Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art

Paperback due out in September for a much cheaper price than what is listed on amazon. 

A decent review of the book is HERE.

Description

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling’s philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810.

Schelling’s philosophy of art is the ‘keystone’ of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling’s idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant’s and Fichte’s practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw’s careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.

Table of Contents

Introduction \ 1. Dogmatism, Criticism, and Art \ 2. From Nature-philosophy to the ‘Mythology of Reason’ \ 3. Artistic Activity and the Subversion of Transcendental Idealism \ 4. Substance and History: Absolute Idealism and Art \ 5. From Art and Nature to Freedom and Revelation \ Conclusion \ Bibliography \ Index

Thorne offers some remarks about political ontology and speculative realism

Thorne weights in with this post on political ontology and speculative realism.  Also, and thanks to jason/immanent transcendence once again, there is this post on Meillassoux by Thorne which is quite good.

Christian Thorne blogs very rarely but when he does, look out.  Nice reading, I am going to add his blog to my blogroll so I can touch base with his writing from time to time.

Varieties of Continental Thought & Religion Conference poster download

review of new Meillassoux book and commentary about talk

Adam Kotsko reviews the new Meillassoux book HERE.  HT to Jason/immanent transcendence for grabbing this first. 

The only thing that I would disagree with in the review is that "Meillassoux is an atheist."  That would be true if we were going by conventional definitions.  But in Meillassoux, nothing is conventional.

In the review many of Meillassoux's fans are identified as atheists - and atheists in the conventional sense.  Thus why they would shy from Meillassoux's theism, even if it is strange, weird, or speculative.  But, to keep things on a consistent plane: M is not a theist or atheist in any traditional sense of either term.  His theist followers aren't traditional theists, but his atheist followers are quite conventional atheists (what it usually means to be an atheist culturally, as in God talk is a waste of time).  M is in the former category, not the latter.  This means that there is alot you can do with Meillassoux and theism. With that minor point aside, I am excited to see where this goes.

My impressions of his talk hinted at a forthcoming speculative Christian process-numbering philosophy of sorts, where not only deity (and deity's Incarnation of a divine human) will empty its own reality of power, but that such power will be given up (abjured) in the act of conquering death and granting immortal life to the living and dead; thus an advent and new mass, given through the very release of power and self-sacrifice.  This is at once eucharistic and even more generally sacramental.

Something along the lines of this comment rings true:

[Meillassoux] mentioned, several times, that Mallarme’s goal was to reinvent the mass, once Christianity had passed. Or I suppose to reinvent Christianity? In any case, that seems to be Meillasoux’s aim as well, or his own aim attributed to Mallarme (as you brilliantly draw the Paul to Christ analogy). I suppose what strikes me is how, again and again, the European philosopher, even in his most avant-garde forms, keeps returning to Christianity.

Desmond at 45th Annual Villanova Theology Institute

neofinalism

Raymond Ruyer is a name that keeps popping up for me.  I first heard of him while reading Whitehead, and then Deleuze, and then randomly while listening to an interview with Hartshorne.

Ruyer's "neofinalism" is concerned with form and formation, insisting on purposiveness in a world of panpsychism and materialist vitalism.

Fractal Ontology blog gives us nice translation and paper propsal, and this article may also provide some background.  On the level of impact and importance, but also for just being interesting, a comparable figure vis-a-vis Whitehead, Deleuze, and friends would be Felix Ravaisson.

new book on Schelling and psychoanalysis

As I've said, I am currently writing an essay which sets out to argue that, there may be some benefit for those contemporary process theisms that take seriously the legacy of Schelling if, in the future of thinking about Schelling's God, a shift is made in emphasizing God's psychoanalytic aspects to emphasizing God's aesthetic aspects - that is, in looking at Schelling and the question of deity we ought to consider more carefully how the psychoanalytic is refracted within the aesthetic.  To this end I bring in some minor notes from Hegel and Schopenhauer as well.  

In the course of my research I found an interesting new book which seems like a "must read" for anyone interested in Schelling: McGrath's The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious.   Link HERE.

Contents 

Introduction. Tending the Dark Fire: The Boehmian Notion of Drive. The Night-side of Nature: The Early Schellingian Unconscious. The Speculative Psychology of Dissociation: The Later Schellingian Unconscious. Schellingian Libido Theory. Appendix: The Metaphysical Foundations of Schellingian Psychology. 

