John Dunn

Siren call

Monday, 29 April 2024 at 22:00

Siren by Conor Walton

Siren call

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.

© John Dunn.

Madness Abounds

Monday, 29 April 2024 at 01:55

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’.27 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.

© John Dunn.

Universal dynamism

Sunday, 28 April 2024 at 00:06

Otto Weininger

Universal dynamism

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’.

© John Dunn.

Mainspring of academic thought today

Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 22:01

Immanuel Kant

Mainspring of academic thought today

Immanuel Kant had earlier provided ammunition for the revolt, ‘discovering’ the subjectivity of knowledge and asserting the power of the human mind over the external world. New ground rules were later attempted by Friedrich Schelling who concluded that there could not be some single philosophy which might reconcile the world in consciousness and the world outside consciousness. Hegel took up the challenge laid down by Schelling, re-engaging subject and object in a dialectical process that regarded real nature, like real man, as a predicate, a symbol of some latent supernatural reality.

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.

© John Dunn.

To intellectualise was to dehumanise

Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 12:30

Georges Sorel

To intellectualise was to dehumanise

Whilst Malevich was intellectualising the black square, Georges Sorel and Édouard Berth, with Proudhon in their pockets, railed against such rationalistic decadence. Reducing humanity to something rationally understood was an insult to the power of imagination and creativity that was at the heart of human consciousness. In Sorel’s mythic conception, artists like Malevich were condemned as déclassé allies of rationalism, democratic demagogues and cultural decadence and thus devoid of human consciousness. Wedded to mercantile interest and intellectualist ideology, they symbolised the sterile intellectual whose inability to create had its social counterpart in the unproductive economics of the financier. If creativity was the essence of humanity, then to intellectualise was to dehumanise and also forfeit the right to be considered human.

© John Dunn.

Humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or idiocy

Tuesday, 23 April 2024 at 22:58

Humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or idiocy

Bodies and minds are subject to natural decomposition and the market’s will. Our response is humiliating resignation, participative cynicism or no response - idiocy. Gravity pulls us back to the flat ground, to the brutal truth of our origin and to the inevitable end. Here lies the detached rationality of the Jehovian terror, an evil driving its dream to an apocalyptic finale.

© John Dunn.

Henge ritual

Monday, 22 April 2024 at 21:06

Otto Weininger, deathbed photograph

Henge ritual

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.

© John Dunn.