Category: Philosophy

17 Feb

To Hell with Culture

Amelia Hoskins / Art, Philosophy / / 0 Comments

Image credit:  'The Arrows Mean Death' from Klee's wartime paintings news.artnet.com

PAUL KLEE - Swiss artist and director of the Bauhaus

In Paul Klee's image above, there is an abstraction of shapes, forms and lines, but there remains an overall vitality of complete difference in idea from any gone before.  Klee's ability to 'take a line for a walk' (a title of his book) has varied approaches here: The smaller images appear to be rooms with life of some kind, or symbols of fragmented civilization, likely symbolic of  war damage. One small dark hole within a grey circle could be a 'bullet hole'; while the large dark arrow, although basically a line with a head, takes on an ominous meaning, as the bringer of death (we know from the title) to the ensemble on the lower plane.   The arrow breaks out from a lined sky section which could symbolise a war plane.  There are very different war artists and if this painting can be considered amongst them, Klee has used his metaphysical awareness transposed into line, colour and pattern to create this fascinating image. The title and finished work draw us into further perception, as they are a mystery of the artist's mind; while all the while Klee is very much a designer with an eye for balance, proportion and harmony, which this picture has.

Sir Herbert Read, writer on art and philosophy, on Klee:-

"He escaped by way of nature, and there is a whole phase of his work, round about 1908-12, which might be described as impressionistic. But he knew the truth of that saying of Meister Eckhart :

" If  you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. And likewise if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence."

Thereafter every painting by Klee becomes an attempt to express this inner essence.  But it is just at this point that he miraculously avoids the pitfall of almost all artists who seek to express the metaphysical. He does not for a moment surrender his artistic integrity—his sensibility."

Read explains abstraction from the artist's internality:

"That does not mean that his art had no relation to the world about him that he was, as we inelegantly say, an " escapist ". It is only an unintelligent and superficial realism that demands of the artist a mechanical reflection of the objects which lie in his field of vision. Nor is it much more intelligent to restrict the artist to what is called an interpretation of those objects - the running commentary of the impressionistic journalist. What history demands in its long run, is the object itself - the work of art which is itself a created reality, an addition to the sum of real objects in the world. Such objects can only come from the artist's own world, the unique world of his own subjective existence. That, of course, is not a vacuum—it is the most crowded receptacle in the universe, and psychology has never plumbed its depths."

"The whole of Klee's life-work was a white energy against the dark background of modern Germany"

Its of interest that a quotation by Max Raphael on the abstraction of Neolithic geometric style, (sited in Read's 'Icon and Idea' ) could just as easily be applied to Klee's painting above!  Especially 'detachment' over the whole scene, and 'connection of content and meaning with...life and death'.

synthesis, reflecting the will to create a visual unity out of a multiplicity of elements;
simplicity, indicating the will to build complex structures from a few elements; formal necessity, deriving from the will both to represent and to conceal content in an adequate sign; detachment, arising from the will of the artist to raise himself above all content of the inner and outer worlds, the sensual emotions as well as the physical objects; definiteness, bespeaking the will to embody eternal contrasts in self-evident form; energy, expressing the will to master by magic that which transcends man's physical powers, even life itself; and, finally, connection of content and meaning with two worlds, those of life and death.'

Post title 'To Hello with Culture' taken from a book by Sir Herbert Read, WWI battalion leader and survivor - turned anarchist philosopher against all totalitarianism.  Friend of Jung and Orwell.

His profound interest in natural law and art is worth looking at today, in our increasingly totalitarian environments.  As many do today, he advocated for decentralization of power, leading to the people organising themselves.  As an anti-industrialist, (childhood spent in farm life) he has commonality with William Blake who observed the changing society of a nation covered in 'dark satanic mills' resulting from the 'full steam ahead' progress of the machine and profit.

Its easy to imagine how the experience of war, and especially the brutality of WWI, would cause a thinking man like Read to consider how life should be lived that all may have meaning rather than survival within the rat race of industrialism and its associated bureaucrats.

Film about Read.  Interviewed 1956

A gentle spoken man with a great belief in art as a necessity for human wellbeing, but not as a means of lucrative competitiveness .

