CAMPANELLA'S UNIVERSALIST REVOLUTION

By all means see my Campanella entry Civitas Solis in the Wishful Thinking section, where many things not mentioned here are properly discussed. What is of the utmost and only interest to me here is Campanella’s religious universalism, which reminds me of my own thinking regarding religious transcendence. Mind you, I am totally against any kind of substitution of a natural religion by an artificial universalist hybrid, like they tried to do with the acultural Esperanto language in the area of human communication. Each religion ought to remain forever connected to the specific historical culture that it represents, and substitutes are ridiculous and demonstrably ineffective. But Campanella’s clever “utopia” (at the time when heretics were habitually burned at the stake, he barely avoided their fate and lived until seventy 1568-1639) presents a philosophical religious vision, and even the author’s severest detractors could not successfully accuse him of trying to transplant it into real life.

Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis is of particular interest to my Religion section on account of his brave and virtually revolutionary depiction of religion, in his utopian city of the sun. Campanella was a Dominican monk, regularly in trouble for his atrociously unorthodox views, but not without friends in high places, who must have shielded him from the more serious and lethal charges of heresy. Indeed, there is plenty of heresy in the book which we are now looking at.

Let us start with his depiction of the city’s temple, which is conspicuous for the absence of a cross.

“On the top of the hill is a rather spacious plain, and in the midst of it there rises a temple, built with wondrous art. The temple is built in the form of a circle; not girt with walls, but standing on thick columns, beautifully grouped. A very large dome built with great care in the centre or pole contains another small vault as it were rising out of it, and in it is a spiracle, which is right over the altar. There is but one altar in the middle of the temple, and it is hedged round by columns. The temple itself is on a space of more than 350 paces. Without it, arches measuring about eight paces extend from the heads of the columns outward whence other columns rise about three paces from the thick, strong and erect wall. Between these and the former columns there are galleries for walking with beautiful pavements and in the recess of the wall which is adorned with numerous large doors, there are immovable seats, placed as it were between the inside columns, supporting the temple. Portable chairs are not wanting, many and well adorned. Nothing is seen over the altar but a large globe, on which the heavenly bodies are painted, and another globe, upon which there is a representation of the earth. Furthermore, in the vault of the dome there can be discerned representations of all the stars of heaven, from the first to the sixth magnitude with their proper names and power to influence terrestrial things marked in three little verses for each. There are the poles and greater and lesser circles, according to the right latitude of the place, but these are not perfect because there is no wall below. They seem, too, to be made in relation to the globes on the altar. The pavement of the temple is bright with precious stones. Its seven golden lamps hang always burning, and these bear the names of the seven planets. At the top of the building several small beautiful cells surround the small dome and behind the level space above the bands or arches of the exterior and interior columns there are many cells both small and large, where the priests and religious officers dwell to the number of forty-nine. A revolving flag projects from the smaller dome, and this shows in what quarter the wind is. The flag is marked with figures, up to 36, and the priests know what sort of year the different kinds of winds bring and what will be the changes of weather on land and sea. Furthermore, under the flag a book is always kept written with letters of gold…”

Unlike in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, written just three years after Campanella’s utopia, this book is not the Bible. But wait… “…The great ruler among them is a priest whom they call by the name Hoh, although we should call him Metaphysic. (!!!) He is head over all, in temporal and spiritual matters, and all business and lawsuits are settled by him, as the supreme authority…”

The philosopher-priest? The parallel with my stress on the philosophization of religion becomes uncanny here! But here now comes the most revealing evidence of Campanella’s cultural and religious universalism:

“There I saw (depictions of) Moses, Osiris, Jupiter, Mercury, Lycurgus, Pompilius, Pythagoras, Zamolxis, Solon, Charondas, Phoroneus, with very many others. They even have Mahomet, whom nevertheless they hate as a false and sordid legislator. In the most dignified position I saw a representation of Jesus Christ and of the twelve Apostles, whom they consider very worthy and hold to be great. Of the representations of men, I perceived Caesar, Alexander, Pyrrhus, and Hannibal in the highest place; and other very renowned heroes in peace and war, especially Roman heroes, were painted in lower positions under the galleries. And when I asked with astonishment, whence they had obtained our history, they told me that among them there was a knowledge of all languages, and that by perseverance they continually send explorers and ambassadors over the whole earth, who learn thoroughly the customs, forces, rule, and histories of the nations, bad and good alike. These they apply all to their own republic, and with this they are well pleased.”

