Hem

New memoir by A. E. Hotchner.

My Gnostic Education

My Gnostic education fell between the years 1975 and 1995--or, to put it another way, between Born To Run and The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Over the course of those two decades, I was alternately lulled to sleep by, and awakened to the predicament of, life in these Orwellian States of Amnesia.

Unlike the classical Gnostics, however, I never acquired a contempt for life in the body. If anything, I acquired a contempt for any mode of thought that would lead to contempt for life in the body.

In '95 I read Ghazali's Deliverance From Error and discovered there the entry way to the "third road" that (Martin Heidegger's student) Hans Jonas spoke of in the epilogue to his book The Gnostic Religion: one that avoids "the dualistic rift" that the classical Gnostics posited between the human being and inhuman nature "and yet [contains] enough of the dualistic insight...to uphold the humanity of man" (Jonas, 340).

Throughout those tempestuous, formative decades, Bruce Springsteen was not only the troubadour of wild longing for an embodied transcendence but also a consistent witness to the facticity of human suffering. As such, he guaranteed my dissatisfaction with any philosophy or religious theory that promised disembodied salvation or ignored human suffering on the ground that it was ultimately illusory. He helped me keep my eye "clear as the bleb of the icicle."

Mandean Baptism

Holy Wear

Looking For The Antidote?

Great North Americana

Great South Americana

Jorge Luis Borges.

A Philosophical Life

"Apprehending the world in terms of contexts of meaning is how Heidegger conceived of a philosophical life."

--Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger's Philosophy of Life, 31.

FYI

All Come To Look For America

Truly Great Americana

More Great Americana

Remembering McGovern, WWII Hero, Politician

Great Americana

An Indigenous Peoples' History

How the U.S. settler-colonial regimen reduced 15 million people to 3 million.