Those who perfect their souls by the virtues and knowledge they acquire resemble those men from the myth who lost all their mortality by feeding on ambrosia. But those who base the excellence of their being only on external qualities are like those Titans who thought they were gods because they had large bodies. Montesquieu
https://logosmedia.com/2012/08/how-darwin-huxley-and-the-esalen-institute-launched-the-2012-and-psychedelic-revolutions-and-began-one-of-the-largest-mind-control-operations-in-history/
Kant and Goethe on the history of the modern Weltanschauung
Georg Simmel
Translated by Josef Bleicher
ANY SENSE of the wholeness of life we tend to attribute to cultures in a semi-developed state, and also to the one preceding the rise of Christianity. This wholeness was torn apart and turned into opposites by later developments. However hard the struggle for physical survival, however mercilessly individuals may have been subjected to the demands of their social group, there only seem to have been very sporadic instances prior to the decline of the Classical era where there arose the intimation of a fundamental rift within human beings, within their world, or between them and their world.
Plato had separated a world beyond, that of ‘Ideas’, from the empirical one, in which the latter was conceived by him as a split-off part of the former, the only fully real world. But even this separation was initially revised again. It is only with the rise of Christianity that the opposition between spirit and flesh, between the state of nature and ultimate values, between the self-willed individual and a God who considers any wilfulness a sin, that these oppositions were felt down to the bottom of the soul. But, being a religion, it offered reconciliation with the same hand that had created the rift. It was only after having lost its unconditional power over the soul, only after its solution to the problem had become questionable at the beginning of the modern period, that the issue could emerge in its full extent. Only after the Renaissance period did the recognition become dominant that humans are fundamentally dualistic beings; that separation and opposition represent the basic form through which they comprehend the constituents of their world, and which also underlie all its tragic aspects, as well as its whole development and dynamic nature. With the awareness that this opposition reaches down to the deepest and widest layers of our selves and to the way our existence is conceived of, the search for its reconciliation becomes all the more comprehensive and insistent. As the tension between our internal and external existence increases, so the quest for an all the more powerful and comprehensive bond increases also, one that allows us to comprehend once more that unity which we have sensed prevailing over and above our unfamiliarity with the elements of being.
https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_simmel1.htm
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
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