John Dunn

Humanist revolution and counter-revolution

Saturday, 20 April 2024 at 22:04

Immanuel Kant 1724-1804

Humanist revolution and counter-revolution

Immanuel Kant provided ammunition for the revolt of the human over the material, ‘discovering’ the subjectivity of knowledge and asserting the power of the human mind over the external world. New ground rules were later attempted by Friedrich Schelling who concluded that there could not be some single philosophy which might reconcile the world in consciousness and the world outside consciousness. Hegel took up the challenge laid down by Schelling, re-engaging subject and object in a dialectical process that regarded real nature, like real man, as a predicate, a symbol of some latent supernatural reality.

Marx led the counter-revolution, restoring the power of the object over the subject by embracing the dialectical process and famously turning Hegel’s idealism on its head. ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence’, wrote Marx, ‘but their social existence that determines their consciousness’. The materialist directional telos was born that to this day provides the mainspring of sociological, historical, economic and political thought in the contemporary academy.

© John Dunn.

Nietzsche and the rise of the superman

Friday, 19 April 2024 at 21:44

Alessandro Lonati

Nietzsche and the rise of the superman

With no time for dwelling on theory, Sorel rejected science as simply a system of fictions, preaching instead the need for a new civilisation of creators, makers and doers, one that would lift man out of bestiality. Nietzsche provided the mythos. Out of the Zarathustrian struggle would arise the superman to whom the pitiful existence of contemporary man would be ‘a laughing stock or painful embarrassment’. Zarathustra spoke thus to the people:

You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now the human being is still more of an ape than any ape is... The superman is the destiny of the world. May your will say: let the superman be the destiny of the world...

The objects of my love, affection and passion live

Thursday, 18 April 2024 at 22:05

The objects of my love, affection and passion live

The They would accuse me of solipsism wouldn’t they. Alone? I am never alone; but I can only ever know others through love. Without love there is only acquaintance and thingship. But in true encounter and Love I see others’ needs as my own, and I give myself to them.



The part of my loved ones which I lost is a reality which never lived. Reality is not the simple abstraction from the living thinking act which I take as real. When I have such an abstract reality in mind, in my ordinary mundane thoughts, I am unconscious of my living thinking which gives it life and makes it be. Instead the abstraction appears to float free of me, to have a magically self-projected existence of its own.



But abstract reality simply does not exist, having no mortality or immortality. The concrete reality which does exist lives in my mind. My all-embracing mind gives life to everything. This living multiplicity of everything is my living thinking.



My all-embracing mind coterminously brings destruction to everything. The life of the object in my thinking mind is also its death, otherwise I would be abandoning it to a fallen petrified existence. The objects of my love, affection and passion live, their immortality being their eternal mortality. As such, they partake of the one bread that I give to them.

© John Dunn.

Anagogic totalitarianism

Wednesday, 17 April 2024 at 10:31

Climb or ascent upwards

Anagogic totalitarianism



My personality and liberty can be conceived only on the basis of my freedom from the naturalistic, biological and primitively individualist bonds that existed before the Beginning. My true state, the state characterised by my ‘transcendence’ of political, historical and religious ideologies, furnishes the only environment for the development of my freedom. My higher self transcends the lower self. This is the transcendence that results from a rising up out of the vegetative ‘One life’.



This is the polar opposite of the sub-human self-transcendence, where the fallen individual transcends himself in the direction of collectives and demagogic movements. This results in a descent into the ‘One life’ with the concomitant loss of identity - the death of the self. 



My transcendent consciousness is the total encompassing of all. My totalitarianism is ‘anagogic’, unlike that of the globalist collectivisers which is ‘catagogic’.

*

*Anagogic: climb or ascent upwards.


Catagogic: one source defined it as "gutterward".


© John Dunn.

‘Formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’ 


Tuesday, 16 April 2024 at 19:44

‘Formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’ 


My transcendent consciousness is one, unique and specific, the result of a process of ascent. Never has it anything to do with 'oneness' in the sense of a collective entity, or homogeneous totality of levelled differences. I reject the ideal of unity understood as immanence of the ‘One Life’ in every being. This is Spinozism and Kabbalism. Followers ofthe universalising ideal of oneness serve as the ‘spiritual’ arm of globalism and its Janus faces, financial and Marxist.* They are the fallen angels, the children of Satan. Oneness was the realm of Ananke before the Beginning, being the point of departure and not the arrival in the ascent of my consciousness. Oneness is the ‘undifferentiated substrate’, the forest out of which I carve out my own clearing of ‘formed individuality’; it is not a final state of perfection in which distinct individuals dissolve themselves, losing their identity in a pantheistic fusion with the Whole. 



My ascent to transcendence proceed from ‘formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’, not the other way around. 


*In my book Child of Encounter,I condemn the whole of the accepted western philosophico-literary canon as being malignly influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah and Spinozism into promoting pathways to undifferentiated Oneness.

© John Dunn.

Take an "ordinary road”…

Monday, 15 April 2024 at 21:28

Scheduled for 8pm Wednesday the 17th April

On the Motorcycle England YouTube Channel

A new YouTube video

Take an "ordinary road”…

…in search of Harley Davidson and a friend of Thomas the Tank Engine

All roads are interesting. Take the A1101, with its turnpike history, from Suffolk to Cambridgeshire to Norfolk and back to Cambridgeshire, to find it is the lowest A road in the UK, with the least-used station, a monument to Harley Davidson, near-flooded Washes, and a lost canal haunted by Toby the Tram Engine.

Join me on an ordinary road.

© John Dunn.

They'll intrude if they can

Sunday, 14 April 2024 at 21:18

Oh no, it's them again

They'll intrude if they can

Freedom from The They is what allows me to receive Being and, in turn, what allows Being to give itself to me. In this mutual exchange I am the arbiter of both Being and freedom.



You think spontaneity is the definition of freedom, freedom to do what you like when you like. But what is spontaneity? If you live your life in the apparently ready-made world of thoughts about things reflected back to you as though they were pre-existing, when in truth they originated as the Logos, but were cast aside as fallen angels, then you can never be spontaneous and free. You can only be reactive to the things you think exist around you. Why? Because you are living in the world of the second hand, the presupposed,a world of idols. You are in thrall to idol worship and its priesthood.



But everything is spontaneous, everything is always first hand, as it originates unimpeded from the Logos, from Love. The challenge is to keep The They out of it, when there are only too many who are willing to intrude - if not the children of the Devil themselves, then the dumb crowd of Beulah they perpetuate with the vile poison they feed into it.


© John Dunn.