John Dunn

Mainspring of academic thought today

Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 22:01

Immanuel Kant

Mainspring of academic thought today

Immanuel Kant had earlier provided ammunition for the revolt, ‘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 restored 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.

To intellectualise was to dehumanise

Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 12:30

Georges Sorel

To intellectualise was to dehumanise

Whilst Malevich was intellectualising the black square, Georges Sorel and Édouard Berth, with Proudhon in their pockets, railed against such rationalistic decadence. Reducing humanity to something rationally understood was an insult to the power of imagination and creativity that was at the heart of human consciousness. In Sorel’s mythic conception, artists like Malevich were condemned as déclassé allies of rationalism, democratic demagogues and cultural decadence and thus devoid of human consciousness. Wedded to mercantile interest and intellectualist ideology, they symbolised the sterile intellectual whose inability to create had its social counterpart in the unproductive economics of the financier. If creativity was the essence of humanity, then to intellectualise was to dehumanise and also forfeit the right to be considered human.

© John Dunn.

Humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or idiocy

Tuesday, 23 April 2024 at 22:58

Humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or idiocy

Bodies and minds are subject to natural decomposition and the market’s will. Our response is humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or no response - idiocy. Gravity pulls us back to the flat ground, to the brutal truth of our origin and to the inevitable end. Here lies the detached rationality of the Jehovian terror, an evil driving its dream to an apocalyptic finale.

© John Dunn.

Henge ritual

Monday, 22 April 2024 at 21:06

Otto Weininger, deathbed photograph

Henge ritual

Hyperborea remains a mythical race memory of a ‘prelapsarian’ epoch without Demiurgic intervention. Yet the polar ascent is blocked and mankind exists on the equator. Looking down upon the pole, the journey to be undertaken is from the outer circle of the henge to the unifying centre, to the place of sacrifice and immolation. Such a quest was echoed in the procession to Eleusis. Either way, the goal was death and transfiguration. Throwing himself on the altar of creativity, Weininger ritualistically committed suicide in the house where Beethoven, the archetypal creator, had died. Yet vain was such an attempted escape, as Ezra Pound well knew:

They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura.

© John Dunn.

Our strings pulled

Sunday, 21 April 2024 at 21:09

Our strings pulled

We have our strings pulled. If we think at all it is as an eager-to-please filing secretary, shuffling and re-shuffling the predetermined truths. When tested, it is the file and recall ability that is rewarded with a pass. As if this were not bad enough, just as the filing secretary is now long redundant, so too have we have become the androidal extensions of software. Even our personal databanks are stored in a cloud, not in our mind. And yet the contents of the hard drive are not me. External stimuli pasted across the databanks are by definition not me. Yet this is what competes for the status of selfhood in our Weiningerian world, where the inner self competes for supremacy with its opposite.

© 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...