It has been made clear that within many traditions, attention has been placed on the importance of marriage, or more fundamentally put, on the matter of breeding. Any culture worth its salt will therefore have some relationship one way or the other to the matter of eugenics. This is not a word that should scare us. Alamariu will turn our attention to the matter of Plato’s Republic, and in its best and proper interpretation, see the philosopher’s vision as an ideal eugenic state, crafted exclusively of the ladder in mind. Alamariu will draw his attention and ours through Nietzsche and his own critique, that such a state will meet its inevitable downfall when it looses sight of this and its inevitable outcome of dysgenic unions.

With this view in mind, we will make our way through the text and point to the ways societies have functioned in this regard. We will then turn to Alamariu’s interpretation of the ancient Greeks as a worthy alternative to ancient norms as an authentic aristocratic rule by nature, and then see how this plays out in both Nietzsche and Plato.

Nomos and Phusis: A Phenomenology of Pre-Philosophical Political Life

I. Nomos and Phusis

The Greek term nomos denotes ancestral custom. In the present inquiry it names a culture’s ancestral laws, which, prior to the emergence of philosophy, were regarded as all-powerful. Nomos is thus an all-encompassing primordial act of foundation. Pre-philosophical societies esteemed it as good precisely because it was ancestral; the word therefore encapsulates the phenomenon of social homogenization.

Nietzsche observed that what is “natural” about nomos is only this binding or burdening of man to laws that are themselves unnatural and unreasonable. The phenomenon is closely linked to a religious vocation. One sees it enacted in the early Judges of the Old Testament and in the Brahman class of elders in Aryan societies.

This notion of nomos stands in contrast to a fundamental Greek exception: the rule of phusis, or nature. The latter phrase designates the pinnacle of “might makes right,” a way of life distinct from primitive nomos.

Alamariu explains that this ancient Greek alternative could develop only when a native population was conquered and subdued by a foreign elite. Such top-down imposition most often occurred when a pastoral people overran a farming population. This, he asserts, is the origin of all aristocratic morality. Philosophy itself is born within the aristocracy. We shall return to that birth later.

Nomos is meant to be all-encompassing, binding every individual within the society. The individual does not conceive himself apart from the customs of his tribe; philosophy is therefore precluded inside nomos. The aristocratic way of life differs from nomos most probably because it is a foreign imposition by conquest. Alamariu finds it difficult to imagine an authentic aristocracy arising spontaneously from the primitive “rule of the ancestral.”

He isolates two terms paramount to genuine Greek aristocracy: phronesis (political intelligence) and andreia (military courage). For the Greeks, military virtue replaced the drudgery of farm-work. Alamariu writes:

The mentality here consists in a lack of equality to the lower class of people, who are felt to be not merely alien ethnically, but who are seen as radically different in way of life, in particular as tied to the earth and to the preservation of mere life, to servile domesticity, in a way that the aristocrat is not.

It is therefore outside nomos that the concept of phusis could first arise. Aristocratic contempt for the limitations of city life—or communal life more broadly—allowed the idea of nature to develop. Nature was first understood as something primal, a secret knowledge lying beyond the bounds of nomos and revealed by demonic beings outside the city.

On the question of breeding, the principle of primitive nomos is taming: the taming of human nature for the sake of leveling all differences under the absolute law of the ancestors and thereby preserving the community. Aristocratic culture, by contrast, bred human types in order to “improve” the stock—more precisely, to breed the perfect human specimen. Biological preservation is replaced by biological improvement. This is the essential difference between agricultural societies and war-band societies.

II. Nietzsche and the Origin of Philosophy and Tyranny in the Decay of Aristocratic Regimes

Unlike Alamariu’s book, which reserves Nietzsche for a grand finale, we begin with him, because his interpretation is fundamental to a proper reading of the Greeks.

For Nietzsche, philosophy and tyranny are deeply connected—perhaps identical in their origins. Alamariu states that the decline or decay of an aristocracy allows for the “distillation,” abstraction, or “radicalization” of the aristocratic ethos, which is reducible to the classical standard of nature. This radicalization produces the tyrant and the philosopher as twin or complementary types. The prerequisite for both, Nietzsche holds, is genius. Such an identity is cultivated within a proper “regime.” In this sense Nietzsche appears as a great reformer of the Platonic project, proposing a kind of “aristocratic radicalism.”

