Immortal mortals, mortal immortals
living their death and dying their life.
— Heraclitus of Ephesus
Late Contributions
Future of an Illusion
No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization. This consists in its religious ideas in the widest sense in other words (which will be justified later) in its illusions. III In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie? We have … Read more
The Unprecedented Present
what follows is an excerpt from Shoshana’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, section 4 of the first chapter where the unprecedented nature of the current system is reflected: IV. The Unprecedented One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something … Read more
A Bit of Wisdom for the Artist
“We are not mere mirrors of what is happening outside us, we are rather transformers of the energies of the universe. The artist, therefore, must train himself to know ‘things-as-they-are.’ ”
Wanderings—Paris to Pacific Grove: 1927–1939
Thus art need not be either propagandistic for contemporary politics or indifferent to them. It is essentially another expression field for something more fundamental and deep-running than either art or politics, economics, science, society or religion.
On the Being of the Encompassing
What is logically impossible to accomplish in the usual sense of knowledge is nonetheless philosophically possible as increasing lucidity of a sense of being totally different from all determinate knowledge.
On the Death of God
Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished, and the Oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb. The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine.
On the Nature of the Archetypal
It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore …