Cado
“O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?”-Personae, Ezra Pound
At some point in the life of the individual, he or she, for a singular lucid moment, is able to step back and above themselves. Hovering over their bodies and casting a wide gaze toward their current age, they see an expanse of time in between epochs. The gift of self awareness, seemingly in great abundance before our own time, has dwindled quite dramatically. One wonders less if humanoid robots are truly a threat to humanity, and not the increasingly robotic behavior of mankind. To some, the dawning age of artificial intelligence provides unlimited sources for a revitalization of the human spirit. Note, the human body tends to be denigrated in favour of “the intellect”, which for a post-Enlightenment world tends to also be analogous with religious understandings of what constitutes the soul. Besides tending to be doomsday oracles about the current situation of the global economic system, which has its own appeal, many of those prophets of artificial intelligence seem to be boundlessly hopeful about what their technology will do to the human condition. Of course, many know that it is not necessarily Peter Thiel or Sam Altman that hold the mantle of techno-prophecy. More often than not, a page on Substack will provide a glimpse into the magic woven by “philosophers” like Nick Land. A heady mixture of semi-mystical language smattered onto a canvas of gematria and Lovecraftian prose, the sophistry of the aforementioned AI acolytes is hard to ignore. While many might be seduced, and still more might feel sympathetic to their cause, there is another way. Man need not be wed to artifice to fulfill himself, machine can never be superior to man. We exist in an age of struggle. Struggle to define the sickness.
There is something missing, however. We all feel it. We used to speak of the stars and read them as a great dialogue with the Creator, and now we speak of them as objects to be probed and exploited. Even those of us who find intense meaning and purpose in religion still understand that meaning and purpose escape many. The constant outsourcing of experiences to a virtual world tears the human individual apart. We understand ourselves as oppositional beings, the body suppresses the spirit and the spirit attempts to wrench itself from material experience. This is an opposition pushed by that monolith called “Modernity”, and is expressed through many different channels, each tending to grow more grotesque by the day. Previous systems of knowledge and thought reject a holistic thesis, and act as if human knowledge rejects the realm of the incredible and irrational.What modern man forgot is that he is not a one-dimensional being. In his fullest expression, man is a symbol and counterpart of the macrocosm, that is the “universe”. This is an age-old understanding of the human condition, but has been lost to popular understanding for more than a millenia. The men of the Renaissance understood these concepts the best, indeed to overcome our current inter-epoch, it the the opinion of the author that we look toward the examples given to us by the Italian Renaissance, if we wish to secure our own renovatio.
What might this renovatio entail? A total upheaval and rejection of scientific and intellectual norms of the present. This does not mean some sort of return to intellectual chaos or the rejection of any rational thought. However, one must return ad fontes, to see the roots of the present evil to properly overcome them. Then, when an individual fully grasps the context of his or her own age, to tap into the deeper and more vital roots that came before. Ideology alone will not extirpate those things that coil and choke out the spark of true civilizations. In his most famous work, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Culianu describes the ideas “scientific” ideas that survived the persecution of Renaissance thought as mutated and wingless flies, surviving out of necessity. The hypercharged imagination of the Renaissance was utterly misunderstood, vilified not for petty disagreements over canon law, but for visions of space and time that did not oppose the revelation of God in Nature. The infusion of Platonic philosophy and systems of thought at the dawn of the Renaissance offered a qualitative view of Nature. Every ordering and blossoming of natural revelation, yes even of magic and astrology, pointed towards Pico de Mirandola’s “Divine Artificer”, and man was at the summit and center of that creation. Man, who stood able to commune with both God and the angelic, who only could steward creation. Man was created to know and to appreciate and understand Creation, his highest fulfillment was (and is) the knowledge of God. This is what the Renaissance espoused, and its “sciences” were always pointed towards the mystical union, the knowledge of the Creator.
We were born malnourished, and yet a feast lay before us. At our fingertips, the works of Ficino, Mirandola, and Bruno are instantly accessible. Yet, they are so far away. We will never live in the world that animated the life and thought of Paracelsus or Cornelius Agrippa. The martyrdom of Giordano Bruno is as far from our current condition as might be expected. What is essential that must be taken from all their lives? That our life was made to be lived maximally. Artificial intelligence only promises false vitalism, and its reality can only be virtual. The individual that puts his faith in artificial intelligence can only be said to be renting his own life out to a false hope, almost like expecting his own consumption of pornography to be analogous to a loving marriage. Smoke, mirrors, and vapor are all that constitute the promises of artificial intelligence. Of course, one should not be dismissive of this movement and its acolytes. There are many incredibly intelligent and truly evil personalities that advocate for the sublimation of the human spirit and its absorption into a virtual reality. Perhaps the one thing that might be said of AI is that it has caused an explosion of human imagination, the art of which was lost at first spark of the diesel engine. However, just as the Renaissance was inspired by an infusion of ancient wisdom and fortified by an opposition to closed knowledge systems, so our own vital humanism must identify its life source and name its enemies. Read Jünger! Read Eliade! Read those who have been maligned. The knowledge that animated those who have come before has not been strictly prohibited. Worse, they have been proscribed by the opinion of nameless golems and faceless automatons! That, however, will not stop you.
For immediate application, the student of a vital existence should study the works of the great men of the Renaissance. The original works and commentaries of Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, and Pico de Mirandola will open up a mental world that few would think possible. For more modern works and commentaries, the author of this article recommends Jean Seznec and the brilliant Frances Yates. The journey of recovering knowledge cannot, indeed it must not become subject to the perfidious perfumes of the “scientific method”. Concentrate on the inner life, on contemplation, and watch the outer life flourish and blossom. The brilliance of the Renaissance casts has indeed filtered down to our own age, and even a small exertion of the human spirit to receive those rays will produce numerous benefits. It must be understood that was not purely material wealth that sparked the Renaissance, although its contribution cannot be minimized. It was not the market economy that dictated that translations of Plato into the vernaculars of Italy, nor were the investigations of John Dee produced by the stock market. Out of an outpouring of vital spirit, inspired by the fullness of understanding the place of man in the Created Order, did the Italian Renaissance begin. In this way, out of the riches of the Spirit, our own renovatio will begin.