Alamariu defines aristocratic radicalism as “the radicalization of the aristocratic standard at the moment of the decline of a historical aristocracy.” In such a moment it falls to the philosopher to emphasize andreia (manliness, courage) as his most necessary quality. The proper philosopher is therefore far more than a mere disciple of learning; he portrays a way of life that is the “crown of high culture.”

Nietzsche calls his readers to take up this cause in modern times. Surveying the political and cultural decline of his age and ours, he finds it all too apparent. Plato would agree that political rhetoric may serve an esoteric purpose: to reform the souls of men according to their plain meaning. This is Nietzsche’s call to the “rebarbarization” of the human spirit. Yet Nietzsche also holds that the Platonic project, through the history of Western civilization, has been all too successful in taming and denaturing Western man rather than elevating him toward the higher cause of philosophy. Nietzsche and Plato therefore disagree only on tactics. Nietzsche sees the philosopher as a radical; Plato sees him as a great politician—one who has become far too spiritualized, intellectualized, and moralized by nomos. For Nietzsche the philosopher should appear as an athlete of the intellect, requiring a strict personal regime and training. Philosophy is a sexually charged erotic contest that combines the physicality of the athlete with the erudition of the learned. This stands in opposition to what we today call a philosopher or scholar—those who have “merely learned.”

The truly aristocratic regime, in its noblest sense, exists for self-defense and self-perpetuation in the face of danger. It must also possess what Nietzsche calls the “pathos of distance”: a sense of intolerance or cruelty. This stands in contrast to Plato’s temperance and justice. Nietzsche’s intolerance possesses a certain severity against others and against oneself. In ages of political decline, after an aristocracy has bred and nurtured the type, a true philosopher may impose himself upon the sedentary and “civilized.”

Nietzsche agrees with an esoteric reading of the Platonic project as “the Olympian existence and the ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius.” Alamariu adds:

Man is a “political animal” in a very literal and direct way then: not merely in the sense of human nature being fulfilled in the polis, but also from the other direction, nature achieves this end through an instinct that binds the lower classes to the growing power of the state precisely on account of its force, power, and violence.

What Nietzsche and Alamariu both maintain is that Plato’s problem was his toned-down message. His philosophy was presented as a morality rather than as a cultural project of selective breeding.

III. The Idea of Nature

Alamariu points to Pindar and Homer as major sources of Nietzsche’s understanding of ancient Greece. For Pindar, aristocracy rules because it is physically, intellectually, and spiritually supreme. Such virtue cannot be taught; it resides in blood. Alamariu writes:

A principle of nature, phusis, emerges from the exigencies of the way of life of the conquering elite. Though mentioned only twice in Homer, the principle of nature acknowledges for the first time a reality that exists outside human law, tradition, and convention—outside and in opposition to nomos—and which is somehow associated with biological observations regarding breeding or blood—in the case of Homer both references are botanical, to be precise. An aristocracy in decline, in danger, its members faced with imminent extinction of their liberty—if not of their lives—but, more pertinently, with the decline and decay of their traditions, severe laws, in sum, of their regime understood quite literally as a form of training, diet, gymnastic both of the body and spirit: this decline and danger produces the two closely related types, the philosopher and the tyrant. The means by which this happens is through a radicalization of the standard of nature, that is first undertaken as it were ideologically, in defense of aristocracy. (pp. 115–116)

Phusis exists as a standard apart even from the divine and outside its power. Arete undergirds an aristocracy’s claim to rule. Excellence is first defined as prowess in battle and the ability to give good counsel. Aristocratic conventions therefore lead beyond the mere preservation of a tribal collectivity. Alamariu turns to Pindar to illustrate the stage immediately preceding the philosophical revolution:

The work of Pindar is indispensable for understanding the aristocracy’s view of itself from the inside, or, as it were, for providing a phenomenology of aristocratic thought—here nature is not intellectualized or abstracted, but understood still in “the old way,” organically connected with aristocratic traditions and beliefs about the divine. (p. 119)

