The rupture of the great man is a return of the primal energies which civilisation denies. The longer they are held at bay, the more they ratchet up. The great man is a catalyst, or focal point: he fuses existing "contradictions" into a "ruptural force."
A brutal rupture - of ecstatic, aggressive madness - laying waste to civilised man. An "initiation into a new kind of life." The return of the gods, of barbarian rites. "Spark." Renewal.
An integrated tradition has less repression, thus less need for course-correcting 'ruptures'.
Hillman: The madness wants to be let in the room that it has been excluded from. It wants to come in.
Ventura: No matter what the madness is - we're not only talking about love now - it wants to come in.
Hillman: Partly because -
Ventura: - it's been excluded.
Hillman: That's Freud: it's repressed.
Ventura: I think it's more than "repressed"; I don't buy that.
Hillman: Because that would suggest it would go away once it comes in?
Ventura: Right.
Hillman: You don't believe that.
Ventura: I think the madness is much stronger than that. It does not go away once it comes in. Freud may be right that we constructed civilization to keep the madness out, as a collective; and, with our nice little homes and lives, we try to do the same thing privately, keep it out; but it does not go away. It's right there, always, waiting, trying to get in. And once it comes in, it isn't easily appeased.
Hillman: In other words, you can't just give it a nice chair and a cup of tea and it sits down.
Ventura: You can't say, "I acknowledge you, I own you."
Hillman: "I respect you."
Ventura: " I respect you, I love that part of myself that is you ... as long as you don't make any fucking trouble."
Hillman: "Or even if you make a little bit of trouble, I acknowledge you because really you're part of my creativity."
Ventura: But the madness - at least my madness - doesn't care about being part of my creativity! Because in fact creativity is a fundamentally sane act, and the madness wants disruption.
Hillman: From its point of view, it's walking in the door with a message, but you sit in the room and it knocks the door down and you think, "Shit, this is only bringing me disruption," but what does it carry in its hand? I think what it's walking in the door with are the Gods. I think the madness is the messenger of the Gods. And that's Plato, not Freud. Different forms of what Plato called mania, each of them associated with a different God.
So the madness is calling us to the Gods, in one way or another either as a frenzy or as love or as a ritual initiation into a new kind of life. Something more important than usual life is going on. It is drawing us out of one thing and toward something else.
Ventura: ... it seems the starting place for any analysis of this culture seems to be the concept of a safe white slate. Anything that is not on this safe white slate is a "contributing factor" to evil and madness. Anything that disrupts a normal safe day - where this normal safe day ever was in history, I don't know - but anything that disrupts it is one of these contributing factors to madness. There's something wrong with that kind of thinking.
Hillman: I think in order to protect yourself against insanity, you must every day propitiate madness. You must take your steps toward madness, you must open the door toward the mania, let it in. That would account in my mind for a great many forms of what we call addiction. These are ways of trying to open the door and to let the madness in. Whether it's getting drunk on a Saturday night or sitting for hours drinking alone in a melancholy to let Saturn in, whatever - these are modes of letting the madness in. And in a sense they keep us from going insane, and we don't know that distinction.
Ventura (singing): "I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane." That's a Waylon Jennings song.
Hillman: Crazy means "cracked," the cracks that let things in. It's not smooth, it's not safe. So what do you do, then, to let the madness in? What do you do to keep from going insane?
Ventura: What do I do?
Hillman: Yeah, what do you do?
Ventura: You mean other than hard whiskey, fast women, and loud music? Or is it fast cars and loud women? Hard women and straight whiskey? Could you repeat the question?
Hillman: I think you do one more thing, and I think I do too, and I think that's part of what this book is about - that we try to go out on a limb.
Ventura: Oh yes.
Hillman: We try to go to unsafe places. We risk. With our minds, we risk.
It makes me most happy when I can go to the farthest out. Or as one writer said to me, it is not enough to go out on a limb, you've got to be willing to saw it off.
[James Hillman & Michael Ventura]
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172
It would seem the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed.
By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities.
Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction.
The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies - either against others or against oneself - are nourished.
[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.157-8
Within a given collectivity, the collective shadow is the same. That is, in each individual it contains all that is not acceptable in the cultural milieu to which that individual belongs.
The collective shadow is the dark other side of the collective ideal.
During the anti-sexual era of Queen Victoria the collective shadow showed itself in the blossoming of pornographic literature.
The personal shadow works destructively against ego-ideals; the collective shadow tries to demolish collective ideals. Both these shadows have a very valuable function.
Both ego and collective ideals must be repeatedly subjected to attack, since they are false and one-sided.
Were they not continually being eaten into from the depths of the human soul, there would be neither individual nor collective development.
... only he who is capable of saying "No" to the world is also capable of affirming it. Only he who has the freedom to destroy can freely turn to the world with love.
[Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig]
Power In The Helping Professions, p.112-3, 116
That's the real reason for censorship, whether it's the direct censorship of the state or academia's censorship-by-dismissal: the less you allow to be expressed, the more alone and cut off people feel.
