John Dunn

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Tuesday, 31 December 2024 at 21:01

Marx’s strange upturning

Yes - there was always something strange in Marx’s upturning assertion about Hegel. The truth is that Marx espoused Spinozism, the denial of human will and creativity. Marx took much from Hegel, but Hegel too was a Spinozist, inheriting his concept of Absolute Spirit from Judaism and Kabbalah. For Hegel, the origin, substance, purpose and direction of the universe was the realisation of an infinite knowledge, consciousness, or mind. Like the Kabbalists, Hegel held that the world’s beginning, substance and end is to be found in an infinite, all inclusive, Absolute Being. This Absolute, which is analogous to the Kabbalist’s Ein-sof, is conceived of by Hegel as the Absolute Spirit, a notion that is itself present in many kabbalistic works.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Only Spinozism

Monday, 30 December 2024 at 17:14

Spinoza/Marx

Only Spinozism

Ilyenkov, the Soviet Marxist, fell under the evil curse of Spinoza. Parsifal might as well have chosen Klingsor as his guide to the Grail. Ilyenkov must have known that there is no such thing as Marxism - only Spinozism,which means without room for contingency, man has to understand necessity and subject himself to it.

In Spinozism, I came to a retrospective understanding of my own Marxist thinking - and there were two surprises. Firstly, what I had once thought of as dynamic and revolutionary in my attitude was essentially passive and static. Secondly, this state of passive acceptance has triumphed as the underlying principle of all thought in today’s world as it applies to ethical and scientific matters. In both instances, the animal soul has defeated the divine.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The siren screams

Sunday, 29 December 2024 at 16:54

Conor Walton, Siren

The siren screams

The siren screams long and hard, drowning out the divine voice. Deafened at maximum each animal soul has its own methods: music, internet, interminable travelling, meetings, business activities, gregarious chatter, pornography, eating out, cinema, charity, sport, work, alcohol.These are characteristic of our time, but in all epochs evil had one task — to lead the pilgrim away from the true path. Perceval went on many a misguided adventure, lost many battles and made wrong turns in the woods. The life-journey is not a straight line, we all know about that.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The journey must begin

Saturday, 28 December 2024 at 21:41

The journey must begin

The siren now is the politico-media complex, which urges us to go with the current, be at peace with the world, leaving the animal soul with a yearning for uniform uniqueness. Populations are psychiatrised and clinicised. He’s fat - it’s an illness; he’s lazy - it’s an illness; he’s addicted - it’s an illness. Explanations can be found on the level of the animal soul. To never transgress and just allow everything to happen, this is an animal level of existence. The journey must begin, but I need more sleep. I need to prepare, but I’m not in the mood, better tomorrow.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Siren calls

Friday, 27 December 2024 at 21:52

Conor Walton, Siren

Siren calls

Madness abounds. Whereas there are two voices most people hear only one, in a state of complete egotism. It means that the animal soul has completely forced out its divine opposite. A constant inner dialogue should be more normal; dialogue because there are two beings. One voice is that of the divine soul, the creator soul, the active soul that has a generative power and makes the truth to be what it is. Another voice belongs to the passive being which lives in the belly and transmits the degenerate will of the animal soul. Dante allegorised the lure of passivity as the siren, diabolical, beautiful and female, a Weiningerian composite, who will do anything to distract the pilgrim from the true path. Not surprisingly, it was the belly that Virgil exposed when he ripped open the siren’s clothes, waking the entranced pilgrim by the stench of it.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.