By now most readers grasp we in the USA are in a protracted global war. Biden wants to create a global medical totalitarianism by treaty with WHO. Omnipresent in this time this is a war of choices to make man cattle and do so through law made by governments. Governments captured and controlled from outside the political process that fig leafs the Great Reset.
Diderot said “No man has received from nature the right to command others. Liberty is a gift from heaven, and each individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he enjoys the use of reason. If nature has established any authority, it is paternal control; but paternal control has its limits, and in the state of nature, it would terminate when the children could take care of themselves. Any other authority comes from another origin than nature. If one seriously considers this matter, one will always go back to one of these two sources: either the force and violence of an individual who has seized it, or the consent of those who have submitted to it by a contract made or assumed between them and the individual on whom they have bestowed authority.” Diderot then Pareto as the volcanic soil my jungle of refusals grows from. The pseudo-reality thrust upon us by Covid Emergency Governance is Pareto most cynical.
Imagination the thread freeing me from the Minotaur. Surrealism seeks the Marvelous. Suzzane Cesaire “Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilised/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be recovered.”
Pareto’s realism -All Governments use force and all aver to have their foundation in reason. In truth, with or without universal suffrage, it is always an oligarchy which governs, which knows how to give to the popular will’ the expression that it desires from the votes of the majority in an assembly variously elected, to the plebiscite which gave the empire to Napoleon III and so forth, up to a wisely guided universal suffrage, which is bought and manipulated by our politicos. Who is this new god that bears the name 'universal suffrage’? He is not better defined, nor any less mysterious and less foreign to the reality of things than so many other divinities: nor is his theology, as others, lacking in patent contradictions.
Owen Barfield -Frederick Amrine and Konrad Oberhuber collate eight lectures by Rudolf Steiner delivered to an audience of scientists in 1920.
The “boundaries” from which the book takes its title were first succinctly formulated by Du Bois-Reymond in 1872, when reductionism was approaching its culmination. There are two opposite directions, he maintained, in which science can never make any further advance, two concepts which must be simply accepted without any further inquiry: matter on the one hand and consciousness on the other.
Ignorabimus was the word in which he epitomized his findings: we shall remain ignorant. Science will remain aware of using these two concepts, and they must simply be accepted. As to what they are, and consequently their relation to one another (how, for instance, consciousness could ever have arisen out of inanimate matter), it is useless to inquire. It may be recalled that Lenin based his “philosophy” on a similarly axiomatic acceptance of matter as an absolute, any metaphysical analysis of it being prohibited.
Steiner points out – what was even truer of 1920 than it is of today, though it is still true enough – that the Western mind is becoming more and more paralysed under this deadweight of assumption. And the crow-bar he inserts to begin the lifting of it, is – the nature of mathematics. He takes pains to demonstrate that mathematics, as such, is “sense-free thinking.” There is not space in a review to do justice to the kind of detail into which he enters for the purpose, notably the distinction between analytical and empirical mechanics, the former sufficing for the parallelogram of resultant motion, since it is purely geometrical, while for the latter experiment is needed to verify the parallelogram of resultant forces. We are faced with the fact that this “sense-free,” mathematical thinking is nevertheless applicable to the outer world. Otherwise how could we use it for investigating and controlling that world? Not only is it applicable, but the deeper we penetrate with our investigations, the more it appears that mathematics is that very world’s basis."
Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, soul and imagination are respectively defined as:
1. Soul: “The spiritual, rational and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason.”
Pareto's educated generation of the pre post modern world still knew that mind is a power of soul, and imagination the power by which mind conceives: Andre Breton, Surrealist, "Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. There remains madness, 'the madness that one locks up', as it has aptly been described. That madness or another..."
Artaud writes
Why do Van Gogh’s paintings give me the impression of being seen from the other
side of the tomb, from a world where finally his suns will have been the only things that
spun around and lit up joyously?
For is it not the whole history of what was one day called the soul which lives and
dies in his convulsive landscapes and flowers?
Or the French poet St-John Perse who hung on his door a sign at night-the poet is working.
2. Imagination: “…the power or faculty of the mind by which it conceives and forms ideas of things communicated to it by the senses….The business of conception (and the) power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones so as to form new wholes of our own creation…(imagination) selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature.”
For Aristotle powers (δυνάμεις) of human imagination are nutritive power (θρεπτικόν), perceptive (αἰσθητικόν), desiderative (ὀρεκτικόν), motive according to place (κινητικὸν κατὰτόπον), intellective (διανοητικόν, 414a29–32). Different classes of mortal living things possess all, some, or one of these (cf. 413b32–33). Because he is considering how widely these faculties extend and which can be separate, he here lists them, unusually, in the order of decreasing extensiveness. Humans have all of these functions, some animals only some, and plants just the nutritive capacity. As more capabilities are added, the number of living things possessing them decreases. Aristotle reconsiders how these functional capacities separate and combine in the classes of mortal living beings to guarantee that he has dealt well with all the powers of mortal living things and that his definition of soul covers all the soul's powers.
P.F. Strawson’s remarks in “Imagination and Perception”, where he writes:
The uses, and applications, of the terms “image”, “imagine”, “imagination”, and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty to identify and list the family’s members, let alone their relations of parenthood and cousinhood. (Strawson 1970: 31)
In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov had dreamt in his illness that the whole world was condemned to fall victim to a terrible, unknown pestilence which was moving on Europe out of the depths of Asia. All were destined to perish, except a chosen few, a very few. . . . People who were infected immediately became like men possessed and out of their minds. But never, never, had any men thought themselves so wise and so unshakable in the truth as those who were attacked. Never had they considered their judgments, their scientific deductions, or their moral convictions and creeds more infallible. Whole communities, whole cities and nations, were infected and went mad. All were full of anxiety, and none could understand any other; each thought he was the sole repository of truth and was tormented when he looked at the others, beat his breast, wrung his hands, and wept. They did not know how or whom to judge and could not agree what was evil and what good. They did not know whom to condemn or whom to acquit. Men killed one another in senseless rage. . . . In the whole world only a few could save themselves, a chosen handful of the pure, who were destined to found a new race of men and a new life, and to renew and cleanse the earth; but nobody had ever seen them anywhere, nobody had heard their voices or their words.
This nihilistic vision represents Dostovesky's acute perceptions of the dangers of modernism.
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Good post. They have indeed fig leafed over the great reset. Now we can see that the plague imagined in Crime & Punishment is the plague - the Frankenstein - furnished by the darkness of our own minds.