Britannia Radio

The Other Idol-Breaker: Owen Barfield and the Plenitude of the Word

From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Wed, 2009-12-02 07:09

Owen Barfield

In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to teach “how to philosophize with a hammer.” Hammers find their predestined use, according to Nietzsche, in the smashing of idols, by which he meant the assortment of falsehoods and platitudes that constituted, in his view, the shabby existing dominant representation of life and the world. Nietzsche never practiced anything like systematic philosophy – he wrote as he thought, aphoristically and in paragraphs. One must take him unsystematically, too, or rather selectively – because, having atomized all the images, as he supposed himself to have done, and having found nothing behind them, as he convinced himself, the devilish idea that everything is nothing strongly tempted him. He wrote of it under the image of “the abyss.” If the Nietzschean philosophical impulse transmigrated for the good in souls like Oswald Spengler and H. L. Mencken, who were skeptics and iconoclasts, it would regrettably also have done so in souls, if that were the word, like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida, to whom harsher labels must apply. Spengler and Mencken warned against nihilism; the polysyllabic abolishers of logic and morality taught the faddishly inclined to crave for l’abîme and Das Ungrund. The legion of cipher-minions has been craving thusly, and arrogantly on behalf of everyone else, ever since.

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Lisbon’s Constitutional Revolution by Stealth

From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Mon, 2009-11-30 09:47

  An analysis by Prof. Anthony Coughlan

 

With the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty on Tuesday 1 December, members of the European Parliament, who up to now have been “representatives of the peoples of the States brought together in the Community” (Art.189 TEC),  become “representatives of the Union’s citizens” (Art.14 TEU).

This change in the status of MEPs is but one illustration of the constitutional revolution being brought about by the Lisbon Treaty.

For Lisbon, like the EU Constitution before it, establishes for the first time a European Union which is constitutionally separate from and superior to its Member States, just as the USA is separate from and superior to its 50 constituent states or as Federal Germany is in relation to its Länder.

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A Baroness for Europe, a Baron for Britain

From the desk of Paul Belien on Mon, 2009-11-30 06:35

On Tuesday the Lisbon Treaty comes into force and the European Union (EU) takes on the status of a genuine state with its own President and Foreign Minister. The Russian newspaper Pravda (Nov. 4) recently wrote that the EU is beginning to look like a “reincarnation of the USSR.” The appointment of Cathy Ashton as the first EU Foreign Minister (full title” “High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”) would seem to confirm this.

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