John Dunn

The evil curse

Friday, 3 May 2024 at 02:19

Marcel Journet as Wagner's Klingsor

The evil curse

Through error and the path of false righteousness I too came. An evil curse drove me about in trackless wandering, never to find the way to healing.Numberless diversions, false battles and conflicts forced me from my path even when I thought I knew it. And what was the evil curse? Dante metaphorically rendered it as the siren, Wagner did so as Klingsor. And what emanation of the dark side of the Zarathustrian bifurcation did I face? - Spinozism and its offshoot, Marxism.

© John Dunn.

The siren screams long and hard

Thursday, 2 May 2024 at 02:20

Siren, Conor Walton

The siren screams long and hard

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.

© John Dunn.

Psychiatrised and clinicised

Wednesday, 1 May 2024 at 02:22

Psychiatrised and clinicised

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.

© John Dunn.

Siren call

Monday, 29 April 2024 at 22:00

Siren by Conor Walton

Siren call

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.

© John Dunn.

Madness Abounds

Monday, 29 April 2024 at 01:55

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’.27 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.

© John Dunn.

Universal dynamism

Sunday, 28 April 2024 at 00:06

Otto Weininger

Universal dynamism

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’.

© John Dunn.

Mainspring of academic thought today

Thursday, 25 April 2024 at 22:01

Immanuel Kant

Mainspring of academic thought today

Immanuel Kant had earlier provided ammunition for the revolt, ‘discovering’ the subjectivity of knowledge and asserting the power of the human mind over the external world. New ground rules were later attempted by Friedrich Schelling who concluded that there could not be some single philosophy which might reconcile the world in consciousness and the world outside consciousness. Hegel took up the challenge laid down by Schelling, re-engaging subject and object in a dialectical process that regarded real nature, like real man, as a predicate, a symbol of some latent supernatural reality.

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.

© John Dunn.