Description

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology: the concept of the unconscious.

McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant.  

Reviews

"Rarely has Schelling been written about with such clarity and passion: McGrath's careful research clinches the argument that the theosophical tradition of Boehme as received by Schellingian philosophy constitutes the root of the unconscious." - Paul Bishop, University of Glasgow, UK

 "This book deals with Schelling's theory of the unconscious and examines its complex, critical relations to psychoanalysis and psychology, showing that it constitutes a theory of mental health, an entire psychology, which stands on its own. Moreover, it demonstrates the centrality not only of theology but also of the esoteric tradition in Schelling's philosophy, and carefully traces the development of his thought in that essential context." - Professor James Bradley, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada

"McGrath's The Dark Ground of Spirit is among the most imaginative, original, at at times exhilarating, studies of Schelling to appear in recent years. Although he carefully charts the full historical trajectory, including the difficult late work on philosophical religion, of what he calls Schelling's "style" of thinking, he does so in order to carefully unpack the problem of the unconsciousness. This allows him to make a powerful case for a uniquely Schellingian style of psychoanalysis. McGrath's pursuit of what Schelling's student Schubert felicitously dubbed the 'night-side of nature" performs a delicate bi-directional hermeneutic. On the one hand, McGrath contextualizes the work of Schelling in relationship to Boehme, Baader, and other indispensable thinkers, giving us a fuller sense of Schelling's fundamental philosophical impulse. On the other hand, this is an expansive work of 'hermeneutical refraction,' carrying Schelling's 'thought forward into contexts that it does not and cannot anticipate.' Contrasting Schelling with Freud, Jung, and Lacan, McGrath discovers a 'theory of the libido in its own right." - Jason Wirth, Seattle University, Washington, USA

infinite density and aesthetics

Infinite Density and Aesthetics

 This semester I am using Fr. Robert Barron's Catholicism text and DVD series as part of my "Catholicism and Asian Religious Traditions" course that I am teaching (which also covers Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism).

Preparing for my lecture  tomorrow, on the life of prayer, I found a rather poignant reminder concerning not only the depths of the soul, but also the depths of all things, of the immanent creative life - the Holy Spirit - that is near and inside all things, and infinitely so.  This became apparent to me as I was reading Fr. Barron on Saint John of the Cross.

Reflecting on Saint John of the Cross, Fr. Barron discusses how John was a reformer and therefore unpopular and criticized.  Eventually for his criticisms and reforms, John was beaten and put under arrest by his Carmelite brothers. There in his cell John composed verse in his mind (he had neither pen nor paper).  One day, however, John escaped through a tiny window from his prison.

Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), Dali

In his verses, Saint John offers a powerful image of the soul.  Within us, John states, are unfathomable and great "infinite caverns" of intellect, will, and feeling.  These caverns are infinite precisely because they are ordered to God.  They are unfathomable because it is not until that one raises one's mind and heart to God that they would be filled, completely only in a "beatific vision," given in the afterlife.  The initial moment of raising of our heart and mind to God, however, is not a fuga mundi, not a "flight from the world" John said, but it is rather a looking into the world.

How this happens occurs in two steps, as outlined in Saint John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul.  First, during the "dark night of the senses" one peers into the senses seeking to empty them of their exterior content, in order to traverse "inside."  Second comes "the dark night of the soul" when one "empties oneself" traveling yet even further inside the soul - preparing oneself to be a conduit for God, to receive the gift that God wants to give.

As with Saint Teresa of Avila, the "interior" here is a fortress, an "inner castle" - the innermost and deepest chamber that may only be filled in union with God, and it is only in beatific vision with God that the deepest aching of the heart will ever be satisfied (Edith Stein, otherwise known as Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, a student of Husserl, described the soul this way as well and wrote beautiful letters and phenomenological essays concerning the soul as an inner-chamber that houses an "infinity" within itself).

Dali, said that his painting (above) came to him in a "cosmic dream" where he gained insight into "an atom's nucleus" - inside the object he saw the "entire universe, Christ!"  The atom's shell-like surface is translucent, and so we may be drawn back into to its center point where the internal-external divide is dissolved within an infinitely deep center. Thus: the intuition of the infinite exterior (life) is to be found within all interiors.  "Entering into" another, or being "entered into" by another, seems to be another meaning of ecstasis.  An ecstasis through empathy: all of nature is ecstatic, all of nature is empathic.

