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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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