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Determiner of the cosmos. Is this the answer I have been seeking? Is this the grail moment?
No it certainly is not. This false grail - object of the fool’s journey - is a trap set by the kabbalists, and the philosophical idealists fell for it, and I too fell for it, but Julius Evola (1898-1974) did not. In a critique of idealism and principally that of Giovanni Gentile, Evola argued that
if the 'transcendental I' of the idealists was not to become merely another name for the same Creator God in the sky who was considered by these philosophers to be a superstitious and uncritical hypostasis and amere 'positing' of our own thought, if it was to be referred in any manner to our real being, the consequence was a paradoxical, regressive collapse.
…it is one thing not to be determined by the other (bywhat is exterior), but it is another thing to be really, positively, free.
Gentile may have been right to insist that the pure act must be an act of creation in itself, reflective of first creation.To this extent ‘reality is a tale told by a thinker,’ but perhaps it does not signify everything after all. There is a flaw in the argument and Evola felt uneasy with it, in the same way that I had identified the kabbalism in Hegel.
It seems to me that this solipsism, this stage of individuation, this conflation of the 'transcendental I' with the Creator God, had to be reached repeatedly before the reintegration of the soul became possible.We had to establish that it is active, creative thinking that defines the individual as human, as opposed to the passive thoughts that accompany arbitrary and externally driven sub-human activity. But this ‘truth’, this ‘gnosis’, found within the human individual, is in danger of being treated as the very Spinozist Substance that Fichte, Gentile, Steiner et al sought to escape, but in which the solipsistic self ends up losing itself.
In the grail quest and all the apparent life journeys, there is always an obsession with ‘return’ and, in particular, a return to wholeness, whereas this is the very opposite of what it means to be human. To be human is to be a disrupter, an over-turner of equilibria. The human mind does not abide by the laws of nature - Dante recognised that much. That is the very mystery of mind.
With Steiner, I had finally read myself into a black hole. I realised that the road, in my case the very long road, to individuation was nothing other than Spinozist. Paradoxically, individuation is the ultimate goal of Spinozism. It is the fulfilment of Tikkun. Individuation on the one hand, and re-assimilation into the original Substance on the other hand, appear to be contradictory standpoints, but they are not. They are one and the same thing. It is as though Prometheus kept re-chaining himself to the rock.
Our socio-economic and socio-cultural environment is steeped in kabbalism, freemasonry and Spinozism, making it almost impossible to escape, achieve freedom and full humanness. The process of individuation, the Absolute I, the arrival at the ‘I am I’, call it what you will, do not oppose assimilative Tikkun, they comply with it, they are it. Opposition to assimilative Tikkun is not individuation, the Absolute I or the I amI. To believe such a thing is to fall into the Spinozist trap. The whole alchemical way is a lie and its adherents, consciously or not, are the participants on one side of an unspoken global war that is routing a feeble and dehumanised opposition.
Looked at this way, the roll call of Spinozists, not surprisingly, sweeps up the whole socio-cultural, literary and philosophical cannon of the West.The cannon of ‘rebels’ duped by Luria’s rehashed kabbalism is long but, in my new enlightened context, a few of its members come randomly to mind: Jung, Nietzsche, Hegel, Locke and the English empiricists, Baudelaire, Blake, Steiner, Marx and Engels, Heidegger and more, my own hitherto heroes and villains alike; and yes, even Fichte, Coleridge and Gentile. T.S. Eliot himself summed up the Spinozist mindset of a journey of individuation, return and re-assimilation with the words:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all out exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Little Gidding)
Even better, Charles Baudelaire summed up the mindset as:
I am everything: everything is me
And that is that. Simple. As Evola remarked, ‘on this basis, all doubt seemed removed, the door of mystery was shut’. And there lies the perversity of it all. These apparent seekers of the mysteries, these writers, poets, philosophers and mystics, who apparently stood aloof from the day-to-day mundane world of rationality and reason, in the end sought to kill the mystery and believed that in all their self-seeking that they had actually closed the door on it.
In the recovery of a lost Totality, of the Total-Man, of the Absolute Self (of the Selbst of Nietzsche and Jung), of the Unus Mundus, they had turned the creator into a discoverer and, if the creative imagination is the defining element of humanness, then they were dehumanisers. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity was founded upon a belief that both the observer and connected phenomenon ultimately stem from the same source, the Unus Mundus, which means One World. Jung was the Spinozist par excellence.
Jung and others fell and worshipped before the power of One; to aspire for us all to become as One; to bring about One world; to proffer a perennial ‘truth’ common to all religions. This is Tikkun, the return to the One.This is the end-game of Spinozism in which freedom is the recognition of this necessity. And the price of this necessary freedom? Answer - the end of the creative imagination, death of the self and the end of humanity.
And who is promoting the One world schemas? Who is funding the anarchist, Marxist and liberal Left? Their faces will not be revealed. Suffice it to say that financial globalism is the final victory of Spinozism.
© John Dunn.
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