John Dunn

Evola and right thinking

Saturday, 27 November 2021 at 10:17

Evola and right thinking

A new ‘’Thought piece’ has been added. Entitled Evola and right thinking,it focuses on Julius Evola’s determination to keep visible the real political dichotomy of our times and all times, as opposed to the petty and distracting squabbles in the context of bourgeois politics. I quote Evola:

To use the term totalitarianism correctly, the substantial difference could be briefly expressed by saying that totalitarianism of the Right is ‘anagogic’, while that of the Left is ‘catagogic’, and that only because both are equally opposed to the limited and hollow regime of the bourgeois individual could a myopic mindset think that they have anything in common.

In addition to the above, I have added three more essays to the ‘Thought piece’ Scaligero.

Faith in the physical

Scaligero’s argument is that to see the things around us as wholly apart from us and given is to engage in an act of faith.

Logos aversion

Scaligero’s main point in the context of the book as a whole is that:

…by eluding the ‘I’, the dynamis of the relation, as a moment of freedom, becomes automatism, instinctiveness, material vision, and aversion to the principle, to the Logos

God apart

Scaligero’sdiscussion about the reduction of God to the dead thinking of the materialists is like my representation of idolatry in Child of Encounter.

© John Dunn.

Scaligero

Thursday, 25 November 2021 at 21:52

Scaligero

Ihave added a new section to the 'Thought pieces'. Entitled Scaligero, this section will build to incorporate all the blogs that I have added about the Italian writer to date.

In my opinion, Massimo Scaligero bridges a gap in thinking left by Rudolf Steiner and Giovanni Gentile. Clearly, Scaligero was heavily influenced by his two predecessors, but he managed to fuse the ideas of both together and move beyond them. A further influence to be detected in Scaligero's work comes from Julius Evola, to whom perhaps I have not made so many references, but who nevertheless makes his presence felt.

The section will grow as I shift over the previously blogged items.

© John Dunn.

Seen on the roadside

Wednesday, 24 November 2021 at 21:34

Seen on the roadside

It is always gratifying to come across a piece of history whilst out on the road. This building, for example, seen whilst shooting some video footage for my YouTube channel whilst in St Neots. I pulled up in front of it on my motorbike, not really looking as I was preoccupied with some roadworks ahead, but later I found out this information from a plaque on its wall.
Avenue Farm

Namedafter an avenue of Chestnut trees, this farmhouse was linked with Ford House for many centuries. In 1800 both were owned by George James Gorhamwho founded St Neots Bank. In the 1840s the properties were sold and this farm became separate.

This building will appear in my next video production, the YouTube publication of which will be announced on this website.

© John Dunn.

Spirit alive?

Tuesday, 23 November 2021 at 22:21

Spirit alive?

Whilst preparing my next YouTube video publication, my attention was drawn to a large and interesting Georgian house on the corner of Huntingdon Street in St Neots. For whatever reason, I did not pay it any attention during my actual motorcycle ride through the town.

On the video I also noticed a blue plaque on the wall of the same building.

Now there is a fascinating building: Bellingham House, named after the man born in it, a John Bellingham.



Only one Prime Minister has ever been assassinated in Britain, and here was born the man who carried out the deed. The plaque reads:

Over-hasty Nietzsche

Monday, 22 November 2021 at 21:35

Over-hasty Nietzsche

Nietzsche was over-hasty when he exclaimed ‘God is dead’.

Quite reasonably, we might say, Nietzsche was right in thinking that there is no longer a god who gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. Man once was beholden to such a god without question, but it was questioning that killed the god. The world is bereft of a ground that grounds it and is left in the abyss.

But is that old god dead, i.e. that which worshippers have themselves sculptured in the mind as an object of worship, which they go on to believe is an entity wholly apart from them, i.e. an all-knowing God which controlled the affairs of man from across a divide?

No - that god still exists.We might lazily, but with some rationale, identify this god as Mammon, with the implications of materialism, in all senses of the word associated with that evil demon, but inauthentic being would be a better description of the god to whom we remain beholden, despite Nietzsche’s declaration.

We shall find the new ground of our existence and our new vocation only when we expose ourselves to being itself in a new mode of experiencing and assimilating it, which is to experience the present purely in terms of the future.

‘Only a god will save us’ and that god will be the future authenticity of being.

© John Dunn.

something else for Heidegger

Sunday, 21 November 2021 at 20:39

something else for Heidegger

‘There is something else for Heidegger; he is no solopsist.’ I wrote this in my previous blog.

I wrote also that Massimo Scaligero moved on to declare that the something else, as it relates to being, is the Logos.

And yet, all the while, when reading Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries, I felt that something was lacking. There has to be a starting point, an originating principle

Some words by Simone Weil (pictured) come to mind:

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Gravity and Grace.)

Love as the originating principle, it cannot be explained; something I tried to express in Child of Encounter.

Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.

I think about those chance encounters. They left deep and lasting scars on all my life. I would never have predicted that. How did this happen? I am asking a metaphysical question here. I am asking about causality. I am in the presence of a mystery, a reality rooted far beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.

Does this mean that for being to be we must be in Love? in God? Well yes, is the answer, now and at every moment.

…he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)

It seems that the something else with which we started out is God.

© John Dunn.

No solopsist

Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 21:26

Heidegger in front of his hut in the Black Forest

No solopsist

A re-examination of my archived essay Heidegger - passive or active? in the light of reading Massimo Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries.

Martin Heidegger’s beautiful metaphor for the mind's passive facilitation of being's emergence is the clearing in the wood, the sunlit space across which being passes from the surrounding darkness of the trees. The resultant emergence of being is described by Heidegger as Aletheia, the Greek word for the state of not being hidden, unhiddenness or, to put it positively, the state of being.

Being open to the emergence of being is closely bound up with Heidegger's notion of living authentically.

There is something else for Heidegger; he is no solopsist.

What he does deny however is a world of pre-constructed Platonic forms, which the mind must negotiate in a constrained manner.

The something else is not mind-constructed, it exists independently of mind. However, it can have no being without the mind of man.

There is a kind of false being i.e. mind-constructed and an authentic being that the mind allows to emerge.

On the one hand, Scaligero defines the false being that we see around us as reflected thought, i.e. thought originating in the mind that solidifies, only to be reflected back to us as a mind-independent reality.

On the other hand, authentic being for Scaligero is the living thought that emerges in the mind before it becomes solidified and reflected back.

That living thought is not mind-constructed, rather it emerges in the mind from another source. For Scaligero, this is the light of the Logos entering the world.

In both Heidegger and Scaligero, there is no question of the mind creating reality; it is rather a question of facilitating the emergence of reality.

This might be embellished, as Scaligero did, by declaring that this is the Logos entering the individual.

So that’s authentic being as the Logos, which makes the acceptance of false being idolatrous.

© John Dunn.