Category: de umbris idæarum
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Clarification
I got a bit lost in my explorations in the previous post and feel like I didn’t fully explain what Jünger was getting at with his talk of automatons. The point is that in sin, in vice, man illegitimately subordinates the higher to the lower, disrupts the cosmic order. We desire some thing, some good which […]
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Why We Fight
Before continuing my now-continuously delayed exploration of The Failure of Technology, I wanted to take a moment to delve into the quote from Ernst Jünger I cited in the last post: During World War I we confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines. In the meantime, things have gotten more complex. We […]
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An Additional Consideration on the Death of the Author
There is a distinction between a classic a work that is merely very good. The classic unfolds. It offers us a glimpse into the inexhaustible depths of Being. Concretely, every time you turn to the Iliad or Dante or Emma you find something new, and it is the exhilaration of that discovery, the sense of it unfolding within […]
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Creation and Literary Form
Scripture and Creation are the pre-eminent revelations of God, or rather the pre-eminent revelations that aren’t confined to a historical moment, i.e. the Incarnation and the various theophanies that have occurred throughout time. Creation can thus be understood as a sort of book in its own right. As such, there is a surface level of […]
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Death of the Author
The death of the author is akin to the rejection of God’s immanent role in creation, of the nature of creation as a reflection of its Author. How can we say that it is not the hand of the creator that guides the work? Choosing our own interpretation without reference to the Creator is sin, placing […]
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Between Two Worlds
Key to understanding the self is the recognition that we are mediating beings, interposed between two worlds, spiritual and material, infinite and temporal. Created as we are in imago Dei, we mirror the hypostatic union of apparent opposites. This union is the root of our despair but also the grounds of our greatness. The possibility […]
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Emma and the Philosophers
Fragments on reading Austen’s Emma through the lens of various philosophers. Emma and Kierkegaard Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Kierkegaard stresses that the second half of the command is just as important as the first: love of neighbor is grounded in and equal to (to exceed would be idolatry) our love of ourselves. […]
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Socrates vs. Dionysus
Harrison argues that the narrative, or a narrative, of the Symposium is Socrates’s triumph over Dionysus. The Symposium takes place at a Dionysian celebration of a Dionysian celebration, an after-party of the tragic festival. Here Socrates shows himself unaffected by wine, rebuffs and baffles (while entrancing) Alcibiades who comes from without in the form of […]
Dan Yingst 