As I say in my Civitas Solis entry, Campanella wants to show a universal ideal in Civitas Solis, which could be accepted by all nations even of non-Christian religions, and he goes out of his way to distance his utopian paradise from a strictly Christian state, expected from a devout Christian apologist. Still, he does make several favorable references to Christianity, to show its high standing in his ideal State.

“They strongly recommend the religion of the Christians and especially the life of the apostles. They admire Christian institutions and look for a realization of the apostolic life in vogue among themselves and in us.”

But it is still amazing and even incredible how in his day he could actually get away with a characterization of Jesus Christ (“whom they consider very worthy and hold to be great”) that is demonstrably disrespectful to his Divine status in Christian theology.

Lastly, I wish to reiterate my amazement at Campanella’s brave attempt to universalize and to philosophize religion, so much in tune with my Allegory of the two-storied Temple, and at the even more astonishing fact that he could get away with it.

GREED MAKES STUPID?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had a much-quoted gem about the greedy capitalist, who, if the price was right, would be eager to sell the communist a rope with which the communist would then proceed to hang him. In other words (and this should be a very natural conclusion), greed is stupid. The fact that this observation is quite true seems to be corroborated by too many examples to mention them all, but, mind you, the greed we are dealing with here is pure greed, unintelligent greed, all-consuming greed. The investors in Madoff’s fraudulent scheme were rejoicing in the high return on their investment without questioning its rationale, or bothering themselves with the old capitalist wisdom: if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Lenin was a clever manipulator of popular psychology, of course. He was a genius of agitation and propaganda. Brilliantly, he substituted the perfectly healthy capitalist will to profit by the unhealthy human emotion of greed, and passed the latter for the former. Enough said.

However, this is not the terminal of our ride. The experience of our modern times tells us that there is a far worse thing than stupid greed, which raises stupidity to a much higher, global level. And here is the gist of it:

Stupid politics trumps the stupidity of greed.

And here is just one example.

The fairly recent policy of American-led Western sanctions against Russia, predictably countered by Russia’s countermeasures, has not hurt Russia in any significant way, but has clearly boomeranged against its initiators. In fact, stupid politics has indeed wreaked more damage on American and Western business interest than any kind of greed would ever have been able to accomplish.

I wonder, what would Lenin have said, had he been alive today in his Mausoleum?..

THE WONDROUS ERUPTION OF GENIUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

(Wittgenstein was perhaps the greatest philosophical genius of the post-Nietzschean era, and therefore it is only fitting that, having the entries in this section in chronological order, his entries should be the concluding ones in the Magnificent Shadows.)

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. The world is everything that is the case. Thus starts, arguably, one of the most important philosophical works ever written, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

One of the brightest eruptions of human genius in the twentieth century was the Wittgenstein phenomenon, the life and work of the Austrian-born wonder Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889-1951). He was, in fact, a textbook case of unbounded prodigy, the epitome of genius, as we have come to understand genius. His contemporary and admirer Bertrand Russell never mentioned him in his History of Western Philosophy, but he wrote a glowing Introduction to the Tractatus, and in his Autobiography was so effusive in his praise for Wittgenstein’s genius that his omission of him in the History starts making good sense: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. (I am alluding to one of Wittgenstein’s most celebrated sentences saturated with a most exquisite mystique.) It is indeed virtually impossible to discuss a bona fide genius in a dispassionate scholarly discourse, which any History of Philosophy has to be, by definition.

Thus, it is only outside his History of Philosophy that Russell gives Wittgenstein his due. He describes him as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Progressing rapidly at Cambridge, where Russell was his teacher, Wittgenstein “soon knew all that I had to teach.” Wittgenstein had “fire and penetration and intellectual purity to a quite extraordinary degree.” Getting to know Wittgenstein was to become “one of the most exciting intellectual adventures” of Russell’s life, according to him.

Wittgenstein’s life can be rightfully studied, purposely quoting Hegel, as eine Phänomenologie des Geistes. There is no sense to engage in a retelling of his biography here as it is enormously intricate and complicated and does not yield itself to adequate abbreviation. The only way to deal with this situation is to recommend to my reader in strongest terms to read Wittgenstein’s biography in proper reference sources, and for me to assume that the reader has done just that, and that this remarkable life has now become known to both of us. In such a case, we can move on to Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

His two masterpieces, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations have been both cited among the top five most important books of philosophy of the twentieth century, by a consensus of professional philosophers.

The point of the Tractatus is expressed in this single sentence in the author’s Preface: “The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

(The parts in greenish font below represent my extractions from a number of reference sources. The parts in blue font throughout this entry are quotations from Wittgenstein and Russell.)

