John Dunn

Convoluted charity

Monday, 16 December 2024 at 17:22

Convoluted charity

There was always something strange in Marx’s upturning assertion. Nevertheless, for more than a century after it happened, any young radical worth his salt chose Marxism as his philosophy. Having insight into the necessity behind the events to which others were blind, permitted one to enter a ‘masonry’ of brother intellectuals, the future governors of the world. To have history on one’s side was a thrilling source of intellectual strength, which also pandered to the arrogance of privileged minds. For many years I too succumbed to the lure of this insider ‘knowledge’.

If most individuals felt powerless before the impersonal thought of globalised capitalism, then for the Marxists, consciousness of the economic root causes of this power imbalance was felt as a privileged insight. ‘We know, but they don’t’ led to the convoluted charitable act of explaining to people the origins of their wrong-headed thinking. This act of charity also explained to the masses how their combined wrong-headed thinking had led them in the right direction historically, whilst their individual contributions added nothing.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Hegel’s necessitarianism

Sunday, 15 December 2024 at 20:49

Hegel’s necessitarianism

The condition of puppethood under the god of this world was expressed succinctly by Engels’s ‘freedom is the insight into necessity’,11 a phrase that connected back to Spinoza via Hegel,12 that same Hegel who had turned thought into an externality that imposed itself upon the individual. For him, truth existed outside and beyond mankind and transcended the act of thinking or experience. Marx did not so much turn Hegel on his head as he famously claimed, but rather assumed the necessitarianism that Hegel had already attained.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Constantine’s regime

Saturday, 14 December 2024 at 17:30

Constantine’s regime

Marcion’s attempt to reject the Old Testament God was thrown out. Constantine’s regime favoured the arbitrary rule of Jehovah and an impassable gulf between dependent individuals and the Absolute as an entity outside, above and beyond the individual. To be subject to a man made entity reified as mind-independent reality is the polar opposite to the attainment of an autonomously creative mind. But then again, such thinking minds would not make good slaves of a tyrannous empire, which needed instead heteronomous minds, wholly dependent on a master to tell them what to do and think.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Unproductive spectator

Wednesday, 11 December 2024 at 21:54

Where they point makes no difference. Imagined by Raphael they are Aristotle and Plato

Unproductive spectator

Who are the gods who would have us tethered too? They are the gods of a transcendent, external world. And they would chain us to a rock of external reality which is opposed to the human thought which thinks it. And the forgers of the chain of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ were Plato and Aristotle, who directed man’s mind away from itself to things outside of itself.

And the theory which took precedence was Aristotle’s, who held that truth was a judgment of the intellect. The intellect pronounced the judgment and, if it corresponded to external reality, it was true. This ‘truth’ lies in a relationship which transcends the mind’s knowing power and depends on the mind possessing the essence of an object external to it and pronouncing on it.

It was Plato who introduced the notion of a realm of realities which transcended human thinking power. Platonic mental realities were only copies of the Ideas which existed in a state of complete independence of man’s mind or thinking process.

If man was to possess the truth, his concepts and judgments had to conform to the Ideas or their archetypes in the world. There was no freedom in this, no liberty or creative thinking. The thought of man had to be as sterile, immobile and static as the thing outside it. It had to remain an unproductive spectator.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

It is us

Tuesday, 10 December 2024 at 21:51

It is us

And the precious flame of Prometheus remains a symbol of resistance to the gods, especially Zeus. Prometheus bequeathed to humanity the powers of understanding and creation. The myth shows us the significance of this through the eyes of the Olympian gods who were enraged. And whilst they tethered and tortured Prometheus, their cause for concern remains at large — it is us, exercising divine prerogatives.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The act of a sovereign mind

Friday, 6 December 2024 at 23:03

The act of a sovereign mind

And in the generative act of creation lies the fecundity of the penetrative act. The cave painter intervened in the equilibrium of nothingness to break open the closed ring of 0. He entered the dark womb of the cave to render self-regulating stasis open to change. He breached the interminable cycle to create new life out of destruction. ‘Make it new’,for this is an assertion of your humanity; the act of giving rather than receiving. Unprompted, frivolous, playful giving, is the act of a sovereign mind.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Something from nothing

Thursday, 5 December 2024 at 21:49

Dante

Something from nothing

The point is that Swayambhu is more original to the universe than any notion of abiotic or living principle. The inevitable limitations of materialism are swept away by Swayambhu, the self-generating, self-evolving, self-existent, self-manifesting and self-born. It is this self-generating principle in man, the first art, the creative drive of the cave painter, the spontaneity of Dante’s child at play, that is the Divine in man. It is the principle that man can create something from nothing. He can overturn the equilibrium of Śūnya to create something new.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.