Synopses

FUTURE TRANSFORMATIONS: This volume of philosophy, combining essays, dialogues, and maxims, goes way beyond the scope of my earlier philosophical works – as, for instance, ‘The Transcendental Future’ and ‘The Way of Evolution’, to name but two - in outlining what I consider to be the logical stages of evolutionary progress beyond man which will have to be passed through before definitive salvation can be achieved in a transcendent goal of evolution ... analogous to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point. One could say that I have attempted to concretize Nietzschean notions concerning man's overcoming ... in respect of specific post-human stages. Hitherto, when I wrote about more advanced stages of life, it was generally within the scope and definition of man. Here, by contrast, the attainment to a more artificial stage of evolution is, ipso facto, chronologically beyond man and thus implicitly post-human. Such was the revolutionary break with my earlier thinking that occurred early in 1982, and it is, I believe, of momentous significance! Henceforth my philosophical task was largely to be a refinement on and modification of contentions outlined here. Obviously in the many years that have passed since then, several changes, some of them quite drastic, have taken place in my overall perspective. But the beginnings of my mature philosophical oeuvre are to be found in FUTURE TRANSFORMATIONS, and it was from this time onwards that I began to grow into what I like to think of as a sort of messianic self-awareness.

POST-ATOMIC PERSPECTIVES: Combining maxims with aphorisms, essays, and dialogues, this work goes beyond the scope of the above-mentioned philosophical project in both its form and content, opening out towards a post-atomic future in what amounts to an entirely new civilization. As conceived of here, the aphorisms are slightly longer and freer than the maxims and thus lead, logically enough, to the essays, which constitute Part Three of the book or, rather, e-scroll. Subjects include the direction of literature in the civilization to come; the transitional nature of contemporary literature; revelations concerning future life forms and their relationship to what is called the Ultimate Creation; the nature of divine love in relation to other types of love and its bearing on messianic credibility; antithetical equivalents - such as birds and planes or horses and motorbikes - in the evolution of human and other life; how the State 'withers' and why; the paradoxical allegiance of Christian pagans, or so-called Christians whose loyalty is rather more to the Fatheresque Creator than to Christ; and transcendental transvaluations in a world that has largely turned its back on nature. Part Four is comprised of four dialogues, which continue the philosophical debate in a slightly more dramatic vein.

THE WILL TO TRUTH: My main philosophical project of 1983 combines dialogues and essays with aphorisms and maxims in a four-part volume of which essays form the greater proportion. However, nine dialogues is no mean undertaking, and they range from subjects as diverse, albeit interrelated, as the freeing of art from mundane attachments as it evolves from pagan to transcendental times; the distinction between Jews and Israelis; the development of awareness at the expense of feeling in art; the moral implications of sexual sublimation; the evolutionary struggle from gravity to curved space; the development of religion from the personal to the universal; the nature of petty-bourgeois art; the possibility of denominational progress in Western religion; and the apotheosis of the 'universal man'. Such, then, is the scope of Part One, while Part Two enlarges on many of the subjects touched upon in the dialogues, as well as introduces a number of new ones, including the main distinction between Christianity and Transcendentalism; the psychology of people who swear; the irrelevance of punishment to a transcendental society; architectural and sartorial relationships to gravity both upwards and downwards; understanding Jazz in relation to other types of modern music; the distinction between philosophy and pseudo-philosophy; and the nature of ultimate music. Originally intended as a sort of sequel to the above, Parts Three and Four move us from the phenomenal realm of dialogues and essays up to what I like to think of as the noumenal realm of aphorisms and maxims, in which the will is One with the truth it strives to convey through the most concise means and is, if not Truth itself, then at any rate certainly truthful! Subjects treated here include the relation between sexuality and dress; the nature of the self; the significance of Israel; the role and nature of worship in popular religion; poetry verses philosophy; the evolution of the arts; the metaphysics of modern music; the psyche; God; ideology; and gender. Although THE WILL TO TRUTH should not be taken for the Truth, it signifies a significant stage on the road to my achievement of greater degrees of truth, both philosophically and, more significantly, theosophically, in the years that were to follow, and is certainly more radical than anything preceding it in this field.

SOCIAL TRANSCENDENTALISM - 'Social Means to a Transcendent End': This collection of essays, dialogues, aphorisms, and maxims, dating from 1983-84, is largely the reverse, in formal terms, of THE WILL TO TRUTH, inasmuch as its first part is essayistic and its second part entirely composed of dialogues, thereby again bringing these two modes of philosophical ‘phenomenality’ into harmony or, at any rate, close juxtaposition. Here, as before, the essays constitute the main part, and they are once more conceived within the protective umbrella of a uniform ideology - namely the Social Transcendentalism 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 standpoint, the standpoint of a socially transcendent outlook upon life, and this even when I am not consciously aware of the fact! Such an outlook is beyond humanism and all other worldly ideologies, having to do with evolutionary striving towards a 'divine kingdom'. 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. Hence in each of these essays and dialogues, not to mention the ensuing aphorisms and maxims, a Social Transcendentalist concern with Truth is what really matters, and it is this which can lead us towards the heavenly millennium to-come. Whether the subject is 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.