The Mythology and Metaphysics of the Macintosh

by John David Ebert

The Myth

The great myth of Western civilization, then, is not, as Oswald Spengler insisted, that of Faust; neither is it, as the American mythologist Joseph Campbell once suggested, Prometheus, or even the Grail quester of Arthurian legend; it is not even Lewis Mumford’s ‘myth of the machine’; it is none of these. Rather, the great myth of Western civilization—and it has been the great myth since the days of Minoan Crete—is that of the Wonder Child’s struggle against the Elders. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction to a Catastrophic Bifurcation

by John David Ebert

When Worlds Close Down

Every culture opens a window onto a particular world horizon that is accessed via one or another form of media. Normally, the process of articulation and unfolding of a cosmos is two-fold, that of annunciation and transmission: annunciation, that is, of a vision to one sort of prophet, while another one, receiving the vision, then creates the necessary medium for transmitting it on a mass scale. Thus, Abraham, living in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, hears the voice of an obscure and hitherto unknown god that tells him to leave the land of his birth and migrate to another land, Canaan, which this god will make known to him. Generations later, after enduring the collective traumas of Egyptian servitude, the vision descends to Moses, who invents the medium of the alphabet and brings it down from the top of the mountain as the new means for communicating the Hebraic vision of a non-visual deity who makes his will known via a non-pictographic script. Read the rest of this entry »

Ancient Myth and Modern Science: A Reconsideration

by John David Ebert

Myth as Psychology

Historically, the conflict between myth and science, according to Joseph Campbell, involved a discrediting of visionary cosmology in favor of one based upon “fact.” In his essay “The Symbol Without Meaning,” Campbell described how science gradually disentangled itself from the mythological projections of the medieval imagination through the discoveries of men like Columbus and Copernicus, which amounted to the “drawing of a distinct dividing line between the world of dream consciousness and that of waking.” As a result, “mythological cosmologies. . .do not correspond to the world of gross facts but are functions of dream and vision,” which means, for Campbell, that myths are projections of the human psyche onto the canvas of the universe. Their validity, consequently, is restricted to the psyche, and all myths are to be regarded as metaphors symbolic of, on the one hand, the mysteries of Being, and on the other, transformations of human consciousness. Read the rest of this entry »

On the Devolution of Consciousness in Ancient Mesoamerica:

Or, The Victory of the Astral Plane Over the Human Ego

An Essay by John David Ebert

The Tyranny of the Ancestral Dead

In Mesoamerica, the realms of the dead and the living were never truly separated. In fact, of all the civilizations in world history, the Mesoamericans are the one society in which no such separation was ever even attempted. Indeed, there is a continuity from the early village traditions of the so-called Archaic period (8000 – 2000 BC), in which the dead were buried under the floors of the houses, right on into the Formative, Classic and Post-Classic periods, in which this practice continues into Aztec times, as Manuel Aguilar-Moreno comments: Read the rest of this entry »

Badiou and the Three Great Monotheisms:

Fragment of a Preface for a Discarded Manuscript

by John David Ebert

Bedouins

The desert gave birth to civilization.

Mesopotamia and Egypt both came into being in hot, dry desert climates alive with palm fronds, braying donkeys and the squeaking of shadufs drawing up water from wells. Camels, Bedouins, veils and dust: mud brick buildings, red granite cliffs, turquoise skies and crescent-shaped boats going up and down rivers and waterways. Canals splayed across the land like dendrites in a primitive nervous system shooting strips of water across muddy fields to nourish thin and spindly shafts of grain. Heat, flies and dusty pink horizons. Groves of date palms and tamarisk trees the only shelter from a burning disc in the heavens that settles at dusk to a glowing coal where the sky meets the earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Spheres I: Bubbles by Peter Sloterdijk

Reviewed by John David Ebert

The first volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s theoretical opus Spheres is now available in English translation from Semiotexte and is due out shortly. This volume, entitled Bubbles, investigates those types of social spheres which Sloterdijk terms “microspheres,” which have to do with personal, one-to-one human relationships, especially of the amniotic kind. The second volume, Globes, articulates his idea of “macrospheres,” or the cosmological containers inside which humanity has been situated until about the 15th century, while the final volume, Foams, articulates the fate of spheres in the Modern world, in which each individual inhabits his or her own sphere, all of which rub up against one another to create a kind of social “foam.” Read the rest of this entry »

My Top 12 Favorite Philosophical Works of the 20th Century

By John David Ebert

1. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (1918-1924): A little known and rarely discussed fact is that Heidegger, in his early lectures, read Spengler and was clearly both concerned and worried about the implications of his ideas. Spengler also seems to have been instrumental in the creation of Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, since he, too, uses the word, but in a different, more vitalistic-Romantic way.  In Spengler, Dasein, or Being, is opposed to Wachsein, or Waking Being, as instinct is opposed to intellect. World civilizations are unfoldings of Dasein, or Being, by supra-rational entelechies that function like cultural monads which unfold their life cycles deterministically from within. Though history appears to be a mess, Spengler saw that it was ordered by these 8 great civilizations, each of which irrefutably underwent a process of form-evolution that involved the birth of a particular Dasein, its growth and attainment of cultural maturity through a mastery of the arts, followed by a subsequent loss of such ability and decline into historical senescence and cultural irrelevance.  The most sobering part of Spengler’s theory, every part of which seems to be daily confirmed by one or another new headline, is that we in the West have passed the moment of our Greek-like mastery of art and culture and have entered a Roman-like period of militarism and empire with its attendant lack of competence in the arts. The shifting from metaphysical concerns in philosophy to economic-pragmatic concerns is symptomatic. Read the rest of this entry »

A Question of Values

by Morris Berman

Reviewed by John David Ebert

You know that something fundamental and utterly irreversible has befallen the American publishing industry when Morris Berman, the author of The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America, both published by a major house (W.W. Norton), is unable to find a publisher for his new book. As he remarks: “No American publisher was even mildly interested” since “clearly, a book like this is not going to make anybody rich.” Berman therefore decided to self-publish it on Amazon’s new self-publisher called Createspace. Read the rest of this entry »

How Gilgamesh Became a God

An Essay by John David Ebert

Lord of the Dead

The earliest version of the Gilgamesh Epic dates to the Old Babylonian period of about 1800 BC. In ancient Egypt, this was a period of cultural disintegration: the time of the collapse of the 12th Dynasty and the end of the Middle Kingdom (the last of the pyramids had recently been completed under Amenemhat III, who built two of them at Hawara and Dahshur); in Mesopotamia, on the other hand, it was a time of great expansion, the rise of the Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi the Great. Read the rest of this entry »

Moses, The Exodus and The Hebrew War Machine

An Essay by John David Ebert

I. Theological Embryogenesis 

Hegel seems to have been right: history moves dialectically, with each age serving as a counter-argument to the one before it. If Akhenaten had eliminated the sun’s nocturnal journey through the underworld, then the life of Moses restores it, for the characteristics of his biography have all the markings of a journey through the underworld: not only does he travel from West to East in imitation of the sun’s course through the world beneath the earth, but he also battles monsters and adversaries which turn up in the narratives disguised as Pharaoh (who functions in the role of the Apopis serpent) and the giants of Anak which the Hebrews encounter once they reach Canaan. The imagery of the parched red deserts which the Egyptians so dreaded that they identified them with the underworld turn up, too, in the narrative as the complaining Hebrews always running short of water and blaming Moses for leading them out into the deserts of the Sinai to die. The same image of waterless sands turns up in the Fourth Hour of the Book of the Netherworld which the Egyptians of the New Kingdom painted on the walls of the tombs of their pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. Read the rest of this entry »