Ryan R. Holston

Professor & Jonathan M. Daniels ‘61 Chair at Virginia Military Institute. Lifelong Philly sports fan. Father/husband. Owner of an incorrigible chocolate lab.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

Had a terrific conversation with @Hermitixpodcast on our “Frankenstein” moment with Artificial Intelligence. Article over at @voegelin_view for anyone interested.

https://t.co/fGlqnibfn6

https://t.co/8eL99RbnHf

[Eric Adler @ProfEricAdler]

📢Coming soon(ish): Folke Leander's philosophical analysis of the ideas of Paul Elmer More, edited and introduced by Claes G. Ryn and yours truly.

Leander's book amounts to the fullest explication of the philosophy of the New Humanism ever written.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@HorcherF Wow!

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@nut_history Uh, no. That’s impossible.

[Ferenc Hörcher @HorcherF]

There will be a chapter on Pieper, as well, in our collective volume on the Münster School, to be published by SUNY Press, coedited by @ryan_holston.
Importantly, one English language edition of his book Leisure was introduced by the late Roger Scruton.

[Ferenc Hörcher @HorcherF]

@BrandonBloch5 @AnnetteWeinke We are in the process of publishing a volume on the Münster School with @ryan_holston . So I would be naturally very much interested in this volume, as well.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@MLB Oh, we’re celebrating Clemens now? Was this before he started juicing? Are we sure? What did the Mitchell Report say?

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@JClarkNBCS Only slightly less concerned than about the hitting. This is starting to feel like 2012 in terms of expectations and reality.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

Here’s an interview I did on “With Good Reason” with host Sarah McConnell, which will air on public radio across the US this weekend. We discuss our “post-constitutional” age and cultural decadence.
https://t.co/Tq02veoDoH
@goodreasonradio
@SUNY

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@greg_price11 Not only that, the French Revolution was the foundation of modern nationalism.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

I need to start using the phrase “Luciferian error” more.

[Girardism @Girardism]

“Nietzsche's only error, a properly Luciferian error (in the sense of ‘bringer of light’), was to have chosen violence against the innocent truth of the victim, a truth that Nietzsche himself was the only one to glimpse, in contrast with the blind positivism of all the atheist ethnologists and the Christians themselves. To understand that the twentieth century and its genocides, far from killing Christianity, make its truth all the more dazzling, you just have to read Nietzsche from the proper angle and to situate all the disasters caused by our Dionysian and sacrificial choices along the axis of his writings, the first of those disasters being the madness that was getting ready to swoop down on the thinker himself — a madness every bit as significant as the political madness and historical insanity [as in Nazism] that followed.”

— René Girard

[Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺 @im_Mateus_]

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Augustine, Time, and the Structure of Hope

Gadamer revisits one of Augustine's most radical philosophical moves: the refusal to treat time as a sequence of three equal "beings." What makes Augustine's approach unusual is not just his conclusion, it's his method. He didn't treat the problem of time as an abstract puzzle to be solved from a distance. He brought it before God, interrupting his own argument with prayer, asking for help in the very act of thinking. That intimacy between devotion and reasoning wasn't decoration, it was the point.

The insight it produced is deceptively simple. Past and future don't exist as independent realms. They exist only as they press into the present as memory and anticipation held simultaneously in the mind. As Augustine puts it: "We can only think of present signs of the future as being present, and we can only see traces of the past… as being present. Only that can we truly see as 'being.'"

This is what he called the distensio animi, a stretching out of the spirit. Gadamer renders it plainly: that is what we call consciousness.

The German word for the present, Gegenwart, sharpens this further. Embedded in it is gewärtig sein: to be awaiting, to be open. The present is not a fixed point. It is a posture of readiness that leans forward. Time, then, is not a container you move through. It is the structure of consciousness itself. The tension between what is remembered, what is attended to now, and what is anticipated. You do not have past and future. You are the act of holding them together.

From here, Gadamer makes a move that feels almost offhand but lands hard. If consciousness is inherently stretched toward what comes next, then hope isn't a disposition some people choose and others don't. It's built into the architecture of awareness itself. Ernst Bloch was right to foreground it, Gadamer says, because it isn't sentiment, it's structure. "That is why I consider every pessimist a bit insincere; they wouldn't even be here if they didn't have hope."

This isn't a rebuke. It's an observation about what it means to persist. To remain conscious is already to be oriented forward whether you name that orientation hope or not.

Much of modern anxiety comes from treating time as a problem of storage. Holding onto the past accurately, predicting the future correctly. Augustine and Gadamer suggest a different frame. Time is lived through presence: the traces we carry, the signs we read, the openness we maintain toward what is arriving. Consciousness is the act of stretching across all three without collapsing any of them.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@LyybR91569 @alanigolanski I’d say it’s intimated by earlier thinkers. Tocqueville’s pluralism is less explicit, but if that counts, he’s much earlier. Oakeshott himself would likely point to Hobbes. I’d argue Oakeshott and Berlin are some of the most explicit because of 20th C. totalitarianism.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@paul_jkrause Just finished Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@Hermitixpodcast Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@zenahitz Teaching her in a “Politics and Literature” class on scientism this semester. “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “A View of the Woods,” “The Partridge Festival,” and (if there’s time) “Good Country People”. She’s amazing.

[Derek Duplessie @dnduplessie]

Have you ever contacted a professor to complain after final grades were posted?

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@BBGreatMoments Look at the 10 to 0 gold gloves down at the bottom like an afterthought. Oh yeah, and that.

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@URDailyHistory @VMI1839

[Ryan R. Holston @ryan_holston]

@DavidHein9 @goACTA Here are the results: https://t.co/pO4h0ZR5lv

VMI wasn’t a part. Schools were: W&M, GMU, UVA, VCU, VT, JMU. (My daughter is headed to W&M in the fall). Interesting info all around.