Francis Parker Yockey
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Francis Parker Yockey (18 September 1917–16 June 1960), who was born on this date in 1917.
A great many philosophers of history have been influenced by Oswald Spengler, but while Spengler’s influence has been wide, that influence has not usually been deep. Note that there is no Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia article on Spengler; he is still too much of an outsider to merit this honor. Spengler has had few explicit, self-professed followers. Yockey was one of those few who acknowledged Spengler’s influence, viewing his work Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics as a sequel to Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Yockey wrote Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics under the pseudonym Ulick Varange. Of Spengler Yockey effusively wrote:
“The first formulation of the 20th century outlook on History only came with the First World War. Previously, only Breysig had definitely broken with the linear scheme, but his earlier work covered only a part of human history. It was left to Spengler, the philosopher of the age, to set forth the full outline of the structure of History. He himself was the first to recognize the superpersonal nature of his work, when he said that an historically essential idea is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It was for him to articulate that at which everyone was groping. The view of others was limited by one or another specialist horizon, and their projects were consequently incomplete, one-sided, top-heavy. Like all products of genius, Spengler’s work seems perfectly obvious to those who come afterwards, and again, it was directed to those to come and not to contemporaries. Genius is always directed toward the Future; this is in its nature, and this is the explanation of the usual fate of all works of genius, political and economic, as well as artistic and philosophical, that they are understood in their grandeur and simplicity only by the after-world of their creators.”
Yockey picks up some of Spengler’s language, writing in terms of the structure and morphology of history, for example. These were idioms favored by Spengler. For example, Spengler on metaphysical structure:
“Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms social, spiritual and political which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?”
And Spengler on the structure of history:
“Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised they have been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved.”
For Yockey, human beings have a metaphysical sense that gives a metaphysical dimension to human action:
“For the animals, that which appears — matter — is Reality. The world of sensation is the world. But for primitive man, and a fortiori for Culture-man, the world separates out into Appearance and Reality. Everything visible and tangible is felt as a symbol of something higher and unseen. This symbolizing activity is what distinguishes the human soul from the less complicated Life-forms. Man possesses a metaphysical sense as the hall-mark of his humanity. But it is precisely the higher reality, the world of symbols, of meaning and purpose, that Materialism denied in toto. What was it then, but the great attempt to animalize man by equating the world of matter with Reality, and merging him into it? Materialism was not overcome because it was false; it simply died of old age. It is not false even now — it merely falls on deaf ears. It is old-fashioned, and has become the world view of country cousins.”
This is significant because Yockey’s conception of history is narrow; that is to say, that which rises to the threshold of the historical is narrower than in traditional history, which was defined in terms of written records. For Yockey, true history, genuine history, is history driven by ideas:
“The difference between the history of man as a species and the history of man in the service of High Culture is that the first is devoid of grand meaning, and that only the second is the vessel of high significance. In high history, men risk all and die for an Idea; in primitivity there are no superpersonal ideas of this force, but only personal strivings, crude lust for booty or formless power. Consequently it would be an error to regard the difference as merely quantitative. The example of Genghis Khan shows this: the events he let loose were considerable in size, but in the cultural sense they have no significance whatever. There was no Idea in this sweeping descent of the followers of an adventurer. His conquests were fatal to hundreds of thousands, the empire he erected lasted generations beyond him, but it was simply there — it stood for nothing, represented nothing beyond itself. Napoleon’s empire on the other hand, brief though it was, was laden with symbolic meaning that is still at work in the minds of Western men, and that is, as we shall see, pregnant with the Future of the West. High Cultures create the greatest wars, but their significance is not merely that they open rivers of blood, but that these men fall in a struggle of ideas.”
One can understand this as part of a long debate over the (proper) scope of history. In my post on Edward Gibbon I discussed Hugh Trevor-Roper’s criticism of so-called “ebb-and-flow” conception history in favor of a conception in terms of purposive development. If we include “ebb-and-flow” history within the (proper) scope of history, then we have history of a much more comprehensive scope than the narrower conception of purposive development. However, though purposive development may be a relatively narrow conception of history, narrower still isa conception of history in terms of ideas as the primary drivers of historical events. Following this line of reasoning, when history and civilization decay to the point that conflicts are no longer driven by ideas, we could say that history itself lapses — the end of history, as it were. Implicitly this ideational threshold of history, sensu stricto, has been the position of every post-Hegelian prophet of the “end of history” from Alexandre Kojève to Fukuyama.
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