Read was tired of the old "gigantic boredom" of fine art, therefore an advocate for new, modern art and set up the ICA with Roland Penrose.  He believed a better world might come from a wider interest in developing art ideas.  (He would not be pleased with the self obsessed, decadent and gender analysing 'art' of today.). Art does indeed tend to reflect the culture of any social engineering which has been financed.

"There is only one plan — the plan of nature.  We must live according to natural laws, and by virtue of the power which comes from concentrating upon their manifestation in the individual human mind"   ~ Read

In Icon and Idea, Read further describes how the history of art shows a changing attitude or predeliction for art with vitality, or moved towards abstraction and pattern.  Paleolithic cave paintings he saw having vitality compared with more geometric Neolithic art.  We have no idea he suggests, whether Paleolithic art was a culmination of previous ancient art that could have been geometric, or whether the earliest artists instinctively had vitality to accurately draw their beasts.  An artist could have been a shaman, who by the power of his ability could inspire the hunt, for survival. That would make it part of survival ritual and not 'art' as we think of it, as a showpiece.  Read explains how abstraction may show advancement:

my intention is to show that in relation to the naturalistic art of the Paleolithic period the geometric art of the Neolithic period represents an extension of aesthetic sensibility, and not, as he (Worringer) has suggested, a contraction.

I can vouch that, as a designer and artist, its easy to produce images of the world, but much harder to conceive from within a coherent abstracted art, with a multiplicity of thought connections. [Link to seed torus painting ADD]

In Coats of Many Colours, Read writes of Eric Gill's thoughts against industrial capitalist society.  Gill, like Blake, resolved to earn a living by humble means, as a letter-setter rather than architect.

My socialism was from the beginning a revolt against the intellectual degradation of the factory hands and the damned ugliness of all that capitalist- industrialism produced, and it was not primarily a revolt against the cruelty and injustice of the possessing classes or against the misery of the poor. It was not so much the working class that concerned me as the working man— not so much what he got from working as what he did by working.  ~. Gill

Gill considered the place of artists in the machine age:  "What the machine cannot do is the " thinking " part, and what distinguishes the artist from the workman is the ability to " think ", a certain faculty which the Germans call Gestaltungsfaehigkei.   ~ Gill 

William Blake would agree with that.  This is the crux of Read's philosophy; that life should be about the vital quality of what you do, and in some way part of a natural law; all things good and true;  the thinking which bring activities into form, and from thence developed his interest in philosophy of art.  Art is from within, thoughts reflective of culture, which humans bring into being by form.  Art activities bring the inside out and are as such a reflection of culture from an era in anthropological perspective.

'.....life must be so ordered that the individual can live a natural life, attending to what is within " Read

 

04 Jan

Satan and Totalitarianism

Paradise Lost - Satan - The Whore of Babylon

Another interpretation of 'Resonance' is when artists describe the probing issues of their time.  Such resonance is echoed even louder when we experience it in our own time.  The 18th Century concept of atheistic science being Satanic has resonance in 2020s with the emergent biotech developments towards an AI driven controlling agenda and pharma dictatorships. Disregard or isolation from ideas of human divinity have also fuelled child abuse, which many refer to as Satanic.  Civilization is far from Paradise as forces of good and evil seem always to be with us.

Artificial intelligence companies funded by big tech already suggest their AI system will be a 'god', many define as Satanic.  [link]  William Blake, who drew, engraved and printed Biblical scenes, had some foresight on this subject.  Beyond his commissions, he painted Satanic images inspired from the Bible, which have a strong resonance today, such as 'The Number of the Beast is 666'.

 

The Number Of The Beast Is 666

The Beast in the book of Revelations and Daniel

Blake is familiar with the biblical texts' descriptions of the beast having many heads, horns and crowns.  The Mark of the Beast is obviously taken from St. John’s 'Apocalypse'  prophesied theme that the antichrist will present as a fake god, (a techtopian globalist plan which is against natural law).

This image would not be out of place in 2022.  The lamb in the painting is the 'lamb of God' with human hands signifying the people below which appear as a flock of sheep.  The white Satan may represent consciousness which points in an opposite direction to the focus of the dragon winged 'bad satan': this would fit with ‘coincident oppositore’  which Blake understood as a balanced world of contraries.

