John Steppling

"The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness." Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) “… there is no way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic." Friedrich Schiller (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794) "Unity, as the avant-gardists are aware, is always at some level a political concept." Terry Eagleton (London Review of Books, Nov. 2020) “Democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e. it is an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against … [Read more...]

"Neither happiness, nor safety and security, nor even material comfort has been realized. In few periods of human history have so many millions of persons been so unhappy, so insecure, so hungry and destitute, as at the present time, all the way from China to Western Europe." Pitirim Sorokin (The Crisis of Our Age, 1941) “Without a doubt the preeminent reason that [Adorno’s] work must now be of vital concern in the United States is for what precisely can be learned from a nation that has so palpably entered primitive times.” Robert Hullot-Kentor (Things Beyond Resemblance) "For this cultural climate also forecloses, as a matter of political necessity, any attempt to notice realities … [Read more...]

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) "We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-theworld into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable." Byung Chul-Han (The Disappearance of Rituals) "But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction." Paul Bowles (Conversations with Bowles) "We are the last, first people." Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael) The fires across Southern … [Read more...]

"And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, [I] the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, [and] will speak unto him in a dream." Numbers 12:6 " He asked me what sort of patients they were. I answered that in most cases they suffered from mystic delusions. After reflecting for a moment, Firth said to me that it was obvious from a logical point of view that, if in their delusions they were in contact with mystic figures, they could not accept my presence, since I was simply a human being." Salomon Resnik (Logics of Madness) "It is my experience that in psychoanalytic writing, as in poetry, a concentration of words and meaning draws on the power of … [Read more...]

"Advertising power houses use psychoanalytic techniques under the rubric of “theater of the mind,” and only the marginalized think to argue with success." Jonathan Beller (Cinematic Mode of Production) "In the case of the Sagrada Família, being a man with such a powerful imagination, Gaudí was constantly making changes to it as the building progressed. They’ve started work on it again now, adding new things as it nears completion, and it will probably end up looking completely different. The man from whose imagination it grew has passed on, so I think it’d be best not to work on it any more but to leave it unfinished." Ando Tadao (Art It) “What is represented in ideology is therefore … [Read more...]

"We are all interpreters, and the world is our text. We interpret to survive, for although the world is our text, it is not an open book." George Stade (NY Times, review of Frank Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy) "Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ … [Read more...]

“It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.” This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality.” Sigmund Freud (Introduction to Civilization and its Discontents. Referring to letter from Rolland) “ Arabic readers would have been familiar with through the two adaptations of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex that appeared in 1949 by playwrights Tawfiq al-Hakim and Ali Ahmad Bakathir, as well as the first scholarly Arabic translation in 1939 by Egyptian belle lettrist Taha Husayn. Egyptian dramatist al-Hakim’s version is … [Read more...]

"In the beginning may have been the Uroboros: male and female, father and mother, mother and child, ego-id and outside world in one. But the Uroboros has busted a long time ago; the distinctions and divisions are our reality—real with all its symbols. In the light of its own possibilities, it may well be called a cave, and our life in it dream or death." Herbert Marcuse (Love Mystified; A Critique of Norman O. Brown, Commentary Magazine) "Actaeon; alien horns added to his forehead; the dogs that sated themselves in the blood of their own master; all for the sin of seeing. Cur aliquid vidi? Why did I have to see something?" Norman O. Brown (Apocalypse; Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, … [Read more...]