The burning question is: What dark impulse lies behind our invention of mathematics, of logic? Even to ask, is a descent into The Abyss.

“Why go to inordinate lengths to break a man’s spirit if you can mold him so that he has no spirit to begin with?”

From The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett, in reference to Soviet behavioral scientists and their efforts to stop dissent before it starts. But also resonates with eerie familiarity in today’s American pharmaceutical culture…

It is not just a question of looking at the so-called “individual” as an organic unity, but of looking at that organic unity within the larger organic unity of Being. This goes against the entire history of our culture; we are defined by our historical addiction to analysis, looking at phenomenon in artificial isolation, to the detriment of Being and ultimately of ourselves.

“We are the children of an enlightenment, one which we would like to preserve; but we can do so only by making a pact with the old goddess.”

from Irrational Man by William Barrett

“Man masters beings, but Being- the open region in which both subject and object stand out and are thus not divided- is forgotten.”

Irrational Man, William Barrett

“By detaching the figure from the ground the object could be made to emerge into the daylight of human consciousness; but the sense of the ground recedes, becomes invisible, is forgotten.”

Irrational Man, William Barrett

“Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.”

Martin Heidegger

It is our destiny as human beings to pose the question of our own meaning, and through this the meaning of all things. I believe this is the will behind evolution itself: this will to evolution is referential to a will beyond ourselves, and this “beyond ourselves”  is an arena we have barley begun to set foot in. To get there reason must be used to transcend itself.

Not just my mind but my whole being turns around this one point: That since the invention of reason we have been living in an artificial world we could control, and that this world, just at this point in our history, has become uninhabitable, and this is why we all fear, collectively, that we are losing our minds. But we are, in fact, simply creating the future.

“Anyone who would make the descent into the lower regions runs the risk of succumbing to what the primitives call ‘the perils of the soul’- the unknown Titans that lie within, below the surface of ourselves.”

William Barrett Irrational Man