William Blake:  Heaven vs Hell

The doorway to the future awaits the couple showing a future of ascendency through hot and cold flames representative of 'heaven and hell' in life's reality.   Beyond the ocean of time, figures ascend the distant hills of development.  The painting is alegorical during a time of revolution: about Blake's universe of balance, expressed in 'contraries' which exist in counterpoint to one and another.  There is no progression without them.  In fact we can only identify one aspect because the other aspect exists.  He was influenced by Jacob Boehm's writing who was immersed in this thinking which created the divine nature of things and who also referred to Heaven and Hell.  [QUOTE Tobias Churton book]

"contraries and oppositions - love and hate, expansion and contraction, opaqueness and translucence, reason and energy, attraction and repulsion, these are the poles of his world, where Without Contraries is no progression."    ~ William Blake

Blake's coincident oppositore’  is the unity of opposites; one force existing in a balance with another.  Blake unifies body of God with body of Satan:

Blake hides his political commentary within the biblical stories, as parables, almost as a political cartoonist.    Censorship is nothing new and he was almost imprisoned for his beliefs and associations, forced to remove text from God of Light (ideas from Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme. He was a radical 'dissenter' who also moved in Freemason circles: as a politically thinking man would need to know the plans of the day.  We cannot know exactly the oppressiveness of his time.  He would have agreed with Swedenborg's ideas of dismantling the overarching power of church as State, but not the dismantling of Christianity in total; whereby he ceased to follow Swedenborg's full swing into free love, even though he wanted sexual liberation.

In 2022 the world is becoming more totalitarian despite lessons from history on absolute power; a long way from the utopian world we could envisage in the 1960s.  Technocracy is in the ascendant and beginning to organise itself to remove freedoms to keep its power.

The larger you build a system the more there is proclivity to worship it as if it is everything; build as large as possible.  "tendency of the rational mind to produce totalitarianism and to fall in love with it, like the tower of Babel and nothing outside them is allowed to exist." ~ Jordan Peterson

People know the balance has gone too far in favour of ruling technocratic oligarchies who have more power than governments.  We can look at the thinking of 18th Century writers and artists who were concerned how the rise of atheism after the rationality of the philosophy of The Enlightenment would affect society.

Blake's outlook on the rationally measured world was a recurrent theme pursued in his character URIZEN until his death.  Even though science has advanced civilization by technology, in 2020's we see just how far 'rational' science has come, all the way to nuclear weapons, bioweapons and biotech modifications; towards genetic modification of humans. Medicine has been hijacked by big oil.  We can imagine Blake today would be ranting about the loss of biotechnology and technocracy.

Urizen misunderstood?

To promote the Blake retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 2019, his last artwork 'The Ancient of Days' was projected on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.  Organisers likely believed it an 'image of God'. I believe its a double-take by Blake of man trying to act as 'God' by measuring everything and even the heavens.  Visionary and prophetic Blake would be up in arms about how things are going today, when all things, political, health and media are under more and more control and be saying 'I warned you..!'

For Blake, his imaginative figure of Urizen is mankind ruled by science. Poetry and figures of Urizen represent rationalised science of those believing to have god like capabilities to control humankind, which Blake, like Milton, envisioned with pending doom for humanity.

'Urizenic Rationality itself is the program that has been expelled from Eternity, through challenging the role of the “transcendent function”, as Peterson suggests, and decides instead to create a world in its own fallen image: the world of Representation and Division, over which it can have power.' 

~ TheHumanDivine

Blake and Milton warned of a technocratic age of scientific 'reason' devoid of spirituality.  [Add Milton quotes + Scientific Outlook by Russell.] One idea of heaven and hell, good and bad times; is that they will always come, in different forms.  Tyranny of the people we know from history.  Poets, artists and philosophers consider the quality of life and the state of the world.  Psychologist, Jordan Peterson wrote Maps of Meaning which includes ideas from Blake.  He is a popular lecturer as people are refreshed by the idea of having a focus on meaning in their lives in a highly technocratic even dystopian world.

Jordan B Peterson, clinical psychologist, gives talks on religion and totalitarianism.  The figure of Satan to Blake and Milton is one of humanity believing itself divine with ownership of science.  Peterson interprets Milton's Paradise Lost - When people are denied their mythological history it leads them  "to gravitate towards nihilism, or as a counter position, to totalitarianism". (in the C20th)  In the background the existentialists were looking for ways to avoid ideological totalitarianism.  Peterson says 'We know the next step is mass murder'!  Let us note the killing fields of Covid and treatments.

"The immediate consequence, from Milton’s perspective, was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent—which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know—immediately, he was in hell. I was studying totalitarianism when I read Paradise Lost. I thought the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future. Maybe that’s because the poetic mind—the philosophic or poetic mind—is a pattern detector."

     ~ Jordan B Peterson - Taken from essay in thehumandivine.org

Peterson lecture What We Should Learn from Milton’s Paradise Lost 

Milton is incorporated into the corpus of christianity. He tried to justify 'being' to human beings. Satan is an intellectual figure, the 'evil scientist motif'. The human intellect falls in love with its own productions.  Milton’s hypothesis was that the element of the psyche – the spiritual element of the psyche that characterised the rational mind – would, by its proclivity to produce these totalising systems, end up casting itself into Hell.

"Milton did the first psychoanalytic study of malevolence and evil. God’s highest Angel, who was Satan, Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, the Spirit of Rationality, tormented a rebellion against God in Heaven and was cast into Hell as a consequence. …Satan, as the highest Angel in God’s heavenly Kingdom, is a personification of the tendency of the Rational Mind to produce totalitarian systems and then to fall in love with them ."

~ Jordan B Peterson

Today's understanding of a beast which would rule over everyone, ties in with the techno and biotech science developments equatable with human chip ‘mark of the beast’; the body-mind control through biotech: with growing ambitions towards transhumanism. First robots to take over humans' jobs, then robotic 'people' to guide and control in all things.  Authoritarian monitoring and control is essential to the techno-transhumanist dream of the 'internet of bodies' and who also want a church of AI.

…"authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation,” and “all the world marvelled and followed the beast" : describes internet tech giant Google followed by millions world wide, and in broader terms the 'Satanic' surveillance techno society.

And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a name of blasphemy…. And all the world marveled and followed the beast…. It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them. And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. If anyone has an ear, let him hear.’

From:   St. John ~ The Apocalypse referenced from book 'Antichrist: The Fulfilment of Globalisation: The Ancient Church and the End of History'

The Whore of Babylon

Again the horned serpent heads of 'Babylon'.  Blake has taken this idea from 16th Century illustrations.

The male is likely King Nimrod, grandson of Noah, who was thought to be King and God of the world at that time, of the peoples who survived the flood.  Queen Semeramis holds the urn where people are born of innocence, then directed down below to war and trouble.

The beast represents power; the leaders throughout history causing wars.  Both the near history of the American Civil War and the French Revolution of Blake's own time, would mean such imagery would be very important to him.  Blake noted in 1798, in contemporary culture and society “The beast & the whore rule without controls”

Here again the seven, horned and crowned heads are the beast.  The man is likely Nimrod, husband (and son, say some accounts) of Queen Semiramis.  We can equate the low morals of Babylon with today's socially engineered gender dystopic liberalism and cult of offensive wars.  Craig Koester says outright that "the whore is Rome, yet more than Rome, it is the Roman imperial world, which in turn represents the world alienated from God".  [This refers to the Papacy as blasphemy, discussed in video below]. Queen Semiramis wears the papal tiara, which indicates Blake's thoughts on the Catholic church, a political cartoon in the modern vernacular.

Interestingly, the 7 crowned serpent heads very likely refer to the 7 sovereign tribes left in Europe after the splitting of the Roman Empire into East and West.   Alemanni - Germans :  Burgundians - Swiss :  Franks - French  :  Lombards - Italians :  Saxons - English :  Suevi - Portuguese :  Visigoths - Spanish.  (Ten tribes, three extinct:  Heruli, Ostrogoths and Vandals).

Development of Kings and Kingdoms is covered in From Babylon to America. Prophetic texts from Daniel's dream are analysed to explain the man of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron and Clay, showing how they depict the empires.

