the Christians did not honor – had initially pushed forward with the union of the villages in the polis, i.e., συνοικισμóς (synoikismos), in etymology this has the meaning of dwelling together (συν, syn) in the same home (οἶκος, oikos). Thus, conservatism includes our love for those things that must go and be changed, our ‘immature’ feelings when we mourn fragility and loss in the face of decay and death, our common feelings towards those people with whom we share a common home, which we want to preserve and conserve – because it is our home and others are the same dwellers in it as we are.

I think there is no better summary than the verse of Homer, which the emperor Julian knew very well, “οὐ γὰρ ἔπ᾽ ἀνήρ, (. . .), ἀρὴν ἀπὸ οἴκου ἀμῦναι.” (“Is there no man here, (. . .), to remove the harm from the home.” Odyssey, book II, verse 60), to show that condition and state against which conservatism worries and tries to prevent everything from ending there. It is my hope that this will also be the concluding view, which I will elaborate on and ultimately support in this essay.

The Genesis of Conservatorism

Enchantment

“Modern conservatism is a product of the Enlightenment,” writes Sir Roger Scruton, “but it calls aspects of the human condition that can be witnessed in every civilisation and at every period of history” (Scruton, 2017, pre-history). Certainly, what is meant by “product” here means a reaction to what the Enlightenment was. But the most important thing I think we need to look at is in the second part of this sentence. My argument is that Sir Roger Scruton had in mind a particular feeling of the “aspects of the human condition” to which conservatism appeals and calls and which influenced his reading of the history of what it means to be a conservative. This feeling, which is the main “argument” and “theme” (Scruton, 2000, f. 210) in the book where he looks back at England, Scruton calls – “enchantment.”

For Scruton, enchantment is closely related to that which makes something our home. “The enchantment of things in the home,” writes Scruton, “is part of a larger spiritual project.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13) By this, Scruton means that homes have their own customs, routines, rituals, set times, and special places. If not, they’re less of a home and less of a place to look to when, in adulthood, anger and rejection have intervened (Scruton, 2000, p. 13). “All attempts,” continues Scruton, “to find solace and in ritual and faith in some supreme (. . .) love have their origin here, and the enchantment of religion is not to be seen as the cause, but as the effect of another and deeper enchantment, which is natural inheritance of childhood.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13)

We can think of enchantment as a state through which the things in whose presence we wander take on a life of their own. The places that hold enchantment for us are the places we call home – where everything has meaning for us, and we don’t feel pushed to justify why we are drawn or inspired by them. When this feeling is lost or when other things break this feeling, we don’t quite know what arguments to use. We know that something has gone wrong (Scruton, 2000, p. 7). Here is to be found Burke’s “cherishing” of “prejudices” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 346): likewise, here is to be found the chief distinction between the preservation of a thing and the defending of a thing.

When we are enchanted, we do not defend things because we have no known or unknown enemies. The very single-mindedness that we are enchanted with makes us preserve. And in preservation, we have no enemies because everything is in the order of things to be changed (even change is needed in order for something to be preserved) (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 34). But to be changed slowly and not be presented with the difficulties of the things that were maintained (Scruton, 2014, p. 120). If you have to bring it into our daily life, in the smallest case, when we say “good morning,” even in places where we do not mean this exclamation, it is a very good indicator of maintaining the enchantment. We maintain this exclamation, even where we do not mean it at all, unconsciously, for in one way or another, we are drawn and inspired by the enchantment it has over us. (But more on this distinction between preservation (heritage) and defense (tradition), in the section on Edmund Burke.)

For Scruton, “enchantment,” in this sense, “is a personalizing force: it endows objects, customs, and institutions with a moral character, so that we respond to them as we respond to one another.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13) In other words, it makes them homes: it makes them lives on their own, which we then experience as our dwelling. Except that, I would argue that by “moral character” Scruton means life itself – it is the same feeling that led him to make the modest argument, initially answered with “I don’t know“, for God (Scruton, 1996, p. 85-90), and, even more, a turning point (though not regrettable) from his hard-to-digest books like “The Meaning of Conservatism” or “Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic.”

