John Steppling

“Yes, the sun surely is the symbol of the center of consciousness, it is the principle of consciousness because it is light. When you understand a thing, you say: “I see”—and in order to see you need light. The essence of understanding, of cognition, has always been symbolized by the all-seeing of the sun, the wisdom or omniscience of the sun that moves over the earth and sees everything in its light.” Carl Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939) "Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood", so total that they bring to his … [Read more...]

"..in what follows I argue that a great deal will be attained if we can begin to raise (or even to see) the question of Greek Bronze as a question. " Babette Babich (Greek Bronze: Holding a Mirror to Life) “Of course, the fairy-tale world, especially as a magical one, no longer belongs to the present. How can it mirror our wish projections against a background that has long since disappeared? Or, to put it a better way: How can the fairy tale mirror our wish-projections other than in a totally obsolete way? Real kings no longer even exist. The atavistic and simultaneously feudal-transcendental world from which the fairy tale stems and to which it seems to be tied has most certainly … [Read more...]

"Of course, for the person exercising bad faith, it is still a matter covering up an unpleasant truth, or of presenting some pleasant error as the truth. In appearance therefore, bad faith has the structure of a lie. But what changes everything is that in bad faith it is from myself that I am concealing the truth." Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness) "The Oedipus myth, so fundamental to the psychoanalytic conception of the human dilemma , is an endlessly twisting labyrinth revolving around the question of whether it is better to know or not to know, better to be known or not to be known. If Oedipus had known that the man with whom he entered into battle on the road from Delphi was … [Read more...]

"Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments as soon as they are written.” Friedrich Schlegel (Philosophical Fragments) "Then one day you wake up and your seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway.You begin to notice the black doorway is always there. At the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass." Anne Carson (lecture 'Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind', London Review of Books) “Only a word book makes it possible to hold the student responsible…because it provides them with a reliable tool for … [Read more...]

" Gandhi was also convinced that Hitler had some sort of twin brother. But this was not Stalin, who, still in September 1946, was considered by the Indian leader to be a “great man” at the top of a “great people.” No, Hitler’s twin brother was ultimately Churchill, at least judging from two interviews that Gandhi had given in April 1941 and April 1946 respectively: “I assert that in India we have Hitlerian rule, however disguised it may be in softer terms.” And further: “Hitler was Great Britain’s sin.’ Hitler is only an answer to British imperialism.” Domenico Losurdo (Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?) “ ...a good book is a good action. It has more than the force of … [Read more...]

“...argue as much as [one] like[s], but obey!” Immanuel Kant (An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?) "Paranoia in an enlarged social form is the central imaginative concern of American literature since World War II." John Farrell (Freud's Paranoid Quest) “In a certain sense the people are right to believe in spirits, indeed they must”. Rudolph Kleinpaul (The Living and the Dead in Folk Belief, Religion and Legend, 1898) “...as soon as I speak I am betrayed by the situation. I am betrayed by the person who is listening to me, quite simply because I am speaking. I am betrayed by the choice of words.” Jean Genet (Interview with Hubert Fichte, 1977) “Monumental … [Read more...]

"And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not." John 2-8 "In the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which … [Read more...]

"I learn by going where I have to go." Theodore Roethke (The Waking) "Is there an instinctual drive to amass wealth? There appears to be no possible doubt about this. We meet this drive every day and in widely varying degrees in different people. It can assume pathological forms, for example, in the miser, who in order to become rich foregoes the satisfaction of other more rational needs, or in the person who strives to become wealthy in order to ward off a fear of impoverishment and the like. The drive has normal forms; indeed a person in whom it is completely lacking will in our society be considered abnormal." Otto Fenichel (The Drive to Amass Wealth) “Hate America?” he said, “I … [Read more...]