This site honors the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)--creative thinker, scholar, and beloved teacher. It explores the modes of speech-- command, exclamation, celebration, reportage--as crucial to the soul in its pilgrimage through time. Welcome to the marriage of Speech and Thought.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Apology for a Long Absence
I have been away for a long time, but Rosenstock 's insights and inspirations continue to form a substratum of my thoughts. In considering this current election season, for example, it occurred to me that Hillary Rodham Clinton represents such a "black hole" of criminality, arrogance, deception, egotism and manipulative ability (I am reluctant even to use that word) that it is as if morality itself had entirely disappeared. "Morality" has gone unconscious. It has sunk beneath the waves of modernity, each wave representing a successive attack on tradition, manners, ethics, religion, common sense, and even language itself.
There is an excellent article on "The New Dictatress" in today's Lew Rockwell.com website--excellent. About the Clinton Crime Family.
Well, the reader may well ask, is Donald Trump any better? In order to understand this problem, I go back to something the spiritual philosopher Rene Guenon (1886-1951) wrote in his master treatise, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. He is talking about the decline of the transcendent Intellect -- which in Rosenstockian terms, would be akin to the developed faculty of grammar -- into 'rationalism,' materialism, mechanism, etc. -- in other words, the decline of Quality into Quantity. It is a movement perceivable throughout human history, according to Guenon, but it has accelerated since the so-called "enlightenment." We perceive a deterioration of the ability to grasp moral realities; the moral in a sense becomes the repressed, the put-aside. Guenon remarks, if I remember correctly, conceivably the process of deterioration or entropy could proceed forever, but that the real energy of negative beings--devils, if you will, would demand steps beyond mere deterioration. There, he says, you find not just deterioration: not merely the fall from a moral-spiritual-and physical whole, but an actual inversion. It is what the Christian revelation calls the anti-Christ.
I don't know if Hillary Clinton is actually anti-Christ, or a version of same. But I dare to call her an inverted soul, a soul from which all that is simple, moral and good has been expelled. Donald Trump has certain characteristics of deteriorated or careless thinking at times. But he is human, recognizably so. And he is persevering and not to be intimidated, which I think is all to the good.
We are being challenged to refine our concepts and perceptions of the bad, of evil. It is not merely 'one thing," but has gradations and levels. But we will not be allowed to wallow in the freedom of choice for very long. Already this election is a sign that the United States has been ignoring moral imperatives for far too long.
We are at the brink. In my stark view, if Hillary Clinton is elected, we may never be able to choose anything ever again.
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