John Dunn

Becoming more conscious

Monday, 21 October 2024 at 22:22

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Becoming more conscious

I would not say that in trying to become divine we search within ourselves for the Nietzschean superman. We have already emphasised the need to be more human, not super- human, or Übermensch (beyond-man). We become more divine by becoming more conscious, more human. By Coleridge’s definition, we exist through most of our lives in a dead state - a sub-human state, i.e. not thinking or creating, but rather accepting the pre-existing. We live at the frozen pole, afraid to shoot the albatross. The implication is that there is an alternative, a resurrected state, a fully humanised state. The implication also is that we can know an object when the object is neither found nor discovered by our thought as existing before we began to know, i.e. we can truly create - and in Evola’s and Rilke’s terms this means creating God.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

As bees collect honey

Sunday, 20 October 2024 at 21:50

Rainer Maria Rilke

As bees collect honey

The only way to remain outside of God, distinct and separate from God, is to trump Spinoza by creating God, in effect, trumping God. In his 1925 work Essays on Magical Idealism, Julius Evola declared that ‘God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine’. The youthful Evola was onto something here. He was rejecting God as a presuppositional object of idolatry, locating the Divine instead in the mind of man. I sense too that this was something Rainer Maria Rilke was expressing in his Letters to a Young Poet when he wrote of God - ‘As bees collect honey together, so we fetch the sweetness out of everything and build Him’. Notably, Rilke added parenthetically to this ‘(so long as this comes about through love)’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Love belongs over here

Saturday, 19 October 2024 at 21:49

Eros kisses Psyche

Love belongs over here

Nothing is extinguished in the human personality’, emphasised Tomberg. So if weare not to be extinguished in the oneness of Spinozist Substance, and if we are not to be lost in the oneness of a Fichtean or Gentilean ego, how is the apartness or the consciousness of mankind to be preserved?

If consciousness and mind cannot be subject to rational explanation, then the answer to this question will not be found in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid. Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

No purposive power

Friday, 18 October 2024 at 21:59

E. V. Ilyenkov

No purposive power

This is not to say that consciousness is to be understood as an adjunct to cosmic evolution per se, i.e. mankind at ONE with the Logos in carrying out the work of the latter. This is where we left Steiner. This is wherethe theories of Ilyenkov and Vernadsky ended up, with man as central to the evolutionary stage of the Noosphere. These were all Spinozist theories in the end - Ilyenkov’s openly so - arguing that man exists to serve some purpose greater than himself, repeatedly introducing a passivity into man’s existence. This is all wrong. Man’s power is not purposive, it is unconditional. If consciousness and conscience define what it means to be human, then man is the chooser of his own purpose.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Eternal other

Thursday, 17 October 2024 at 21:04

Eternal other

Woman, Demeter, Earth-mother, nature, the external other in the chance encounter, Eve you lead us to temptation and Fall. ‘A chance encounter between two people can have implications for eternity.’ Love, transgression, happy fall, these things awaken consciousness and in consciousness the magic lies. To be conscious is to be human. To be more human is to be more divine, because consciousness cannot exist in harmony with the world, it is in the world, but ‘not of the world’. By its very nature it must live in confrontation with the world and change it - with ‘implications for eternity’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Transgressor

Wednesday, 16 October 2024 at 22:19

Transgressor

Dante had invoked the felix culpa, happy fall once more. Man not only has the power to breach the cosmic order, but in so doing can re-order the cosmos. He is restating the freedom of the crowned and mitred one. And it was Beatrice who led him to this realisation, to be a transgressor, a disrupter of the cosmic equilibrium, rather than being absorbed into its perpetual and Spinozist harmony.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Human beings: the odd ones

Monday, 14 October 2024 at 22:13

Human beings: the odd ones

The theme of wilful disobedience is examined in Beatrice’s Paradise I exposition of the Cosmos. ‘All things observe a mutual order among themselves,’ said Beatrice, ‘and this is the structure that makes the universe resemble God’. This too is the premise of Dante's cosmos, in which all natures have their bent, their given instincts. Just as a flame always rises when lit, a stone always falls when dropped. This is the natural order. The question should already be rising in the reader’s mind - are we like that? Think of that child, who turns spontaneously without necessity to what delights it. The answer to the question is, most emphatically, no. Beatrice explains by expanding upon the theme of creativity with a metaphor from art. ‘Just as form is sometimes inadequate to the artist’s intention, because the material fails to answer, so the creature, that has power, so impelled, to swerve towards some other place, sometimes deserts the track.’ In other words, within the description of the order of the cosmos, Beatrice emphasises that human beings are the odd ones out, with the power to deviate from the cosmic order.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.