Saint Teresa's ecstasy was similar.  A "transverberation," as she called it: inter-vibrancy.  For her, a castle was a keep, a place of safety and power, giving one shelter from all storms.  Yet, the inside, the radical interior, which always leads to another level of the chamber, always withdraws as we approach it.  But, there always is a trace.  One thus senses the infinite density within this realm of the interior, and one senses that this infinite density must be had by all things as divinely created beings.  Within the glassy surface of all things there is depth.

Now, as my research these days into Schelling progresses, my theory is that the psychoanalyst need not necessarily look further and further into the human person in order to flesh out the soul, the infinitely dense interior.  Rather, perhaps, we may turn to an aesthetics of sublimity on the outside, in that one that may probe into a radical material exterior in order to engage the spirit as well.  Does that exterior, too, withdraw from availing its sublime gift of the spirit?  May nature "out there" reveal soul, spirit?  Allow me come back to this idea in just a moment.

Fr. Barron writes of the spiritualists who write about this theme of the center, the "divine still point around which the self properly revolves."  In my own "speculative naturalism" this divine still point is in each object of nature, the center of each monadic perspective-point: a soul.  As Teresa's interior castle indicates, the things of this world may stand as places of evocation, each with their own interior castle, each with their own receding inner chambers.  The "inside" of those chambers are revealed through semiotic aesthetic expression to the other as mediated traces, yet are also immanently intuited as a feeling, a feeling out of and intuition "into" another soul or perspective, another deep world all of its own.

The above suggests that the human soul may rest confidently in Christ and find a place in Him wherein the mystical marriage unfolds.  But, for as much as Christ is in those who seek Him, those who seek refuge in Him, and lean on Him, the Word also became flesh, and so we are also in all partakers in God's body being one with the Holy Spirit as it is enfleshed in the Church and in the world.  Thus Christ is part of the mystical body of God with the Holy Spirit, Christ as that body's head. Or, in Plato's organic conception: there is the "body" of God, Christ the logos speaking God's sentience.  Or, from the Catholic Church: the church of God is God's mystical body with Christ as its head.  A panentheism of love (Hegel), or a cosmic body (Plato, Schelling).

With these topologies in mind, and wishing to turn toward the exterior, that great plane of immanence and the body of the virtual power constituting it, let me now return to my earlier thought and entertain for a moment what Emerson tells us with respect to nature being God's "Great Church" (nature being exterior and universal, being catholic).  The spirit is also the exterior nature, that which helps to construct the vital living material of the Great Church.

“Nature is my church, philosophy and poetry my scripture.”  - Emerson

“It [Christianity] is not yet one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”  - Emerson

 I would like to, in the future, suggest that the supposed "fleshing out of [the] soul" in psychoanalysis, being an interior turn for most, is also possible in a turn toward the exterior material realm of the natural world, where such divisions unite and dissolve through the rhythms of nature "naturing."  Psychoanalysis and aesthetics join hands, then. Psychoanalysis, through a peculiar speculative aesthetic moment, becomes nonhuman, perhaps even suprahuman, focusing on the enfleshment of spirit; the ontological incarnating of nature: a revealing within materiality an infinite density of generative condition, or, the depth dimension of the spiritual pole - tragic and manic aspects of nature's God longing for wholeness and completion, in short: deity as it pertains in its innermost essence to natura naturans. The revelations within natura naturata. Speculative aesthetics as spiritual-nature revelation.

Would this result, then, outline the contours of a truly philosophical religion?: aesthetics being its crown - a result that Schelling and the early German romantics and idealists were seeking as they wrestled with an analysis of consciousness, nature, and (the unconscious drive of) spirit?

###

couldn't have said it better myself

While polemical, Adam seems to be hitting the nail on the head HERE.  Highlights are,

Heidegger and Derrida are out, and with them the various approaches to philosophical discourse that proceed via commentary. Suspicion of system-building is out, and accordingly Hegel is reemerging as a major point of reference — and one must have very firm convictions about the proper reading of Hegel, dismissing vast swathes of the existing traditional commentary. More generally, caution and qualification seem to be out. We must boldly speculate into new realms, it seems, having developed our own axiomatic ontology by the age of 23...

