I WAS studying the thoughts of one of the very early phenomenologists, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), whose On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle reminds me somewhat of the spirit behind National-Anarchism.

A huge inspiration for both Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) alike, Brentano’s work sets out to discover what is meant whenever people say “there is” a God. Does it mean that God exists purely in our heads or, conversely, that he is out there in the world as a whole?

In an effort to solve this problem, Brentano created a third category in which he placed what are described as “intentional objects”. Ideas do not merely exist within us, they always relate to “something” and it is this which cannot be absorbed into the subjective. Brentano’s third category, then, lies midway between the subjective and objective that one finds in much of Western philosophy. God cannot be held in the palm of one’s hand, for example, as an object, and neither can the Divine be verified in terms of assuming the abstract status of an ultimate “Good”. Brentano therefore agreed with Aristotle in that he rejected the notion of an undifferentiated “Whole,” believing that everything is separate and distinct.

To use one further example, the idea of “love” as a general concept is viewed as a fallacy on account of us only being able to measure it in the form of individual events. The real substance lies, not in general concepts, but in specificity. Brentano thus insisted that God is to be found in the detail.

Turning now to politics, there are fascinating similarities between Brentano’s method of determining the “something” by way of a particularity which can be related to it and the wide-ranging idiosyncrasy that one finds in National-Anarchism. The latter is not an ideology in itself, but a vast canvas upon which a colourful multitude of radically diverse principles and beliefs can be applied in the manner of one’s own choosing.

For us, National-Anarchism is the “something,” but it is defined by the unique creativity of the free-thinking Anarchists that operate within the space that it offers. If all National-Anarchists were Christian, it would be logical to assume that National-Anarchism itself was a Christian phenomenon. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” However, the fact that we are drawn from such a loose array of spiritual (or not), racial (or not), binary (or not) and cultural (or not) backgrounds means that National-Anarchism is virtually beyond comprehension.

Using Brentano’s phenomenonological methodology, on the other hand, our political “something” is defined by the relationship that exists between each participatory component that helps to shape our “worldview”. That brings us rather neatly back to Brentano’s idea that the substance of “something” is determined by the individual nature(s) that validate its existence(s).