 

The head of one beast entity was dreamed with one horn after others were rooted out, being the Papacy, which claimed to be God on Earth, with the power to forgive sins.  This is blasphemy, as the bible passages describe the attributes of a fake God.  After scholars deciphered Daniel's Prophecy, Napoleon had the Pope dis-invested for blasphemy in 1789, which date corresponded to the video analysis on biblical time spans.  William Blake lived through this and his images display the shackling of the Pope, on his way to hell with the previous kingdoms.

Lucifer And The Pope in Hell - 1805

Religion no longer has a central place in society as it did in Blake's time when he read the Bible avidly as a child, and was a commissioned engraver of Biblical illustrations; a popular subject for the new printing of the age.  Blake was consistently against powerful organised state religion, so would have backed Napoleon's acts against the Papacy in his art.

The Pope is chained to Lucifer; unable to escape evil, while deposed Kings lie in the depths of hell. Interesting to note Lucifer has scales as part serpent.  Evil is often seen in Blake's art as a serpent engulfing men who have succumbed to evil; the central figure is ambiguous, part evil.  Note the Kings' similarity to the seven beast-headed Kings in Whore of Babylon.

Snake Biting Vanni Fucci (Dante)

Serpents are poised ready to attack Vanni Fucci, as he seems to defy God.  The flames of hell are not far away.  Innocent angelic ladies are often depicted observing events, which may signify Blake's respect for women, who we know he was always ready to champion if a woman was in harm's way.

 

“We are looking at the primordial serpent right in the eye right now and we have the opportunity to cut its head off”

 ~ Dr Zelenko.  Interview on Infowars  A statement with resonance today, on the times where the serpent is big pharma biotechtopia.

The new god of Pharma-techtopia

Pharma techtopians and transhumanist planners like Klaus Schwab of the WEF and Yuval Harari feel they can be a new God, as they seem to be duplicating the Satanic route for mankind, as a modern day 'Nimrod' working against the natural way of life towards an AI Dreamers' transhumanism.  Klaus Schwab's The 4th Industrial Revolution plans neural implants.  This mad science is against the natural law of God. [Add link to SA]. 

Ian McGilchrist in his book 'The Matter of Things' extrapulates the reason behind thinking in terms of all life having contraries in dipolar force to make a whole.  He discusses the need for meaning and putting reason back into the world Iain McGilchrist: The Coincidence of Opposites

[to continue... writers on conjugates and link MU holons]

[create new post on paintings which represent conjugates]

How 'the Divine' can protect against Totalitarianism

Jordan Peterson and Peter Robinson of Hoover Inst. at Stanford (March 2022) again makes a case for a society based on the divine (including natural free speech) as a protector against totalitarianism.  He suggests starting values would be truth, justice and beauty "some good allies"!

With the underpining idea that our society is based on Judeo-Christianity, he defines 'divine' without it having to relate to a godhead religion. ...... [Notes and quotes to complete]  Acting without self consciousness. (living naturally without forced rulings) is living in God, being God.  When the divinity of mankind is considered this way: any ruling forces of power, socialist constructs, the worst being totalitarianism; all reduce or take away the individual enterprise and free thought which are replaced by social engineered mind sets.

Jordan explains how the youth have little to live for after a Marxist education, which instils guilt into their innocent existence.  “Its very hard to write a description of the world, without being informed by some value structure”. Postmodernists went wrong when they turned to Marxism to answer that question, organising our questions under the Nietcshzean term ‘will to power’.  "An appalling doctrine...There’s no evidence that power structures our relationships".

This divinity is further explained in Mc Gilchrist's interview [link]; how society has in the main lost contact with a 'divine' or 'sublime' concept of truth beauty and justice.

Blake's outlook on the rationally measured world was a recurrent theme pursued in his character URIZEN until his death.  Even though science has advanced civilization by technology, in 2020's we see just how far 'rational' science has come, all the way to nuclear weapons, bioweapons and biotech modifications; towards the planned alteration of humans. Medicine was hijacked by big oil.  We can imagine Blake today would be ranting about biotechnology and technocracy.

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