When Scruton writes about “The English Character ” (Scruton, 2000, p. 43) – most definitely referring to Burke’s famous piece on “national character” (Burke, (vol I), 1865, p. 345) – this feeling of enchantment of England’s dwellers in a common house, is embodied in two things. – “The first,” writes Scruton, “is the instinct for justice and fair play; the second is the institution of common law – law not invented but discovered, through the working of impartial justice.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 55) When Scruton is reading the history of what it means to be conservative, he is reading it from this point of view – the enchantment of the Common Law (granted that the first instinct depends mostly on the doings and becomings of those who are) (Scruton, 2000, p. 10). Of course, Aristotle is a starting point for his defense of the Constitution of course that Johnson and Hume, Simone Weil, and others, which for one sound incomprehensible how a Marxist thinker turns out to be conservative (Scruton, 2017) are preserved by Scruton – as they had penetrated a feeling that if it does not invoke an English Common Law, it does invoke a social conservation. In other words, they had penetrated the feeling of enchantment. This is why Scruton’s story of conservatism and its efforts to thrive on the soil of Edmund Burke differs from that of Russell Kirk or Leo Strauss. Scruton did not go into politics to meet politics, he went in politics translating the feelings, the doings and the attitudes of those who are driven by the very necessity of living in the common home – to come out and argue their positions, even when they cannot articulate themselves properly.

“ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων”

(“ethos anthropo daimon” – “Man’s ethos is its daimon”)

But why enchantment? Isn’t the main feature of conservatism irrational: but why then are they accused of being uncreative?

I think there is no pure rational way to defend conservatism (nor that there is a necessity for there to be such a way), because I agree with Scruton that the fundamental feature that conservatism appeals to is enchantment. Whether this is more “aesthetical” than “ethical“, I cannot say: but the matter seems to be the same with Edmund Burke – whether with the first ironic book in philosophy, with his aesthetic strands, or with the imagined events of the execution of the king and queen of France and with “our natural affections” towards them (though in all three cases, his warnings have been entirely worthy of being considered as history has come to show): again, Scruton with his aesthetic strands, and with the enchantment: Oakeshott’s taking rationalism away from politics – the greatest conservative preservers have never “argued,” to borrow Scruton’s words, for a “change of mind“, but for a “change of heart,” and have done so either through art or by appealing to a feeling that we do not know how to elaborate.

But I think that conservatism if it doesn’t embrace “rationalism against art,” as it did with revolutionary conservatism, we can see how creative its conservation thinking really is. To know this properly, we have to start from what I will argue is the first drama between heritage and rationality (which can then also give us an answer: ‘Why enchantment?‘). That is the confrontation between Plato (Socrates) and the then-Greek heritage (especially Heraclitus and Homer).

. . .

Nietzsche thought that conservatives corrupt the text. In the aphorism below, he was writing more about how Aristotle was defended in France when his philosophy began to be replaced, but I think what Nietzsche wrote there can be said of all conservatives and their thinking –

“Their defenders rationalized these rules,” writes Nietzsche, “and why they ought to exist, for no better reason than not to have to admit that they were accustomed to them and their authority, and no longer wanted them otherwise. And this is what people do and have always done with every prevailing morality and religion: the reasons and intentions behind the habit are always ‘interpolated’ into it when some begin to deny its authority, and ask for reasons and intentions. Herein lies the great dishonesty of conservatives in every era – they corrupt the text.” (Nietzsche, 2019, aph. 60)

Granted, Nietzsche would say that even when these prevailing moralities or religions are questioned, they are questioned by the “artistic instinct” of those who can no longer bear them. For Nietzsche’s philosophy, what decides against Christianity now, for example, is our taste, not our reasons (Nietzsche, 2019, aph. 132). It still remains a wonder why Nietzsche’s strands that “knowledge kills action, because action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion” (Nietzsche, 2008, aph. 29), has not been read by the right in the academia. In any case, what Nietzsche witnesses is precisely the condition of that man when one is under the enchantment of preserving something but is driven to defend it rationally and quickly (as the things one is about to preserve are being attacked) and fails – thereby ending in the protection of thoughts that do not coincide with one’s own inner feelings. It fails because this man’s attitude is primarily internal, rather than elaborating or giving reasons why, it seems, there is nothing else to say but – “because I love these things” or “because that’s how they’ve always been“.