In both Homer and Pindar, nature (phusis) as the verb phue is usually translated “growth” but also “stature.” In Pindar the sense of nature stands for a concrete material or biological reality that stands in for “the body.” Phue is contrasted with the dead or passive corpse, the Greek soma. Alamariu quotes Pindar:

…in the toil of conflict he resembles the spirit of loud-roaring lions in boldness, while in wisdom he is like the fox, who foretells the swoop of the eagle by falling on her back. And it is right to do anything to blot out [maurosai, literally: darken/make dim] one’s enemy. For Melissa’s was not allotted the nature of Orion; he is negligible to look at, though heavy to grapple with in his strength. And yet once there went from Thebes, Cadmus’ city, a hero in stature but unflinching in spirit… (p. 125)

Throughout Pindar’s poems phue concerns the emergence of a body in supreme condition into an enduring radiance of fame. Pindar always uses the term as a mark of distinction. In this state of nature one possesses authority and need not give reasons or justifications for it. Those belong to the plebeians and the envious—the soma.

What is inborn in phusis is said to give a “sign to be seen,” a visible mark. Nature is revealed in overt action. The nature of a man manifests itself only in great deeds or in victory in contests. Most people do not possess this phusis. It is a matter of intensity: some beings are more worthy than others; they have more being, more nature. Therefore, in both Pindar and Nietzsche, nature is never something “discovered”; it is something that manifests itself in action. Alamariu quotes Pindar again:

Each of us differs in nature [phuai d’hekastos diapheromen] for we were each allotted a different life [biotan]. One man has this, others have something else; but for one man to win the prize of complete happiness is impossible. (p. 138)

By contrast, nomos as convention homogenizes or equalizes. Alamariu reminds us that nomos is meant to “keep persistent famine from the belly.” It aims merely at the preservation of more life. Phusis therefore makes the contrast sharp: for Nietzsche the highest type of man is the product of a proper breeding program, not of an educational program fashioned by nomos. Men pursuing higher achievement must strive according to nature and not be misled or “educated” by base convention or teaching.

Arete cannot be taught; it can only be bred. The primary function of nomos is social control, taming, and tribal survival through a regime of commands and teachings that cover up or suppress nature. An education by nature would have to be a “re-wilding,” a breeding of beastly character, a de-civilization—in essence, an escape from nomos. Pindar, like Nietzsche, believed that no law or regime could ever restrain excellence. Arete or phusis is convention-independent.

IV. Platonic Political Philosophy

Like Nietzsche, Plato holds that philosophy and tyranny are fundamentally connected—or at least that the preconditions necessary for philosophy are also the preconditions for tyranny.

Alamariu points to Strauss’s reading of Plato’s Gorgias, particularly the position of Callicles, as a crucial source for Nietzsche’s understanding of political philosophy. According to Callicles, the production (the breeding) and training of this biological specimen—“the production of genius”—is the fundamental function of political philosophy. Philosophy and tyranny are alternative methods of “preserving nature” or “saving nature.” For both Plato and Nietzsche they function, as Alamariu puts it, as “emergency medical measures.”

Platonic rhetoric—the way Plato is to be read—is quite literally “political philosophy”: philosophy as investigation and spiritual warfare, presented as the intention of the philosopher in the city. This philosopher of the polis is painted as the good citizen who keeps his city safe from harm and corruption. The study of political philosophy therefore demands that the reader treat Plato as rhetoric and read between the lines, attending especially to the means of concealment and dissimulation.

Political “law” in the ancient Greek sense should not be interpreted as nomos but as the “law of nature” to which both mortals and immortals are subject. For Callicles it is the tyranny of convention (nomos) over superior specimens that is the problem. He claims that truth itself and the just by nature will shine out only in escape or revolt from convention. Does Callicles then represent the political doctrine of pre-Socratic philosophy? Plato fails to provide a clear answer. Callicles appears to reject the philosophical life in favor of the tyrant. He points to a kind of suicide of the philosopher of his time, who pursues political rhetoric only to perish at the hands of convention, whereas the tyrant liberates himself from such restrictions. The philosopher is thereby put on notice not to become a merely moral man attached to law and custom. Such a philosopher runs the risk of being ruled by a superior tyrant when in reality he himself wishes to rule.