I am unwilling to speculate out into the air, without the guardrail of working through the thoughts of those who have gone before me. The world will have to look elsewhere for a bold new form of jargon purporting to capture the essence of the things themselves.

I am, in short, an old man now. 

A few weeks back there was a kerfuffle in the blogosphere about "tradition" work.  As usual we got the same old response of "Saying that our speculative work has been done before doesn't contribute to the debate!" (a response that I have grown more than annoyed in hearing).

Absolutely, let's go beyond the commentary - let's go beyond name-dropping here and there or resurrecting the dead to do our work for us.  BUT, let's call a spade a spade.  When what you are doing is basically concept for concept in a new language game the same exact moves of philosopher x and y before you, then admit it. 

What's funny about Adam's response is that it's true. I enjoy all of Hegel, Derrida, and Heidegger.  I also enjoy Whitehead, Hartshorne, Bergson, and Peirce.  Consider me an old man, consider me unfashionable.

Back to reading my unfashionable and irrelevant Gilles Deleuze.  He is "just so 2009" you know.

Hartshorne's Creative Experiencing, Review Part 2

(Back to Part One of this review, HERE.)

Chapter Nine, “Theism and Dual Transcendence” unpacks the idea that God is an individual, but one that is not “properly a particular."  In other words, God is properly a Transcendent individual.  But what does this mean?  Hartshorne answers that, God must be “[a] being radically superior to all other beings” (Hartshorne, 93).  But is there more to this definition?  The superiority of God, we are told, is not a relation of infinity, for example, to nothing – but a relation to the finite.  Not a relation of transcendence to an immanence that is so absolute that the relation does not hold.  Relation, rather, must always be positive and relative.  In other words, “[A]ll actuality is finite and relative, and…although the primordial nature of God is absolute, infinite, and deficient in actuality, God’s consequent nature is actual and finite, and is ‘in flux’ and ‘always moving’” (Hartshorne, 94).  This means that the Transcendent God’s superiority is “di-polar,” where “di-polarity” means relative-absolute, contingent-necessary, complex-simple, temporal-nontemporal, concrete-abstract, finite-infinite, possible-impossible, dependent-independent, and social-nonsocial.  Thus, God’s particularity proper falls under the principle of dual Transcendence.  Underscoring this principle in a universe of creative freedom, where God, too, is a creative individual (whose creative act and knowledge of what is created is forever increasing), Hartshorne concludes that, “Necessary is only that there be some world or other, and some appropriate divine knowledge of whatever world there is.  All the rest is contingent” (Hartshorne, 101).

Other than panpsychism, Hartshorne is also well known for rehabilitating the ontological argument – especially as Anselm conceived it.  In Chapter Ten, “The Ontological Argument and the Meaning of Modal Terms,” Hartshorne echoes the likes of Norman Malcolm and Alvin Plantinga in asserting that modal terms such as contingent, possible, and necessary may adequately be applied to a coherent idea of God.  As Hartshorne puts it, “I maintain that Anselm was literally correct; the ‘nonexistence of God’ is a phrase with no corresponding coherent thought or possible reference” (Hartshorne, 110).  The chapter explores in modal logic Hartshorne’s updating of the ontological argument and weaves in the notion that a becoming God is just a supremely necessary as one thought to be “pure actuality.”  We are told that not until the distinction between “existence” and “actuality” is made clear can the ontological argument achieve what it sets out to do.

Chapter Eleven, “Categories, Transcendentals, and Creative Experiencing,” distinguishes (in a Scholastic manner) categories from transcendentals.  “A category is a concept applicable to every being except God.  A transcendental is a concept applicable to every being including God” (Hartshorne, 113).  Hartshorne accepts the five transcendentals, but thinks that nothing in the transcendentals involves becoming, even as a possibility.  The essay sets out to challenge the idea of immutable perfection and to show how becoming applies to the supreme being, God.   Hartshorne parses out the ontology behind a “becoming God” and how that God is “actual” but also “existent” in different senses of being.  In “the logic of immanence and Transcendence” we find that becoming possibility means being creative.  God is the supreme being who possesses the supreme amount of creativity and freedom, the creatures lesser so.  Instead of “being” Hartshorne thus prefers to say that God is a “creative experiencing.”  

