“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Destination Eschaton: Masciandaro on Anagogy


Nicola Masciandaro's prose is suggestive, moving and counter-intuitive. It's great, in other words. Here he is writing on the medieval notion of anagogy, somehow breathing new life into it for the twenty-first century.

Think of anagogy like the universe inside the Monolith in 2001. (Thanks to some nicely chosen visuals Masciandaro shows you this.) It sucks you in. Or as Masciandaro puts it, “
anagogy is itself a transition within transitivity wherein subject/object and sign/thing boundaries directionally invert in a wonderful way.” You think you are living your life, but really the One is emanating its display.

Somehow, Nicola manages to find ways in which medieval philosophy shows the speculative realist way ahead. This isn't surprising to me, given my own recent conclusions on the restriction of rhetoric to ear candy and the attendant severing of science from philosophy.

No comments: