Portrait of Massimo Scaligero, Albino Marcolli
Faith in the physical
Massimo Scaligero focused on an aspect of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom and makes it central to The Logos and the New Mysteries.
Steiner had made the case for intuition, in addition to immediate perception, being necessary for a complete and rounded understanding of the object.
This intuition ‘has the possibility’ of arising independently of the object and this, according to Scaligero, is where the pathway to esoteric truth lies.
However, the intuition is independent for but a fleeting moment before becoming tied inseparably to the object in the eyes of the onlooker. The role of the onlooker’s intuition in the full and complete development of the object as it appears to us is lost, leading us to confront the object as something wholly apart from us and given. 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.
He wrote:
…we are each the subject of the experience, since the realm of technology and, therefore, of the mechanism, asserts itself thanks to a missing sentiment of truth, which arises in us as intuition. It is not the original intuition, which has the possibility of determination independent of the object, but the intuition that has refrained from recognising itself and, therefore sees the presupposition in outer datum, in the phenomenon, in the fact. It does not recognise it within itself. Thus its movement toward the object becomes conformity, dependence, and mystical submissiveness to reality. Faith rises, but in the lowest form - as faith in the physical fact. (The Logos and the New Mysteries, p.15)
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Death of the self
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'Anti-entropic' and 'Smashing eggs'
'Anti-entropic' As the highest expression of the anti-entropic development of the universe man is capable of continuing the creative development of the universe insofar as he the living image of the first Creator. John Dunn
'Smashing eggs' To accept a system as closed, to accept freedom as necessity, is to withdraw into nature, to return to Mother Nature, to Ananke and an amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being. Closed systems are the path to entropic death. John Dunn
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