Socrates represents a compromise of this erotic tension, replacing nomos with the more nuanced term politeia: the regime, the actualization of convention through physical force. Socrates’ political life treats the regime (politeia) as ruler, and it comes to rule through convention, nomos. The best of such a polis would unfortunately have to homogenize itself to the ruler—in this case, the politeia. This runs counter to Callicles’ proposal of liberation for the philosopher. Socrates proposes conformity as the proper means of power. Worse still, Callicles warns that the demos, ultimately related to nomos, will destroy the superior man it uses for itself. Socrates’ reply is simply that Callicles’ concern is political naïveté. Overt tyranny is not possible because it provokes an ever-greater conventional or democratic counter-revolution.

Plato’s larger project is therefore the reform of convention (nomos) itself and of political regimes (politeia) from within, by rhetorical techniques that accept the premises of convention in politics.

Nietzsche’s justified criticism of the Platonists is that they are would-be tyrants who play-act as pious, righteous, and tense moralist sages in order to rule within a given regime. Nietzsche’s political—and therefore wider philosophical—concept can be seen as the refinement of Callicles’ argument for antinomianism, a drive toward a tyranny of violent atheism, or an amoral radical aristocracy.

V. Conclusion

Alamariu asserts that Nietzsche held the true esoteric Platonic project to be “the Olympian existence and the ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius.” Man is a “political animal” in a very literal and direct way: not merely in the sense that human nature is fulfilled in the polis, but also from the other direction—nature achieves this end through an instinct that binds the lower classes to the growing power of the state precisely on account of its force, power, and violence.

Platonism, corrupted by Socrates’ plebeian moralism—that is, moral exhortation as the taming of the instincts through the application of reason—turns the Platonic philosopher into the mere man of reason, the exemplar of piety, temperance, and justice arrayed against the anarchic instincts of intemperance, lust, and criminality. He becomes the virtual priest of moral life and the good citizen. This is the philosopher’s “ascetic mask,” the creation of conventional Platonism as we know it today.

The problem, then, is that Plato toned down his philosophy and presented it as a morality rather than as a cultural project of selective breeding.

(This is an updated version of one of the few essays I’ve posted in the past that I still stand behind. Much of my opinion on things has changed recently, but this I think still gives a decent interpretation of what interests me on the Chudstack.)

What I write here and what I will continue to write on in the future is meant for chud artists like myself. They are endowed with certain retrospective abilities. One that is blessed with psychological innovations and esoteric artistic secrets. One must be initiated into a kind of artistic metaphysics. This quest draws from the Greeks and their immortal desire for beauty, for festivals, pleasures, new cults, and new life. Always more life. For what is this muddling in art without the stuff of life?We are not a quantitative mass. We are more. We must re-educate others to see science through the lens of art, and art through the lens of life! If you’re not into that sort of thing, you can stop reading this now. Thanks.

I have this vision in my head. I’m sure you’ve had it too. A vision of the future. This future is naturally progressive, but not that kind of progressive. This future is one emboldened by the primordial Will. In this future, gone are the morality fags who weigh down the potential of humanity. Like many, the emblem we hold to a world such as this might look something like the Greeks. Yes, this is another essay adorning Ancient Greek culture, but maybe beyond posting the statues (please see above, I can't help myself) we can start getting serious about why we want a RETVRN to Ancient Greek culture.

This reflection on the Greeks comes from their own sense of Will, as that which sought to behold itself in its own glorification as “GENIUS” (an important word that I will write more on in the future…) and the artistic world of their own making; to glorify itself, the Will’s creation had to feel worthy of such glorification. This is the Greek’s own unique realm of beauty, where they saw their own reflections, when they conceptualized their Olympian man.

My reading of the Greeks, perhaps just like yours, first came through Nietzsche. From the beginnings of his career he asked how is it that the Greeks came to need tragedy? Even more so, why the insistence on its particular way of art? What was it about the Greeks? Nietzsche paints an ancient society that is fascinated by the harsh and horrifying. The Why? Because for them the need to overcome the complicated, painful aspects of the human condition stem from their unique drive beyond well-being. From their own excessive health, from their abundance of life, they wished to face the horrifying in nature. The issue is not a matter of how to live, but that we do not live enough! #Peaty.

