John Dunn

Madness Abounds

Thursday, 26 December 2024 at 21:10

Alessandro Lonati's portrait of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche

Madness Abounds

Nietzscheconfronted demons that are ages old, ‘the struggle between good and evil’ that is ‘the essential wheel in the working of things’. And he proclaimed the superman as the end goal of man’s internal struggle. In an act of ‘self- overcoming’, we must turn our animal instincts for cruelty against the creature in us, the animal soul. And the wound born by the king of Grail legend is symbolic of the fissure between the divine soul and the animal soul. Whereas the animal soul lives in the belly, the divine soul is the highest soul and lives in the head. This divine soul is not possessed from birth, but takes a long and arduous journey to acquire; a real education is the undertaking of just such a life-journey. Sofia is the essence of this soul. One can easily lose it.To lose one’s mind is madness - our state of puppethood. In this state of insanity there remains one inner voice only.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The ages old Zarathustrian struggle

Wednesday, 25 December 2024 at 21:12

The ages old Zarathustrian struggle

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.

With the directional telos arose a new manifestation of an old struggle. This time the demiurge confronting the divine mystery of creativity in man would be the determinist and materialist dialectic; the mission of mankind to make his own world and shape the cosmos versus the Weiningerian nightmare of a dehumanised, ‘feminised’ self, the passive, unproductive, unconscious, amoral and illogical product of Usura. This was the new form of the ages old Zarathustrian struggle, which renders the old alliances strange in retrospect to twenty-first century eyes, so imbued are we with the false political dichotomy of left and right liberalism that serves to mask the ancient and perennial bifurcation. Early twentieth century Sorelian amalgams within the Futurist art of anarchists, syndicalists, nationalists, revolutionary socialists and fascists cannot be explained in terms of today’s bogusly constructed oppositional politics, yet they all celebrated the technological triumph of humanity over nature and man’s ability to shape the world. Committed to a universal dynamism, their common cause held a Weiningerian resonance: the ‘fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.