John Dunn

Being the messenger, Thoth is the transmitter of the Truth, the Logos; but manifestation is not the Truth or Logos. It is an illusion created by deftness of hand.
John Dunn

The Fool is the son of Isis who exclaimed "I am all that has been and is and shall be”. Isis is all - begetter and devourer. The Fool is the son of the god “I am”. He is the holder of the Word. Logos.
John Dunn

I thought that love was the awakening of Eros and the mirror of Creation; but loss is the true awakening after passion.
I fell in love, but became a slave to Ananke. Love unrequited offered ‘a living spring of hope’ - new life after the fall.
John Dunn

Ananke - goddess, indestructible force, bestower of love and life, upholder of the law of fate and ultimate destruction, giver and destroyer.
John Dunn

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

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

The Orphic and Hellenic tradition on Eros is certainly important to understanding the true meaning of love in the Johannine corpus of the New Testament.
John Dunn

Between birth and death a clearing emerges, in which we can decide to choose our world. It is a place in which authenticity demands that we undertake a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ in order to escape the banal clutches of Das Man, or ‘the they’. We can inscribe this place of temporality with the temporarily improvised self-expression of our own being. This, for Heidegger, was freedom.
John Dunn

Derrida’s formulation of there being ‘nothing outside the text’, combined with the destruction of ultimate meaning in the text, left a border-free grammatical landscape on the page. This was analogous to globalism in its implications. Like Luria and Spinoza before, the exiled Derrida found a home in the One by deconstructing the sovereignties of the many.
John Dunn

He was wrong in this idealistic and naive belief. The truth is that deconstruction has evolved into a new logocentrism. I think that he eventually saw the truth of this, and that he thought that ‘only a god’ could save us from it, the ‘god’ being an alternative onto-theology.
John Dunn

In the mould of Martin Luther, Heidegger may only have wanted to ‘stake out the positive possibilities’ of tradition, but he opened a Pandora’s Box in doing so. Derrida delved into the box and found a way of deconstructing the whole of tradition rather than revitalising it.
John Dunn

Nietzsche declared God to be dead, i.e. that God the idol is dead.

Perhaps the corollary of this is that God, the metaphorical concept associated in some way with the active creation of the cosmos, is very much alive as aesthetic life.
John Dunn

Schelling ultimately is a Spinozist, i.e. holds a worldview best summed up by the Spinozist credo that freedom is the recognition of necessity.

In Schelling’s romantic Spinozism there is heroism in standing up to necessity, but there is tragedy in succumbing to the inevitable.
John Dunn

Because the unity of the ‘All’ is projected as the future, the reader is called upon to realise that same unity in actuality. What Rosenzweig is actually calling upon the reader to do is commit the suicide of the self. In other words, exchange the sovereignty of independent thinking for subsumption into world unity.
John Dunn

Death for Heidegger sets the limit to separateness as a human being. In the end all is subsumed into the Oneness. In this context therefore, human life is a temporary aberration, something with which Heidegger reluctantly had to deal. Ironically, Heidegger had to deal with this because of the uniquely human ability to stand back and think about this aberration.
John Dunn

Heidegger’s failure to become führer to the Führer, i.e. transform the political revolution of 1933 into the philosophical revolution of Being and Time, did not deter him from pursuing the new authentic future.

The vacuum left by his disengagement from politics and resignation from the rectorship was filled by an engagement with literature, in particular the poetry of Hölderlin.
John Dunn

The ghosts of the British Raj can still be sensed in the Himalayan hill station of Shimla as a lingering nostalgic presence.
John Dunn