I think what I see here is the beginnings of a particular kind of aesthetic movement. This was not necessarily forged on the fundamentals of morality like other high cultures of its time, but rather what I think Nietzsche would argue, is theirs was actually forged primarily on aesthetics. I actually think our cultural climate today has proven that many would subscribe to something like this, and so maybe this is why time and again, we do in fact wish to RETVRN to the Greeks, specifically.

We do not need to resurrect particular traditions wholesale, though if the old forms still ignite vitality in some, so be it. Whether you hold any kind of religious belief is not important to me for this argument. I myself am fascinated by religious and spiritual beliefs, though I do not belong to any, currently. For that reason we will hold back on any hostility Nietzsche or other artists of his kind may hold against Christianity, specifically. I personally believe what the rising generation truly craves is better art forged by superior artists. Certainly the role between artist and sage is remarkable. Perhaps the hunger for living tradition and the hunger for living art are nearly identical sensations: both orient the soul toward the sacred, the hierarchical, and the overflowing abundance of existence. That being said, it is true, in an age of nihilistic exhaustion, where both the modern Left and the Right offer only sterility, the youth must look not backward into this dull nostalgia, but perhaps forward through some kind of new creation. Nietzsche saw this clearly in The Birth of Tragedy. I think for both the Evolians and Nietzscheans alike that I have spoken with, it is in Nietzsche’s earliest works that lend themselves to some kind of spiritual metaphysics, though what it amounts to is what I wish to lay out - specifically, an aesthetic phenomenology. Nietzsche’s diagnosis remains my compass for a modern artistic metaphysics.

It is in the contemporary political landscape that repels the hot, and virile young, precisely because it is lame and boring. The “cuckservative” Right clings to hollow moralisms and managed decline, while the institutional Left has rendered culture “ghey,” decadent, and ugly through its ongoing dominance of academia, media, and almost ALL of the major artistic institutions. There is little for energetic youth to admire except in their own latent potential—and even that requires new rituals, new myths, and new art to shape it into something higher. Without these, I believe the spirit drifts into what we see now - some kind of modernist self-consumption or an ongoing detachment from reality. Nietzsche understood that art and morality exist in a profound tension, that “reason” itself often wars against the artistic instinct. For Nietzsche and for myself, the Greeks still remain our eternal example. They are a challenge to our own creative poverty, and these ancients continue to challenge those who are worthy of them.

There is a certain metaphysical comfort for one who has seen into this “terror” of nature. But the noble man capable of facing such forces is not meant to be seen as some Adam defying his God and marked forever as a sinner, but a Prometheus, willing to snatch fire from him and defy him. You are meant to derive some kind of cheerfulness from this. You are meant to struggle with these forces, even though you know you may never surpass them. Wisdom as we know it today becomes rather a crime against this nature. Truth, we can be sure, may in fact be harmful to life. The truth might not necessarily set us free. We may be in need of our illusions.

Returning to Nietzsche’s own origin, he would ask: What explains the supposed “cheerfulness” of these Greeks? How could a culture so vibrantly alive produce art steeped in the pessimistic, the harsh, the horrifying, and every other problematic depth of existence? To elaborate more on our initial aesthetic assumptions, the answer Nietzsche sees is in a kind of pessimism of strength. Their overflowing health and their abundance of life, as mentioned earlier, allowed them to stare unflinchingly into the abyss without what we, in our own sense of objectification in facts or certainty may seek shelter behind. It was specifically from its strong, healthy bodies and its society as a whole people that allowed for the Greeks to face the darker side of life. It is out of this superfluity that came tragedy. We, by contrast, have grown far too theoretical, and saturated with critics, “educated” idiots, and starved of any true, genuine artists. The argument can be made, as it is by Nietzsche, that since Socrates, we have whole-heartedly fled the tragic, pessimistic side of life. We are not built to handle such harshness anymore. Our modern optimism—socialistic, egalitarian, promising limitless potential for all humanity—nauseates because it is fundamentally unartistic. It is BORING! It is UGLY! The unartistic bug man sadly cannot comprehend the aesthetic power of the Dionysian.

