Thoughts from Beyond the Grave

Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the λόγος is common the many live as though they had a private understanding.

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

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

“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.’ ”

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.

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.