Chapter Twelve is titled “The Higher Levels of Creativity: Wieman’s Theory.”  This chapter argues that “neither creative novelty nor value can be totally lacking, or at zero, in any concrete actuality…how far above zero the novelty or the value may be is left open” (Hartshorne, 129).  For Hartshorne, all value is a felt harmony.  Even in intense suffering there is a display of some value.  The value of harmonious feelings is proportionate to their intensity, where intensity is established by “the depth and variety of the contrasts in the data” (Hartshorne, 129).  All of experience is value, and all of experience is a creation of some sort of value.  With this in mind, Hartshorne continues to explain that how creative value is added ultimately involves a social relation, dependent upon “the extent to which we open ourselves to the influence of others….[in] ‘creative interchange’” (Hartshorne, 131).  The main proponent of such a theory, in addition to the likes of Berdyaev, Whitehead, Bergson, and others – all whose moral imperative was, “Be creative and foster creativity in others”- was Henry Nelson Wieman, a figure whose career involved for the main teaching in the department of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (that department known for its specialization in process philosophy, pragmatism, and phenomenology).  

By creative Wieman meant a mode of “exchanging thoughts and feelings” which produces rich experience and which tends to “optimalize” the capacities of the participants in the exchange.  In many ways this theory resembles Nicholas Rescher’s: a creative reality is the way it is because that is the best (metaphysical optimalism of creative value, or axiogenesis).  The uniqueness of Wieman’s theory is the fact that it takes creative exchange into the realm of culture and religion, focusing on the relationship between human culture and God.  Wieman’s belief is that “The aim of life should be the glory of God,” where what we observe in the creative capacities of the human is God (Hartshorne, 131).  Hartshorne builds on this and states that, taken as ultimate category and ground, creativity is divine in the sense that both creature and Creator add to nature and culture. In the creative life there is always symmetry: some form of mutual creativity and spiritual exchange.

This theme comprises the concluding chapter, “Politics and the Metaphysics of Freedom.”  In it, political freedom simply means that “the behavior of citizens be protected against determination by the rulers” (Hartshorne, 137).  Here I see Hartshorne raising the shield of a process-theory of freedom against the likes of deterministic political and social philosophical systems, such as those found in Hegel or Spinoza.  A truly “social” conception of freedom must demand that God not rule in such a way that would determine or even coerce the creatures if freedom is to be preserved.  Freedom, an act of  creative addition of value to the universe, is politically a metaphysics involving more or less determinative behavior, true, however it is Hartshorne’s thesis that behavior must never be totally determined, that is, controlled, by those (or even a being) whose power ultimately exercises some total or absolute influence over all others. 

Despite the challenge of Hartshorne’s at-times difficult style of writing, the essays’ arguments are compelling.  This book truly is a testament to Hartshorne’s metaphysical genius, and Creative Experiencing is the perfect capstone to a trilogy of books that outlines the essentials of one of the twentieth-century’s greatest process-relational philosophers.  

 I would recommend this book, and the other two in the trilogy, especially to those looking to expand their knowledge of process-philosophy vis-à-vis studies in Whitehead, or more generally to anyone simply looking to master the essentials of Hartshorne.

the magic of the real

Die Schere #27
When a "vision" takes place, the afflicted is assailed by that vague sensation which is felt by a man, who, upon returning from an excursion, is unable to give any account thereof. At the time, the vision could have passed as a dream - its realization makes one suspect that more was in play.

The scissors, appearing before only as image, can cut - this is uncanny.Perhaps memory conserves only a secondary particular, as does a note in the margin of a page whose text is smudged. Has more taken place? A similar mood can follow a heavy inebriation: the drinker does not know what drove him to it. In any case, a tie has been made - he has found his way back to his person and his norms. Drinking from the Well of Mimir is taboo.

Die Schere #29

The pre-visionary thus attended twice his own funeral, once while standing at the window, then in reality. The  relation has interlocked, the scissors of Atropos, at first seen in its potential, then took effect in actu - the scissors cut. But the visionary is hurt no more.

Second sight does not open a panoramic view, as if a curtain were ripped apart.

Instead, it is like squinting through a keyhole. The perspective is quite limited, it is mostly trifles, like a toppled inkwell, that meet the eye. However, such accidental details are perceived with great exactness. This might be explained by assuming a slight disturbance, caused perhaps by a tiny screw in the intricate mechanism of perception becoming loose - luckily merely for a moment.

E. Juenger, The Sheers (Die Schere)

What is the spirit world and what is its relation to this life?  Does the natural reflect up from within its own depths the spiritual and magical?  We are presented with options concerning the one nature and its sheered existence (Juenger).