The central question of the Tractatus is: How is language possible? How can a man, by uttering a sequence of words, say something? And how can another person understand him? Wittgenstein was struck by the fact that a person can understand sentences that he has never encountered before. The solution that came to him was that a sentence that says something (a proposition) must be “a picture of reality.” “A proposition shows its sense; (it shows) the connection between the signs on paper and a situation outside in the world.”

One of the most striking features of the Tractatus is its conception of the limits of language.--- Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality, in order to be able to represent it-- logical form… What can be said can only be said by means of a proposition and so nothing that is necessary for the understanding of all propositions can be said. There are other things that cannot be said: the necessary existence of simple elements of reality; the existence of a thinking, willing self; and the existence of absolute value. These things are also unthinkable, since the limits of language are the limits of thought. Thus Wittgenstein’s tremendous insight: “Unsayable things do indeed exist” is also an astonishing paradox, as it is itself something that cannot be said or thought and, in this sense, is nonsensical. The final sentence of the book (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) is no truism. It is a highly metaphysical remark, attempting to convey the unsayable, unthinkable doctrine that there is a realm about which one can say nothing.

I admire the Tractatus both as a linguist and as a lover of philosophy. Representing propositions as pictures of reality has become the amazingly fertile ground for theories like Permyakov’s paroemiological theory, or my own unique incursion into political linguistics, to become possible. One may rightly say that out of this Tractatus a whole constellation of future sciences may well grow, if sciences are to make further qualitative progress at all. Philosophically, the Tractatus is a consummate mystical experience, embodying everything which is quintessential to the heights of philosophical thinking.

THE PRIEST AND THE SCHOLAR

My acute unhappiness with the state of the world, and particularly with the crisis of American society, is hungry for any morsel of optimism I can find. It is therefore immensely gratifying to me to come across a morsel like this (not that I had not read it before, but I just had not been ripe for it then) in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Why I Am A Destiny, Section 7:

“This would still open the possibility that not all humanity is degenerating, but only that parasitical type of man: the priest, that has used morality to raise itself to the position of determining human values: finding in Christian morality the means for coming to power. Indeed, this is my insight: the teachers, the leaders of humanity, theologians all of them, were also, all of them, decadents:--- hence, the revaluation of all values into hostility to life, and hence, my definition of morality as the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life, successfully. I attach value to this definition.”

It is heartwarming how this diatribe parallels my own against the “Academia” that is ruining this country’s ability to understand the world’s reality and to be ready to solve the problems of all sorts to the best of her otherwise healthy and adequate ability. You can practically see our respective diatribes as almost perfectly interchangeable, except you change the name of the addressee. So, I can feel poor Nietzsche’s frustration with the ugliness and the magnitude of the deception. In a sense, we are in the same boat! I also recognize the validity of using the words priest and teacher interchangeably. Yet, still, I said it before and will say it again: he is wrong seeing religion as religion, and not seeing the national-cultural aspect of it. He does not talk much about Marx, and, obviously, in his time Marxism must have been a non-event. It is the ascent of Internationalism, expressing itself most ostensibly in the American-driven immoral doctrine of Globalism, which, today, is giving religion, not as it is practiced here, but as a genuine expression of nationalism and anti-colonialism around the world, a new and positive significance, and a totally new lease on life.

For better or for worse, religion is with the world to stay. In sickness or in health, the world is married to its religions… Till death do us all part…

GOD AND THE DEVIL AS ONE: BLASPHEMY OR A REVELATION?

 

Sometimes I am prone to pushing the limits of my religious reverence, but all for a good cause: in order to enquire into the mystery of free speech, and what it actually means.

In one of such “quizzical” moods, I once asked myself, whether the faint demarcation line, separating our philosophical revelation from an offensive blasphemy is, philosophically speaking, the same line as the one drawn between art and pornography? Indeed, by the same token as the aesthetical being unthinkable as unethical, it has to be the censorship of free thought that needs to be labeled as immoral, rather than free thought herself, a gift from God to us, wherever it may take us in its flight. In a sense, such censorship would be acting as the hot rays of the sun, which melted the wax of Icarus’s wings, turning his free flight into a freefall.

For this reason, I cannot agree with those critics of Nietzsche who find many of his undeniably outrageous remarks offensive. Like the following one, in his Ecce Homo, Beyond Good and Evil Chapter, Section 2:

“Theologically speaking, it was God himself who, at the end of his days’ work, lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God. He had made everything too beautifully... The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day.”

