Links to the files of which
follow the introductory remarks below:–
This
collection of essays, dialogues, aphorisms and maxims, dating from 1983–4, is
largely the reverse, in formal terms, of The Will to Truth, its
philosophical precursor, inasmuch as its first part is essayistic and its
second part entirely composed of dialogues, thereby again bringing these two
modes of philosophical phenomenality – as opposed to
tthe noumenality, as it were, of the aphorisms and
maxims – into harmony or, at any rate, close juxtaposition.Here, as before, the essays constitute the main
part, and they are once again conceived within the protective umbrella of a
uniform ideology – namely the Social Transcendentalism which I had been
building towards in earlier works, but which here comes to ideological fruition.Thus, whatever the subject, it is treated
from a uniform ideological standpoint, the standpoint of a socially
transcendent outlook on life, and this even when I am not consciously aware of the
fact.Such an outlook is beyond humanism
and all other worldly ideologies, whether of the left or the right, having to
do with evolutionary striving towards a 'divine kingdom' which is, in a special
centre-oriented sense, centrist in character.Yet this 'divine kingdom' does not follow death, as we customarily understand
it, but presupposes the ordering of society according to certain idealistic
principles designed to free mankind from its atomic past and indeed from
itself, since the final outcome can only be supra-human in character.Hence in each of these essays and dialogues,
not to mention the ensuing aphorisms and maxims, a Social Transcendentalist
concern with godly truth is what really matters, and it is this which leads us
towards the prospect of the heavenly millennium to-come.Whether the subject happens to be art,
literature, sex, politics, psychology, drugs or whatever, the emphasis on Truth
from a specific ideological perspective is what lifts Social Transcendentalism beyond the sterile
realm of intellectual speculation towards the potent challenge of universal
freedom. – John O’Loughlin
John O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army),
he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home
by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues throughout Britain and Ireland.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to do English and History A Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of personal factors, quit the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey Management Agency (within the YMCA buildings) in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview
Reviewed (1979), Secret
Exchanges (1980), Sublimated
Relations(1981), and Deceptive
Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned numerous titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
