Tag: Arthur Schopenhauer
Children of a lesser god: Gnostic elements in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts
The discovery of an entire "Gnostic library" in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, revealed to the world the "cosmic pessimism" of some of the earliest Christian congregations in the Near East, based on the ontological difference between the unknowable God- Father of the Synoptic Gospels and the "God of this world", a figure who has notable correspondences but also sensitive distinctions with the Platonic Demiurge.
Thomas Mann, the nocturnal side of reason and the depth of the Myth
65 years ago, on August 12, 1955, Thomas Mann, one of the most influential storytellers and thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, left this world. Here we see how - taking a cue from Freud, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer - Mann considered the journey to the mythical and archetypal abysses of man as a return to the past, but with the prospect of delivering it, purified of irrational error, to the future.
Greetings to Emanuele Severino: the eternals and the will to power
Our homage to Emanuele Severino, the "philosopher of eternal being" who left us in these days: a brief reflection on nihilism starting from the great teaching of the Master.
The human being as multiplicity: mask, "doppelgรคnger" and puppet
Since modern man has dramatically realized that the unity of the human being is an illusion some of the highest minds of his consortium have sought - in a uncanny game of masks, mirrors and dolls - to understand how to integrate one's infinite personalities and overcome the existential nihilism that such masks potentially offer: from ETA Hoffmann's โThe Sandmanโ and EA Poe's โWilliam Wilsonโ to Hermann Hesse's โThe Steppe Wolfโ; from the contemporary cinema of Roman Polanski and David Lynch to Thomas Ligotti's "marionette metaphysics" and HP Lovecraft's "cosmic horror".