Central to Nietzsche’s metaphysics are the twin impulses: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Today we might explain them thus: the Apollonian is the dream-like principle of form, individuation, beautiful illusion, and measured clarity—the sculptural, the heroic image, the ordering light of the sun-god that shields us from chaos. It is the realm of dreams, of imagination and perfection. We should not merely associate the Apollonian with the objective. It is rather through Apollo that we see our lofty gestures, how our world of suffering is actually necessary so that through it the individual is driven to produce a kind of redeeming vision, and then, immersed in such contemplation, he may sit and calmly abide. The Apollonian is both enlightenment AND illusion. The Dionysian on the other hand is the ecstatic dissolution of boundaries, the primal unity, the intoxicating music and dance that merges the individual back into the surging will of nature—sexual omnipotence, terror, and rapture intertwined. This is the realm of intoxication, of the annihilation of individuality. It is through the Dionysian, and more specifically the Dionysian chorus that saves the Hellenistic Greek from an otherwise buddhistic negation of life through the salvation of art. It was in the Dionysian dithyramb that humanity is stirred to the highest elevation of all symbolic capabilities. It is something that may never before been felt that pushes for expression - for the destruction of the veil of Maya. The satyr chorus embodied this: not mere drunken beasts, but symbols of nature’s sexual and vital power, the archetypes of man in his most potent, amoral reality. We were meant to admonish the satyrs, not laugh against their revelry. Nietzschean metaphysics suggests that greek tragedy was born from the marriage of these two equally important forces. The Greeks had the wisdom to make their strongest, most disruptive emotions sacred.

However we now glimpse at a resurgence of this satirical, Dionysian energy in the BAP-o-sphere and Frogtwitter spaces today—amoral artistic mischief, ironic vitality, the chorus-like mockery of the longhouse and the bug man. Thank the gods for it. It is raw, chaotic, and generative, even if still in its fledgling stages. Yet it points toward what is missing in the broader culture, and I am more than hopeful for what this might bring. I too think Nietzsche might be proud.

Why these spaces matter now, for us, if we look at the ancient tragedy by comparison, the chorus was no passive spectator. Through it, the audience experienced the Dionysian frenzy while witnessing the Apollonian drama unfold. The true metaphysical payoff was some form of a catharsis: having glimpsed the terror and meaninglessness at the heart of nature, one emerged reconciled to existence. Art justified the world aesthetically, not morally. As Wagner grasped, echoed by Nietzsche, it is the aesthetic phenomenon—and not its morality—that eternally justifies the world. Rest assured, modern entertainments offers NO such comfort of this kind. We are flooded with situational comedy, hyper-realism, and therapeutic messaging that Nietzsche would have despised as a default setting. Realism without the veil of illusion becomes a suffocating mirror; comedy without the tragic ground becomes hollow laughter. The Apollonian divorced from the Dionysian carries no catharsis and no potency.

The youth do not need to necessarily LARP as ancient Hellenes or medieval knights. They need artists capable of forging new forms that recapture the Apollonian-Dionysian synthesis for our time: art that confronts the horrors of existence from a standpoint of strength, that dissolves the ego in ecstatic unity before re-forming it more beautifully, that provides metaphysical solace amid the ruins. This art would birth new rituals—not as archaeological revival, but as organic expressions of vital spirit.

Superior artists do not merely reflect culture; they create it. They stand as the true legislators, the bridge between the terror of nature and the affirmation of life. In their work, pessimism becomes strength, abundance flows into form, and the young find something worth looking up to—not the lame pieties of Left or Right, but the shining, terrible, joyous images of what man can become.

This possible aesthetic path forward is not restoration alone, but something uniquely new for US, through our own creation. Let the sensitive young men and virile spirits of today reject the critics and demand—or better, become—the artists who make existence aesthetically bearable once more. Here is to the future, my frog frens!

Post-Script:

If you’ve made it this far into the essay, congratulations. For you, I would like to propose something. Let us go on a journey together. Shall we follow Nietzsche into some kind of madness? A kind of madness not meant as degeneration, but part of an overwhelming sense of health. We will lay siege to this artistic realm by sheer youthful vigor. What I am after here are other Dionysian enthusiasts. Have you contemplated the satyr yet? What I am after is the Crown Rosary of Laughter. Zarathustra speaks of this. Have you seen it? Do you know of such light-heartedness? If so, please follow along. The road is long and I am in need of fellow companions.