Schelling (in his text, Clara, or On Nature's Connection to the Spirit World) offers insight into our options:

1. The spirit world enters this life
2. The two worlds are kept completely separate
3. There is interaction between this life and the next
4. we may learn about the next life from carefully looking at this one

Another question must follow.  In what way might the human be a point between these two worlds, a Schere or scissor cutting them apart?  We are not directly connected to the spiritual world, but do progress toward the spiritual through our death.  The bands of a paper cut into a moebius strip are hemmed by our perception.  

Steroscopically, the senses may zero in and unveil the magical quality of the world - the spiritual entering in through and interacting with this life.  Dreams are the direct testament to such a revelation presented before the inner senses, although others have developed the optics which, under certain conditions, perceive the truth of the revelation directly.  Whether or how this may be communicated is another story.



Novelist Ernst Juenger (1885-1998), friend of Martin Heidegger (and equally loathed because of his politics) is the phenomenologist of dreams, a "psychonaut."  Opening a new view of the everyday allowed him to perceive the spiritual alive in it.  Among the realities found in this new, deeper layer of reality, is the reality of liberation: freedom from the body.  Juenger's politicization of this inner pillar of freedom was called "the Anarch"; a figure whose religious orientation was psychical and Eastern, a figure whose metaphysics was libertarian and ecological.  Thus a unique prototype, the Anarch has the ability to "shape-shift" according to circumstance: the ultimate figure of freedom.  At the end of his life Juenger appears to have aligned beliefs about this prototype to an order whose aesthetic and spiritual ranking he seemed to confide in the most, the Catholic church (although Juenger never just "gave up" his freedom to the Church, if anything this was a respectful nod to the order, an acknowledgment of its spiritual aesthetics).

Juenger also found a spiritual freedom in the forest, evidenced in his novel Eumeswil, where he then develops a figure whom he titles, "the Forest Fleer."  Juenger's celebrated essay Der Waldgang ("The Forest Fleer") develops the theme of inner emigration, a transition from Anarch to Forest Fleer - the retreat to a spiritual zone found within the forest which is also a retreat into the self.  There, in the forest, there in dreams, we communicate with the dead.  We see the power of our inner freedom and the magic of the real.  The transition is from Anarch to Forest Fleer: the prototype drops its mask and reveals to the world the power of its inner freedom.  There in the forest the last stand is made.

I copy below a not-so-bad  translation of an article written about Juenger referencing several of the themes outline above.

Ernst Junger. Warrior - Psychonaut - Anarch

credit: from Science.ORF.at 13.04.2012

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) is polarized like no other intellectual of the 20th Century. They called him a propagandist of the war and described his poems as "Mr. Reiter's prose." Nevertheless, the German poet-philosopher for some represents an appeal like that of the '68-movement.

He was "a kind of disciple to life, surrounded by the aura of intellectual obscenity," such as former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once remarked. A report on drug-induced "paradise" and "human salamanders" is found in the work of Ernst Jünger.

Juenger re-read

To sweep the widespread stereotypes about Juenger aside, the philosopher Gerd B. Achenbach in early April held a multi-day seminar held in the Swabian monastery Heiligkreuztal. The intention of Achenbach was to undertake some investigations into the multi-faceted, subtle work of controversial the artist-philosopher, Ernst Juenger.

You should show that Juenger may well be regarded for a philosopher, if  - as Achenbach - implies, you are not confused with footnote philology and academic term papers. In an interview with science.ORF.at, Achenbach referred to Juenger's "strategy", namely looking to the phenomena and activities of daily life that are hardly noticed as a starting point for theoretical point of view excursions. They lead Juenger into "the pathless darkness of mystery."

A new view of the everyday

Documents of these expeditions into the mystery find themselves in the Juenger's book, "The Adventurous Heart. Figures and Capricchios". His aim was to wrest the surface of things and uncover a deeper meaning of reality with new or hidden dimensions. His goal was also to undermine the reality of the very means of art.

Much like the surrealist writers Juenger drew a new perspective on the everyday, which opened up surprising perspectives, "A falling to the ground of reality's tissue may be the start of an Archimedean point from which the poet [Juenger] sets in motion a whole world and opens up a world," wrote the writer Guillaume Apollinaire.