A conservative who does not investigate one’s own enchantment is not so much a conservative as a defender of a particular tradition. The conservator preserves the heritage, that which remains, which can and must change if it means that it can be done further. It is only the traditionalist who responds with “it must be so and only so” (almost all the contemporary “American Conservatives” are dusty traditionalists without a heritage to call forth): it is not at all comforting that today’s conservative is not someone who has sought one’s own enchantment to properly preserves what one conserves, but protects the ‘traditional family‘, ‘nation‘, ‘my kind of people and religion’ – without recognizing the meaning of why it is important or why one should preserve these at all.

When Scruton writes, for example, that we can see conservatism in Hegel (and liberalism in Kant) (Scruton, 2017, part iii): I am of the opinion that all things considered, what is found in Hegel may be a good defense of the “bildung“, but Hegel is too rational – so rational, indeed, that all nature somehow speculates (speculum) (Hodgson, 2005, p. 79) to him the rational through the Spirit – to be a conservative. The reason why, to this day, we still have a conservatism that does not explore its enchantment but a conservatism that defends certain ideas; it shows that conservatism is artistic enough to preserve, however irrationally, ideas that are not so conservative (that Hegel is conservative should be included here as well).

Conservatism is an (artistic) act to protect the things we love from being burned by the philosophies of the “luminous spectrum,” of rationalism, of the more than excessive Western Platonic sun. We can preserve conservatism today through Hegel: or give up like Burke on some metaphysical maxim to explain our doings. However, I will now present the argument that no one shows better what conservatism is than the meaning behind ‘daimon’ and ‘agathos’ in Plato’s division, or as Socrates says against those that “κατὰ μὲν Ὅμηρον καὶ “Ηράκλειτον καὶ πᾶν τὸ τοιοῦτον φῦλον οἷον ῥεύματα κιν-εῖσθαι τὰ πάντα (. . .)” (“according to Homer and Heraclitus and all the same who see everything in the movement of perpetual flux (. . .)”) (Plato, 1921).

When Plato has in mind his state Καλλίπολις (Kallipolis: the beautiful (kallos) city (polis)), he sees it as the highest goal of those who have knowledge (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē) of ideas (εἶδος, eîdos), in which the highest idea is that of the good (ἀγαθός, agathós), which can be reached and is ontologically related directly to the beautiful (κᾰ́λλος, kallos). So, Plato’s politea (πολιτεία, policy-making) is that the most beautiful state (kallipolis), is the state that embodies the idea of agathos (of the good) (Plato, (vol II), 1930). This should be read hand in hand with Plato. This is how we achieve happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudaimonia: soul (δαιμον, daimon), good (εὐ, eû)): the daimon of Socrates, is not simply an argument to defend Socrates that he supposedly believed in the city’s gods. Socrates’ daimon is Plato’s drunkenness to seek eudaemonia through his kallipolis: that is, to seek happiness (the good soul) in the ideal state (the beautiful city).

When Socrates speaks against what was then the Greek understanding and always equates the two, Homer and Heraclitus, we must also remember how Heraclitus understood the daimon. As I will argue that the biggest difference between Plato and Heraclitus is their understanding of the daimon. “ἦθος,” writes Heraclitus, “ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων” (frg. 119) (“ethos anthropo daimon” – “Man’s ethos is its own daimon.”) For Heraclitus, our daimon was not an inner spirit or voice as in Socrates, but it was the habits or ethos (ἦθος, ethos) of man itself, (ethos in the Greek sense can also be read as what has remained through habit), so the daimon of man was the doings and becomings of the man themselves (and not something outside or within them) (Peters, 1969, f. 33).

Heraclitus was called the weeping philosopher (in Western philosophies, Burke was the first to talk about “positive pain ” (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 102-106)), because Heraclitus did not see an eudaimonia somewhere, since the “daimon” of Heraclitus was the man in becoming (the same opinion that Homer held about the gods according to Plato (Plato, (Theaetetus), 1997)), which preserves a hidden logos that we must listen to (frg. 1). Unlike Dianoia (διάνοια, through (διά, dia), mind (νοῦς, nous)), in Heraclitus we speak, in the sense just related, of a Hyponoia (ὑπόνοια, under (ὑπό, hypo), mind (νοῦς, nous)): a lower knowledge, which Plato makes synonymous with mûthos (μῦθος, myth) (Peters, 1969, f. 121), here is one more reason why when he writes about Heraclitus he always mentions him with Homer. And one more reason why when Heraclitus uses and introduces the word “magic” (from magos, μάγος) to Europe  (J, 2002) – through which we have “magjepsje” (enchantment) in Albanian – he speaks against the people who enter the mysteries mediated (and not going in them by themselves) (frg. 14).

