From the publisher who brought us a new and expanded edition of L.A. Rollins’ excellent “The Myth of Natural Rights” comes a rare little book by Jonathan Bowden called “Mad.” The book was originally published in 1989 but I have not been able to find much information about it. Before publication Nine-Banded Books announced it as a “Stirnerite belle letters.”
The logical positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach wrote in his seminal work “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy”:
“The philosopher…appears incapable of mastering his desire to know. Throughout the history of philosophy we find the philosophical mind associated with the imagination of the poet; where the philosopher asked, the poet answers.”
A brief glance at a random page of Bowden’s Mad will suffice to identify the phenomenon that Reichenbach is talking about. The author identifies a dazzling number of relations between historical, sociological, political, and psychological phenomena without providing little epistemological clues about how he has established such wisdom. For example, we learn that “death is man’s cardinal reality: an act of danger, complete self-absorption, becoming, in the moment of transfiguration, complete self-negation.”………Right. Better to treat Mad as an powerful and imaginative form of literature!
Art exists for its own sake, and rarely benefits from being analyzed. As Bowden states himself, “science and art are brought into conflict by those who have the interests of neither near to their hearts.”
So I will suffice with quoting a number of representative passages from Mad to give you a taste of the book:
“Those who don’t lie down and die soon discover that happiness and intellect are at opposite sides of the pole.”
“Life’s essential fragility is preserved with due regard for its importance. We know that we’re perched on a knife-edge and the slightest oscillation kills us.”
“In essence life is conflict between those in control and those endeavoring to throw off control.”
And as the writer reminds us repeatedly, “sex is the mark of the beast married to the spirit of the divine.”
In what is my favorite passage of the book, the author’s knowledge of the history of human thought meets his bleak outlook on the human condition, culminating in the following deadpan, but dead-on statement:
“Prior to the establishment of a state, life is nasty, brutish and short. Nothing changes once a state’s created. Only the longevity of the participants alters. And even that’s arbitrary.”
There is structure to Bowden’s MADness. One detects an outlook on life similar to thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Stirner and Ragnar Redbeard. It should not be completely surprising, then, that Jonathan Bowden has become associated with the “New Right,” and less fortunate, petty party politics. Despite his interest in thinkers associated with esoteric Traditionalism such as Julius Evola, it seems that his elitist moment of distancing himself from mass politics still has to come.
Bowden’s H.P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic is a typical example of New Right writing. Bowden rightly identifies Lovecraft’s “mechanistic” and “ultra-conservative” outlook on life but then drowns the good man in the obligatory occultist purple prose. And that is unfortunate because it is not hard to picture a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism. But as a book about Thinkers of the Right indicates, the Traditionalist Right is just not capable of “remaining true to the Earth,” as Nietzsche put it, and remains unified in its case against “materialism” and flirtations with mysticism.
In the same piece, Bowden draws attention to H.P. Lovecraft’s publication The Conservative. Despite the growing interest in Lovecraft’s writings, prevailing orthodoxy does not make it likely that someone will produce a complete and handsome collection of this vehicle of Lovecraft’s most reactionary thoughts anytime soon.
Nine-Banded Books, are you listening?!