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Zarathustra spoke thus
Monday, 23 December 2024 at 17:39
Friedrich Nietzsche
Zarathustra spoke thus
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 overman is the sense of the earth. May your will say: let the overman be the sense of the earth...
Who were the worms to Nietzsche and Sorel? They were the products of liberal democracy, whose spontaneity, invention, and creative will had been crushed by la petite science, the petty bureaucratic imposition of quasi-scientific rules upon society. Human no longer, these were the worms.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Hidden agenda of contemporary art
Saturday, 21 December 2024 at 21:23
Hidden agenda of contemporary art
Man’s condition is puppethood: every minute of everyday lives responding to strings pulled. We appear to be responding freely to the randomness of life’s contingencies, but the pulling governs not only our bodies and the free will of our psychological expression, strings also regulate our communication in public spaces or the internet, and in political and economic spheres including our families and intimate relationships. Borders of capitalist negative freedom are hidden and camouflaged in order to create an illusion of unlimited democratic participation and creative expression. The hidden agenda of contemporary art in a post-political, post-ideological world, is to bolster this illusion.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Polar ascent is blocked
Thursday, 19 December 2024 at 16:31
Ezra Pound
Polar ascent is blocked
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.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Weiningerian composite
Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 21:53
Weiningerian composite
The point is - the metamorphosis is universal. This was Marx’s point, this was Weininger’s point, this was Wagner’s point, this was Wedekind’s point, this was Marsden’s understanding of Weininger, this was Schreber’s nightmare. Manhood, the individual will, the creative self, were feminised and lost in the unmanning of man. Strinberg’s The Father was prescient. Man’s cosmic perspective was pronounced as madness. Woman and proto-Freudian psychology in alliance became the formidable force of our times - the Weiningerian composite that has us all in a straitjacket.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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