I think it is no accident that conservatives – Burke, Scruton, Oakeshott – do not mix their hands with rationalism (even though there are concessions here and there, or why Chesterton can’t speak to anyone with his Descartes to defend ‘Western thought‘), because they believed something close to or precisely the aphorism-like that man has ethos as its daimon. No matter how much rational calculative philosophy we will do – eudaimonia, or otherwise, that desire to make the earth a paradise, at best gives us a crippled government, and at worst, the regimes of the twentieth century, without exception. Conservatism admits of change, like that of Heraclitus and the gods of Homer; (the good daimon is not in Heraclitus, just as the good, moral, gods are absent in Homer); conservatism admits even the change of gods: the only thing that does not admit of change is whatever is raised by the ideas of Plato – whatever the rational subject comes to be in Western philosophy, in this sense, it is not at all strange that it gives the main seeds for liberalism. A historian of ideas would know this from Plato’s treatment of Heraclitus and Homer. But this should also be known by poets when they read Homer’s verses:

“εἴ γε μὲν εἰδείης σῇσι φρεσὶν ὅσσα τοι αἶσα

“κήδε᾽ ἀναπλῆσαι, πρὶν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι,

“ἐνθάδε κ᾽ αὖθι μένων σὺν ἐμοὶ τόδε δῶμα φυλάσσοις”

(“If you only knew in your heart / How many difficulties Fate has for you before you reach your homeland / you would stay again, guarding this house with me.” Odyssey, book V, verse 206-208)

The conservator is someone who, even though one knows fully well that Fate has to bring its own difficulties because everything is in the making, still does not stay in someone else’s home. And returns and longs for one’s own home – where enchantment is its own dwelling. The conservative preserves because the conservative has something to lose, the traditionalist, on the other hand, defends – because the traditionalist has nothing to lose, even one’s own life is instrumentalized (it is only a traditionalist who stays in Plato’s house and shows Europe rationalism through rational philosophies to achieve happiness – albeit happiness according to their definitions, not ours).

Edmund Burke and the Preservation of What is

“Man’s nature is art”

It is generally accepted by philosophers and political thinkers that the first sowing of the seeds of conservatism belongs to Edmund Burke. As throughout Burke’s life, policy-making in Europe has changed a lot. While the reaction in essence of ‘conservatism’ was against the demands and hypotheses of the liberal philosophies, in the time we live in, what the world knew as liberal, and what I will elaborate as (Burke’s) conservatism, have come to resemble more of a center in the realm of politics – rather than two corners that spiral in opposition and reaction to one another (Scruton, 2017). But nevertheless, in essence, however much they are now closer to the center in the field of politics, there are key differences that should not be forgotten.

When Burke, for example, opposes the idea of the “social contract“, saying that, unlike liberal philosophies, policy-making is founded on things that are not only present but on the gratitude and participation with those who were, are, and will be (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 359). – (Even Scruton, analyzing the enchantment of the Common Law, we can assume that he had this in mind when he is of the opinion that a liberal constitution is almost always in contradiction with itself when the pronoun “We” in our (liberal) constitutions does not responds only to an individual and not only to those who are now (Scruton, 2017).) And when Burke rejects any attempt to define human nature, writing that human nature is art (Burke, (vol IV), 1869, p. 176) – this definitely brings us to his “cherishing” of those highly misunderstood “prejudices”. For, in the absence of any world Spirit, the general will or human nature that leads to the natural rights of those who are, as liberal philosophies pushed and push forth (here more than anyone else’s philosophy, Burke responds to the dreary and sterile Rousseau’s one): nothing else remains but the things that their endurance over time has been the greatest proof of the enchantment they have over us (thus of our natural need to preserve them, even, as Burke writes, if we do this being ashamed (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 346)).