When certain feelings are unexpressed in the culture, people think those feelings are bad or crazy, and so they trust their feelings less; hence they're more vulnerable to pressure from above.
[James Hillman]
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.87, 88
[…] soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the anti fragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds - that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.
As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning - actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flaneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library.
Provided we have the right type of rigour, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.
It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 242
Civil wars and palace coups will always continue, but the spirit of man is broken by habituation to an overlong domestication, and nothing genuinely great in body or spirit takes place again after a while.
It is the very character of domestic life to present the world as an enclosed owned space, and, although mankind adapts itself on the whole to this condition, both biologically and culturally, yet there remains a glimmer of the opposite tendency in even the lowliest.
[Bronze Age Pervert]
Bronze Age Mindset, p. 96
Masculinity has an ideal that corresponds to it, of noncastration - someone who escapes lack, who is all-powerful, non-lacking […] This figure of the ideal is thus necessary to create the whole.
The great figure of this is […] John Wayne. John Wayne is perfectly non-lacking. Masculinity is always constituted in relationship to this ideal man. But, at the same time, there is an absolute prohibition against being the man.
All men measure themselves in relationship to the ideal man and come up short; but at the same time, they experience a prohibition, because this man is aggressive, violent, and doesn’t really belong in society.
We can see this nicely in the final scene from The Searchers. He rescues the niece, he brings her back, the family is constituted, its returned to its wholeness, civilisation is restored - he has to be exiled. The ideal man cannot exist within civilisation. This is a theme explored extensively by the Western.
[Todd McGowan]
Formulas of Sexuation, YouTube
We are the radical right, but put more precisely we are the Odinic right. We are both creator and destroyer. We are beyond the pale, here to raze a decadent civilization to the ground.
We are the Romulus here to clear a path for a healthy Numa to reign for a thousand years, and if we succeed, we will salt the earth around liberalism so completely that not a trace will be left.
[Imperium Press]
‘The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic’, Imperium Press, Substack
“If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ . . . [that] ‘ fuse’ into a ruptural unity . . . [to launch] an assault on a regime [against] which its ruling classes are unable to defend . . . an accumulation of contradictions.”
When ‘contradictions’ converge into this unstoppable maelstrom they are said to be ‘overdetermined’. A single contradiction, or even multiple contradictions, alone are not enough to create these big moments of historical change or ‘ruptures’; there needs to be ‘a vast accumulation of “contradictions” . . . [at] play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous’.
[...] under normal circumstances contradictions are ‘overdetermined’ into being neutralized and displaced, effectively lulled into banal ‘non-antagonism’, by the dominant ideology. The key is whether or not they are ‘fused’ together and activated – overdetermined by an exceptional set of historical circumstances – to become antagonistic towards the dominant power.
It is important to grasp this idea of ‘ruptural’ or ‘epistemic’ breaks in history to understand both Foucault, who takes it almost wholesale from Althusser, and the new historicists and cultural materialists who follow him.
History is not continuous, but a series of ‘ruptures’ […] In order for one of these ruptures to take place, the many contradictions between ISAs and in ideology must be ‘overdetermined’ by becoming ‘fused’ together to create an irresistible force against which the ruling class has no defence.
[Academic Agent]
‘Defining Ideology, Part 1’, The Forbidden Texts, Substack
[...] the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor.
The feminine is that-which-is-sought; it recedes beyond our grasp. Hence there is always a feminine element in the beautiful young man of male homosexuality. The feminine is the ever-elusive, a silver shimmer on the horizon.
The beautiful boy of the sonnets is asocial, selfabsorbed.
Shakespeare exhorts him to marry and beget heirs lest his patrician line end (Sonnets 1–17). Ironically, as I see it, if the youth were to make the social commitment of marriage, he would immediately lose his glamourous narcissistic beauty, which is produced by his removal from time and community.
I have stressed that the Apollonian mode is harsh, absolutist, and separatist. Apollonian beings are incapable of Dionysian participation: they cannot “take part,” since Apollonianism is coldly unitary, indivisible.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.15, 32, 206
The “great man” theory of history was not as simplistic as claimed; we have barely recovered from a world war in which this theory was proved evilly true. One man can change the course of history, for good or ill.
Marxism is a flight from the magic of person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.36
Nietzsche's portrait makes it clear that he who transcends is wanting in respect of both relationships and activities [...] if the account of the virtues which I have defended can be sustained, it is the isolation and selfabsorption of 'the great man' which thrust upon him the burden of being his own self-sufficient moral authority.
To cut oneself off from shared activity in which one has initially to learn obediently as an apprentice learns, to isolate oneself from the communities which find their point and purpose in such activities, will be to debar oneself from finding any good outside of oneself.
It will be to condemn oneself to that moral solipsism which constitutes Nietzschean greatness.
The concept of the Nietzschean 'great man' is also a pseudo-concept, although not always perhaps – unhappily - what I earlier called a fiction. It represents individualism's final attempt to escape from its own consequences.