Here is the consummate Nietzsche,-- beautiful, totally magnificent, original, thought-provoking, unafraid of heights. No, I am not going to either agree or disagree with him here: it would be too simplistic. This is not even my reason for quoting him, as my main point is far more general: Whether one would agree with him, or not, does not really matter, as long as he makes us think!

Such a thinker is never a blasphemer, whatever he utters in his pristine sincerity. Like all God’s prophets, his words are divine revelations, not in the sense of their acceptance literally, which would be tantamount to our renunciation of philosophical freedom to the fetters of superstition, but as an invitation to the sacred act of thinking, in which our intellectual capacity is increased multifold by such an exposure to the infinite; and the truth, in the Socratic/Platonic sense, is thus made more accessible to our senses.

But let us not brush off Nietzsche’s irreverent proposition quoted above. It starts with an important qualifier --theologically speaking! This immediately precludes any silly literal equation of God with the devil. But it raises the highly controversial question which is very much in circulation today, as we know from the opera Jesus Christ Superstar and from the infamous remark of Pastor John Hagee: Is evil, theologically speaking, a tool of God’s destiny for His creation? Was Judas the key enforcer of God’s plan of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, as argued in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice rock opera? Was Hitler, in Hagee’s own incredible words, “God’s hunter,” divinely dispatched to hunt down six million Jews?..

With questions like these being actively raised in our allegedly politically-correct modern times, one must really admire Nietzsche’s philosophical audacity in his coming up with his mother tincture…

...theologically speaking…

 

"WHY I AM A DESTINY."

This entry’s title coincides with Nietzsche’s own title in Ecce Homo for the passage quoted below, and for a good reason. My principal task here, as befits this whole Nietzsche section, is not to draw attention to any of my personal ideas, but to Nietzsche as a person, and also to the reason why he calls himself “a destiny.” The structure of the following paragraphs is borrowed from my Sources & Comments format, but I see no other way at this time how to do this better.

(1). I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous--- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. --- Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion: religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people. [Here again Nietzsche kind of goes over the line, refusing to recognize the simple fact that religion is, above all, the ethical foundation of each great culture. But perhaps, he is too preoccupied (à la Kierkegaard) with his personal ressentiment toward the hypocrisy of religion, and, of course, I see nothing wrong with that, because I will always take this kind of magnificent subjectivity over anybody’s fake all-through, and grotesquely self-important exercise in the so-called objectivity!] I want no “believers”; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses. [Compare this to my thoughts about the uselessness of speaking to the “followers”, who only listen to their leaders, and that, instead, one must attempt to reeducate the leaders!] I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.

I don’t want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a buffoon. But my truth is terrible; for so far one has called lies truth.

Revaluation of all values: my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity that has become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being that I know to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of the millennia. I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies. Revaluation of all values… Once again, compare this idea to my appeal for a critical reassessment of all basic terms and their applications: Nietzsche would have appreciated my Lecture Summary on International Justice! By the same token, I see his call for a revaluation not as a call to abolish old values, but to reexamine them, clean them up and exorcise them from the hypocrisy of the millennia and then, perhaps, they can be restored to their original pristine condition.

For all that, I am necessarily also the man of calamity. For, when truth enters into a fight with the lies of the millennia we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded: all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me (it pains me even to make this comment here, as in many other places elsewhere, where I am not doing it at all, that throughout Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s final bow to his reader, the evidence of a progressing mental illness including such sudden flashes of pathological megalomania are becoming excruciatingly more and more apparent) that the earth knows great politics.

This presents a great temptation to see Nietzsche as a genius psychic, predicting things that are to come to pass, which he is not. Yes, the twentieth century would indeed be the age of unprecedented wars, but they are not Nietzsche’s wars, they are only accidental coincidences, and in his great prophesies of this passage he himself is only a Utopian, nothing more. Mediocrity has always carried the day, and in the end it comes down to a status quo, a new scenery and decorations, a new Christmas Tree, and perhaps some newer Tree decorations, but the old Christmas, the old status quo, going over and over again. I have no problem with Nietzsche’s hopeless idealism here, his subjectivity, even in error, is the only way to be a philosopher. But, mind you, the time has not borne out his predictions, there is no ‘Zarathustra’ yet to come, except that old perennial genius who has been physically dead now for over a century, yet spiritually alive and well for all time. Whereas the great object of his indignation, Christianity, has not changed so much, and today is very much alive and very well in Russia, because, and this is what Nietzsche the genius has failed to recognize, great religions, like Christianity, are not so much about a particular religion, as they are about the national culture rooted in it, and they ought to be always seen in that light!