The Mazeppist

A Transgressive Transcendentalist manifesto.

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Location: Dar ul-Fikr, Colorado, United States

Part Irish, part Dervish, ecstatic humanist, critical Modernist, transgressive Transcendentalist.

Saturday, August 31, 2019

Amor Vacui



Leszek Kolakowski's Metaphysical Horror is a quixotic attempt on the part of a modern philosopher to find an "answer" to "the eternal silence of the infinite spaces" that so troubled Pascal.

There is no "answer" to the horror vacui; there are only responses--and how one responds reveals her quality as nothing else can.

Pace Aristotle, it is not Nature that abhors a vacuum, but the human being. Nature has nooks and crannies everywhere. Entropy is the law.



Sunday, August 25, 2019

Confession



I will confess to writing much more off-line these days than on. Indeed, this Blog and its sibloglings have been, from the beginning, more of the "notes to self" genre than a self-conscious attempt to write for an audience. Or, perhaps, cyber-graffiti.

What audience I have been able to attract to my blogs has always been modest, which troubles me not at all. Wrapping up a book manuscript and continuing to fill my personal and scholarly archives with pages of lines have taken me away from contributing regularly to these cyber-notes. I find that activity more personally and professionally fulfilling. And I work harder on those projects. Most of what I post on my blogs is off-the-cuff.

Those who stumble upon this blog and are familiar with Chuang-tzu's story about the "useless tree" will understand my version of Transcendentalism better than anyone else...

I assume that I will continue to post on-line in a desultory fashion into the future. But there may be lengthy periods of silence going forward. A Transgressive Transcendentalist, a party or sect of one, muttering to himself within eye-shot of the bored or curious, pushing no products, with unfashionable opinions on almost every subject that he feels moved to remark, has little to offer anyone these days.

But this is news to no one.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

The Tasks That (Still) Await Us



"Kierkegaard and Marx: these living-dead men condition our anchorage and institute themselves, now vanished, as our future, as the tasks that wait us."

~ Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, 169.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

A Message From John & Yoko



Thursday, August 08, 2019

William Blake - Albion

Read!



Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Tongues Of Fire