And the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather one more representative moment in its internal unfolding. And we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed 'great men' from time to time. Alas!
So it was right to see Nietzsche as in some sense the ultimate antagonist of the Aristotelian tradition. But it now turns out to be the case that in the end the Nietzschean stance is only one more facet of that very moral culture of which Nietzsche took himself to be an implacable critic.
It is therefore after all the case that the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.300
Masculinity has an ideal that corresponds to it, of noncastration - someone who escapes lack, who is all-powerful, non-lacking […] This figure of the ideal is thus necessary to create the whole.
The great figure of this is […] John Wayne. John Wayne is perfectly non-lacking. Masculinity is always constituted in relationship to this ideal man. But, at the same time, there is an absolute prohibition against being the man.
All men measure themselves in relationship to the ideal man and come up short; but at the same time, they experience a prohibition, because this man is aggressive, violent, and doesn’t really belong in society.
We can see this nicely in the final scene from The Searchers. He rescues the niece, he brings her back, the family is constituted, its returned to its wholeness, civilisation is restored - he has to be exiled. The ideal man cannot exist within civilisation. This is a theme explored extensively by the Western.
[Todd McGowan]
Formulas of Sexuation, YouTube
We are the radical right, but put more precisely we are the Odinic right. We are both creator and destroyer. We are beyond the pale, here to raze a decadent civilization to the ground.
We are the Romulus here to clear a path for a healthy Numa to reign for a thousand years, and if we succeed, we will salt the earth around liberalism so completely that not a trace will be left.
[Imperium Press]
‘The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic’, Imperium Press, Substack
“If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ . . . [that] ‘ fuse’ into a ruptural unity . . . [to launch] an assault on a regime [against] which its ruling classes are unable to defend . . . an accumulation of contradictions.”
When ‘contradictions’ converge into this unstoppable maelstrom they are said to be ‘overdetermined’. A single contradiction, or even multiple contradictions, alone are not enough to create these big moments of historical change or ‘ruptures’; there needs to be ‘a vast accumulation of “contradictions” . . . [at] play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous’.
[...] under normal circumstances contradictions are ‘overdetermined’ into being neutralized and displaced, effectively lulled into banal ‘non-antagonism’, by the dominant ideology. The key is whether or not they are ‘fused’ together and activated – overdetermined by an exceptional set of historical circumstances – to become antagonistic towards the dominant power.
It is important to grasp this idea of ‘ruptural’ or ‘epistemic’ breaks in history to understand both Foucault, who takes it almost wholesale from Althusser, and the new historicists and cultural materialists who follow him.
History is not continuous, but a series of ‘ruptures’ […] In order for one of these ruptures to take place, the many contradictions between ISAs and in ideology must be ‘overdetermined’ by becoming ‘fused’ together to create an irresistible force against which the ruling class has no defence.
[Academic Agent]
‘Defining Ideology, Part 1’, The Forbidden Texts, Substack
[...] the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor.
The feminine is that-which-is-sought; it recedes beyond our grasp. Hence there is always a feminine element in the beautiful young man of male homosexuality. The feminine is the ever-elusive, a silver shimmer on the horizon.
The beautiful boy of the sonnets is asocial, selfabsorbed.
Shakespeare exhorts him to marry and beget heirs lest his patrician line end (Sonnets 1–17). Ironically, as I see it, if the youth were to make the social commitment of marriage, he would immediately lose his glamourous narcissistic beauty, which is produced by his removal from time and community.
I have stressed that the Apollonian mode is harsh, absolutist, and separatist. Apollonian beings are incapable of Dionysian participation: they cannot “take part,” since Apollonianism is coldly unitary, indivisible.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.15, 32, 206
The “great man” theory of history was not as simplistic as claimed; we have barely recovered from a world war in which this theory was proved evilly true. One man can change the course of history, for good or ill.
Marxism is a flight from the magic of person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.36
Nietzsche's portrait makes it clear that he who transcends is wanting in respect of both relationships and activities [...] if the account of the virtues which I have defended can be sustained, it is the isolation and selfabsorption of 'the great man' which thrust upon him the burden of being his own self-sufficient moral authority.
To cut oneself off from shared activity in which one has initially to learn obediently as an apprentice learns, to isolate oneself from the communities which find their point and purpose in such activities, will be to debar oneself from finding any good outside of oneself.
It will be to condemn oneself to that moral solipsism which constitutes Nietzschean greatness.
The concept of the Nietzschean 'great man' is also a pseudo-concept, although not always perhaps – unhappily - what I earlier called a fiction. It represents individualism's final attempt to escape from its own consequences.
And the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather one more representative moment in its internal unfolding. And we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed 'great men' from time to time. Alas!
So it was right to see Nietzsche as in some sense the ultimate antagonist of the Aristotelian tradition. But it now turns out to be the case that in the end the Nietzschean stance is only one more facet of that very moral culture of which Nietzsche took himself to be an implacable critic.
It is therefore after all the case that the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.300