Stereoscopic sensuality

The means to transform reality is, from the stereoscopic view, to be discovered next to the usual perception of everyday objects in their magical quality, "as if an observant was controlled from the mysterious itself".

Stereoscopically one perceives words as Juenger did, to win from the same object simultaneously two sensory qualities, and indeed - this is what is important - by a single sensory organ. As an example he cites the cinnamon scent of clove, "of which not only the smell is aromatic, but also has the taste of a spicy quality."

Discover the magic of the real

The stereoscopic view stages a simultaneous layering of realities, impressions, memories and dreams, it leads to an enhanced perception of the object world, which thus takes on a magical quality.

Here, too, are echoes of Surrealist writers such as André Breton, where the stereoscopic gaze is the place of the "automatic writing" - translated, the letter automatically takes place. Artistic expeditions would expand the range of factuality and reality into the realm of the numinous, the mysterious, the wonderful advance that defies logical and rational access.

    "Often it seems to us that the sense of depth can be created only from the surface, the rainbow-colored skin in the world, where the sight moves us urgently. Then again, this colorful pattern is created solely from letters and symbols by which the depths talk to us through their secrets. " (Ernst Jünger)

The shortcomings of the administered world

The stereoscopic view is trying to evoke a sphere which was displaced in the Enlightenment by the "disenchantment of the world". Such refers to the paranoid delusion of the Enlightenment era, which tries to explain all phenomena and define all rationally - "The geometry of reason obscures a diabolical mosaic, sometimes shockingly alive world".

The will of the realm of the numinous, the wonderful world, was disenchanted into a flattened world - spoken by those who celebrate on the weekends in the supermarket's buying frenzy, - a substitute for the loss of the Saints. Jünger's critique of the one-dimensional life-world that resembles the life of lemurs, meets with the analysis of Theodor W. Adorno.

The parade intellectuals of the "Frankfurt School" deplored "the damaged life" of the individual who will be sacrificed by the late capitalist industrial society on the altar of profit maximization. For Adorno, this form of society "is completely wrong," the "hell of human existence" was a total loss of the individual, demoted to "Lurch".

The Doors of Perception

Many were convinced that the use of drugs also opens up access to the area of ​​the numinous - beyond the usual bleak one-dimensional world. With the use of hashish, opium, mescaline, cocaine or LSD, Juenger designed singular experiments where created a sense of that archaic phenomena of ecstasy, which were usually hidden in the process of Western civilization .

High on drugs, there was the unexpected, "wholly other", which was already described enthusiastically by the English author Thomas de Quincey as divine. He spoke of a God-like state that occurs after the ingestion of opium. This condition is also experienced after taking LSD, which Juenger shared with Albert Hofmann, who took the substance which he had created (Hofmann, a chemist).

In the book "Approaches and drug intoxication," Juenger said LSD was a possible access to the "divine which moves everything." Back in 1949 he had presented in his novel "Heliopolis" the spiritual adventurer Antonio Peri, in addition to his everyday life wrought by the hallucinogenic drug "artificial paradises". This "artificial paradises" now promised "good news, eleusinisches light." You can, however, find out that these experiences- "turn out to be mirages, a pretend the true oases, but without a closer reality".

Regarding the use of hallucinogenic drugs, Juenger wrote, "Once is enough, you will have gained an idea of ​​the dimensions within which they move as a blind man once plumbed the depths, the yawns among the planks of their boat."

Waldgänger and Anarch

When thinking - and living Juenger propagated the "forest transition" or "retreat into the forest" - he who defies the world and manages the consumer frenzy. The "Forest Fleer" is an outsider of civilization, one who situates their self at the edges, and is very skeptical of the normativity of common sense, who always knows that people are not "good."

The radical aversion to socially binding norms affects not only the late-capitalist society, but is directed against any religious or ideological coercion corsets. The "Forest Fleer" is simultaneously a "Psychonaut", which always seeks out extreme conditions in order to expand consciousness. He is also "Anarch", not an anarchist, who still has the illusion of being able to change the world rather than one's self.

The "Anarch" refers to Max Stirner's "unique one" who has made his cause on nothing. He defies not only every act but also any public articulation of his only developed inner secret thought:

    "When "Anarch" I am determined to get involved with anything, but not taking anything too seriously - but not in a nihilistic way - as a man's land is between tides, eyes, and ears." (Eumeswil)