/lit/ - Literature

>>17137489

The only solution to the modern era is found in religious teachings

>>17110383

>>17016909

It seems that nothing exists for modern man other than what can be seen and touched; or at least, even if they admit theoretically that something else may exist they hasten to declare it not merely unknown but “unknowable,” which absolves them from having to give it further thought. If nevertheless some persons still are to be found who try to form some kind of idea of an “other world,” relying as they do on nothing but their imagination they picture it in the likeness of the terrestrial world and transfer to it all the conditions belonging to that world, including space and time and even a sort of “corporeality”; in speaking elsewhere of spiritualistic conceptions we have given some very striking examples of this kind of grossly materialized representation; but if the beliefs there referred to represent an extreme case in which this particular feature is exaggerated to the point of caricature, it would be a mistake to suppose that spiritualism and the sects more or less akin to it retain the monopoly of this kind of thing. Indeed, in a more general way, the intrusion of the imagination into realms where it can yield no useful results, and which ought normally to remain closed to it, is a fact which in itself shows very clearly how incapable modern Westerners have become of raising themselves above the realm of the senses; there are many who do not know how to distinguish between “conceiving” and “imagining,” and some philosophers, such as Kant, go so far as to declare “inconceivable” and “unthinkable” everything that is not capable of representation. In the same way everything that goes by the name of “spiritualism” or “idealism” usually amounts to no more than a sort of transposed materialism; this applies not only to what we have described as “neo-spiritualism,” but also to philosophical spiritualism, although the latter considers itself to be the very opposite of materialism. The fact is that spiritualism and materialism, in the philosophical sense of these expressions, have no significance apart from one another: they are simply two halves of the Cartesian dualism, whose radical separation has been turned into a kind of antagonism; and, since then, the whole of philosophy has oscillated between these two terms without being able to pass beyond them. Spiritualism, in spite of its name, has nothing to do with spirituality; its conflict with materialism can be of no interest to those who place themselves at a higher standpoint and who see that these opposites are fundamentally very near to being equivalent, their supposed opposition reducing itself, on many points, to a merely verbal disagreement.