But perhaps in this manner, Burke is dangerous because he seems to take and halt us away from protecting minorities from majorities in democracies; for example, he prevents us from fighting against imperialist abuses and prevents us from running away from ideas about the abolition of slavery; from the protection of those who live in the colonies when we have our king; the thought that the woman is not just an animal. Well, here is the opposite of whatever “prejudice” Burke tells us about, and it is purely a prejudice of ours that these thoughts are assumed that come only from one corner of political thought: for Burke was among the first thinkers to worry that in democracy (Burke is generally skeptical of democracy), minorities would always be oppressed by the majority and that same majority would fall into the hands of the leadership they voted (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 38); he was among the first, and sometimes the only one, to oppose the king for the taxation of the American colonies and to speak out against the abuses in British India (Burke, vol II, 1869), (Burke, (vol X), 1869): he suggested not only the document to make illegal “the slave trade” (Burke, (vol VI), 1869, p. 254) in a sincere way (although with some misjudgments) in the kingdom then, but it was also Burke who wrote against “the empire of light and reason” of the revolutionary France, that in their reasoning “a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 333). Above all, it is Burke who does not believe that we should have a divine law, and still more, it is Burke again who says that the greatest achievement of the modern era is the state that does not interfere in the lives of those over whom it rules (Bourke, 2000, pp. 632–656).

When Burke talks about cherishing what remains, he does not have a tradition in mind. Tradition is always a bias of consciousness that defends the state of things over an interpretation of how these things should be. Burke speaks of a heritage; of a heritage which from its changeable possibility (“a state without the means of some change,” writes Burke, “is without the means of its conservation” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 256)); we are under its enchantment to preserve it: and change is possible because what Burke is talking about is not how these things ought to be, but how they are. When he writes that the nature of man is art, he is definitely referring to the essential meaning of the word art (lat. “ars“, as he uses it everywhere in the twelve volumes of his speeches, books, and letters, which reminds more than what Heraclitus calls ethos): it is for this reason why now conservatism, at least the Burkean one, is read more as a method than as an ideology (A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (vol I), 2007, p. 285): an ideology has certain foundations that lead to certain conclusions of action, in Burke we do not have something like that, indeed, in Burke we have contempt for such thoughts. In Burke, precisely because this distinction between heritage and tradition can be made, we have the appeal of conservatism to not be something only political, but more of and closer to a specific and particular attitude towards things that are.

If conservatism is only Burkean, liberalism, with its conceptions of human nature, the general will, and whatever corner of rationalism and rights it finds, is more ideological. And it is no coincidence that in essence, Burke’s abandonment of philosophy after his book of aesthetics and his refusal to trust metaphysics or anything but political discourse to preserve things not only gave him the name “the madman” by his contemporaries – but it also gives us a beautiful picture of what it means to be stubborn in your own enchantment. Not to be blinded by what has always been your home, and the lack of fear that even before your king, when the latter seeks to spoil that feeling, to say to him –

“Again and again,” said Burke, “revert to your old principles – seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here to discuss the distinctions of rights, nor to attempt to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it (. . .) Do not burthen them with taxes.” (Burke, (vol II), 1869, p. 73)

This is Edmund Burke even to the philosophies that fueled and billowed the fires of the French Revolution. If there is a summary of Burke’s philosophy – then it is this: “Don’t burden us with things that are your whims and not the way things are“. The same thing can be observed when Burke – here we even can see the point where he exposes all of his enchantment feelings – thinking about the French Revolution concludes:

“As things now stand,” writes Burke “with everything respectable destroyed outside us and an attempt to destroy every principle of respect within us, one is almost forced to apologize for having common human feelings.” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 337)

Edmund Burke never apologized for his common human feelings, but after him, not everything conservative, in large measure, is what he preserved. Indeed, if it were not for the French Revolution, we would today recognize Edmund Burke as a rhetorician and philosopher deeply concerned with the multiplicity of feelings from within and their expression in policy-making – and we would be talking now about the “defenders” only about those who came after Burke, and then perhaps we wouldn’t read Burke only politically at all. However the case might be, something quite different begins to be understood across the English Channel in the twentieth century as conservative (or at least, named as such), and even further, something quite different begins to be preserved (or rather, here it begins to be defended) besides the feelings of enchantment or human nature as art. Here life ceases to matter, the concern about death begins.

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