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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... philosophical depth and coherence or revitalizing culture but achieving an essentially political objective - namely , defeat communism and replace statist liberalism with minimal government . The editors were fascinated by practical ...
... philosophical depth and coherence or revitalizing culture but achieving an essentially political objective - namely , defeat communism and replace statist liberalism with minimal government . The editors were fascinated by practical ...
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... philosophical tensions or contradictions. The groups that the magazine tried to accommodate ranged from radical ... philosophers to understand that fusionism was an artificial construct, a jumble of ultimately incompatible ideas ...
... philosophical tensions or contradictions. The groups that the magazine tried to accommodate ranged from radical ... philosophers to understand that fusionism was an artificial construct, a jumble of ultimately incompatible ideas ...
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... philosophical discernment and historical distance from the events of the present, made the conservative movement susceptible to confusion and manipulation. Almost from the beginning it contained antitraditional elements, including the ...
... philosophical discernment and historical distance from the events of the present, made the conservative movement susceptible to confusion and manipulation. Almost from the beginning it contained antitraditional elements, including the ...
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... philosophical stringency and historical perspective made it miss what should have been obvious, namely, that so-called neoconservatism did not have much in common with the conservatism of Edmund Burke or of some of America's leading ...
... philosophical stringency and historical perspective made it miss what should have been obvious, namely, that so-called neoconservatism did not have much in common with the conservatism of Edmund Burke or of some of America's leading ...
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... philosophical background, which enables him to sort through Viereck's often disparate and scattered observations about life and then provide philosophical orderliness, structure, and precision that are often lacking in Viereck's own ...
... philosophical background, which enables him to sort through Viereck's often disparate and scattered observations about life and then provide philosophical orderliness, structure, and precision that are often lacking in Viereck's own ...
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