Aesthetic Origins: Peter Viereck and the Imaginative Sources of PoliticsJay Patrick Starliper While it is gaining in academic prominence, discussion of the imagination is too often neglected. Society is dangerously unaware of the intimate relationship between culture and politics, ethics and aesthetics. Challenging this, Jay Patrick Starliper examines the imagination through the lens of the work of Peter Viereck and other likeminded thinkers. The result is a philosophical deconstruction that demonstrates why books are bullets.In 1941, before Nazi barbarism was public knowledge, a young Peter Viereck published Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. In it, Viereck attacked the diabolical spiritual foundations of National Socialism. He made the ostensibly absurd claim that a certain shade of romanticism was the ethical foundation of a German revolt against decency. According to Viereck, Nazism was the culmination of over a century and a half of bad culture, the result of an idyllic imagination. Starliper warns that the same diseased imagination that culminated in gas chambers and guillotines is subtly affecting the way millions of people view the world today and that, without the inspiration of an elevated aesthetic, civilization will not survive.In the spirit of Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, Viereck's insight into the ethical and political force of aesthetics provides a much needed critique of contemporary civilization. |
From inside the book
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... ethical standards have all but vanished. The ideas and values our world associates with success and happiness are ... content exalting the virtues of uninhibited self- worship. An unabashed enthronement of the ego combined with a ...
... ethical standards have all but vanished. The ideas and values our world associates with success and happiness are ... content exalting the virtues of uninhibited self- worship. An unabashed enthronement of the ego combined with a ...
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... content of our culture. We neither understand the standard of life our aesthetic is celebrating, nor consider the humbling results of a legitimate ethical and aesthetic examination. The past has been pleading with the West for too long ...
... content of our culture. We neither understand the standard of life our aesthetic is celebrating, nor consider the humbling results of a legitimate ethical and aesthetic examination. The past has been pleading with the West for too long ...
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... ethical content of values and, consequently, the very health of the political order. The thesis of Metapolitics—that the imagination has a substantial impact on politics—is the central theme uniting all of Viereck's work: “A very ...
... ethical content of values and, consequently, the very health of the political order. The thesis of Metapolitics—that the imagination has a substantial impact on politics—is the central theme uniting all of Viereck's work: “A very ...
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... ethical confusion that had caused revolutionary political turmoil in Europe and Asia , what he referred to as the ... content , relativizing those ethical standards necessary for the preservation of decency in a constitutional ...
... ethical confusion that had caused revolutionary political turmoil in Europe and Asia , what he referred to as the ... content , relativizing those ethical standards necessary for the preservation of decency in a constitutional ...
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... content, ideas determine the ethical complexion of every civilization, determine how a particular group of people defines goodness, truth,
... content, ideas determine the ethical complexion of every civilization, determine how a particular group of people defines goodness, truth,
Contents
Arbitrary Caprice | |
The Crux of Civilization | |
Ahistorical Rationality and Human Nature | |
Will and the Ethical Imperative of Inner Action | |
The Moral Imagination | |
The DreamNexus | |
An Imaginative Conservatism | |
The Standardless Threat to Liberty | |
The Unadjusted Incarnation of Order | |
Epilogue Strict Wildness a Love That Transfigures | |
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Aesthetic Origins: Peter Viereck and the Imaginative Sources of Politics Jay Patrick Starliper No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic American American conservatism archetypes aristocracy artists Babbitt beauty Burke cash-nexus Claes G concrete conservatism conservative creative culture decent Democracy and Leadership dream-nexus economic Edmund Burke emotional ethical action ethical content ethical standards ethos existence existential experiential German German romanticism Germany's happiness healthy Hitler human condition human experience human nature ideas important indispensable individual inner check insight inspired intellectual intuitive Irving Babbitt Jahn Kirk lack legitimate liberal liberty living mass mass-man means Metapolitics moral absolutes moral imagination National Review Nazi Nazism neoconservatism Nietzsche overadjusted particular Paul Elmer person Peter Viereck philosophical Plato poetry political positivistic preserve psychological public imagination quality of imagination reality reason restraint Revolution romantic rootless roots Russell Kirk sense society soul spiritual stereotypes symbols tradition truth unadjusted understanding universal unwritten constitution values viable Viereck affirms Viereck avers Viereck believed Viereck refers Voegelin Volk Wagner Wagnerian