Astrology and Militant Atheism

A friend of de Maistre wrote: "For him, one deed alone was constant in the history of the universe: the shedding of human blood. He would often wake up in a mood for revenge, with his sword drawn. Then fury would seize him and he would wish to destroy everything." Yet de Maistre was also an "immensely amiable" diplomat and courtier. More recently Christopher Hitchens proudly said he awoke every morning angry and looking for a fight; and yet many can be found to describe him as rather charming.

Aries lit the torch of modern authoritarian excesses. Vladimir Ilych Lenin (born April 10, NS) invented organized mass violence. He also set in motion the USSR's merciless League of Militant Godless. According to the scholar Joan Witte, Lenin "evinced an addiction to violence that caused him to overlook or foreclose other, less radical, political methods for accomplishing his goals." (Terrorism & Political Violence, 1993). The only other Soviet leader born under Aries, Nikita Khrushchev, is immediately recalled banging his shoe on the podium at the UN, crying "We will bury you!"

By whose ancient decision was Aries made the first sign? To punctuate with a Beginning the seamless nirvana of night's celestial circle was a fiat of early homo sapiens, as the emerging neuro-visual, geometrical and phantasmal competencies co-evolved. The introduction of a mathematical starting point into the infinitesimal fluidity of the circle may be taken for the primal shared Thought that initiated the development of cultural reality; and the constellations, crystalline totemic projections around which the human umwelt was precipitated. Why shouldn't our humanly constructed existence bear indistinct residues of these formative visions?

From a modern, personalist application of astrological  metaphors Aries bears the idea of the birth of the Self, the coming into being of the conscious Subject. Aries is branded with the ontological dilemma of origin, is immediately the 'barred Subject" pursued relentlessly by Aries psychologist Jacques Lacan. The relationship of Aries to war declares that every true birth is an emergency, involving phallic violence.

The infant comes naked and with the passionate energy of newly discovered self-hood it clothes itself in individuality, to make the most of its unique, unshareable position in space-time. The Aries-born always stays close to that need. A frantic creativity picks up the instrument, or weapon, nearest-to-hand. Aries is clear and distinct, never bland, often noisy, needing to act and be heard to know itself. The terror of regression, of being dragged back into non-being, the imprisoning but alluring maternal womb, fuels a tactic of pre-emptive aggression with pre-rational force. No sign is quicker to 'cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war'.

Aries is branded with the motto "I am". And here comes perhaps rationalist modernity's foundational philosopher, Rene Descartes, born March 31, 1596, with his reverberating motto: "I think, therefore, I am!" Some call it the birth cry of modernity. As Aries is the origin of the Zodiac, so all the natives of the sign carry reverberations of the originating Big Bang and the infant's scream. Paul Valery called the cogito "a fist coming down on a table" and "the explosion of an act, a shattering blow . . . an appeal to [Descartes'] essential egotism . . . the clarion call to his pride and the resources of his being."

We might also call the 'cogito' a great "performative" utterance, rather than a logical one, with a nod to the Speech-Act philosophy of J. L. Austin. Or we could liken the 'cogito' to the heroic sword that cut the Gordian knot of pre-scientific obfuscation.

A study titled "The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes and the Emergence of Modernity" (Piotr Hoffman, 1996) dwells on this formulation. It was Descartes' project to harness rationality, to make it a reigning force. For Hobbes might makes right. The two converge like the point of a knife in Sam Harris' remark to Graeme Wood. 'I've had debates where it's absolutely clear to me that my opponent has to tap out. . . They are wrong--just as demonstrably as you're wrong when you're being choked to death in a triangle choke.'

Grotius' armies are in formation on the plane of Cartesian coordinates. Cartesian science is fueled by the arms race. Descartes himself was forceful. He carried a memorable silver foil and used it. He appears in Frans Hals' famous portrait a rakish, low-browed swashbuckler. His story contains several D'Artagnan-like adventures -- he crossed swords on the Orleans road, he disarmed Freisian bandits on a ferry. Famously touchy, he feuded by correspondence with many of the major minds of his period, and turned on friends inexplicably. In fact, according to one biographer he "fought with almost everyone he encountered." Witty Thomas De Quincey imagined Rene's enemies "spitted like larks upon a Cartesian sword."

For no discernible political reason he chased across Europe to volunteer as ballistics engineer at major battles. Descartes launched the modern technological project "to render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature," the development of munitions generally leading the way. The battlefield was the laboratory of early mathematical physics and mechanics. Descartes' mathematics and physics of motion and force enabled the missiles and rockets of Werner von Braun and beyond. His absolutist conception of truth and knowledge presaged a world ruled by Science, a rational authoritarianism where (in Paul Valery's words) "the word Knowledge is increasingly denied to anything that cannot be put into figures." He invented triangle-choke Reason.

He directly likened the attainment of knowledge to a battle and intended his philosophy to clear the field for armies of laboratory workers to come, salaried, he advised, so they would follow orders and not ask time-consuming questions (technical? moral?). He warned against spending more than "a few hours a year" on philosophy, which draws "the mind too far away from physical and observable things, and make it unfit to study them." He actually disdained books! He dreamed his famous three dreams in the stove room of a barracks of carousing soldiers. Though forthright in his rationalism, he was coy about his atheism. Both Hobbes and Pascal called him on that hypocrisy, from opposite sides of the fence.

The mobilization of reason, the rationalization and implementation of power, energy, heat and light, these are the materiel of the Aries campaign, not carefully weighed analysis or well-digested historical experience. Following the powerful start-up given by Descartes and Hobbes philosophy needed no more of Aries for 250 years (until neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl attempted a new version of the Subject), but mechanical physics continued to develop to Descartes' plan: Christian Huygens (the wave theory of light), Leonhard Euler, (the Euler identity, which is the cogito in mathematical terms), Pierre-Simon Laplace (who discovered velocity potential and murmured atheism into Napoleon's ear, while serving as ballistics engineer), Joseph Fourier (the theory of heat); including Descartes, these five Aries arguably belong among the top dozen early physicists. That is remarkable.

Descartes, one of the first methodical vivisectors, was up to his elbows in blood, purposely living near slaughterhouses to further his anatomical studies, plunging his arm into the open chest cavities of living animals, rabbits and dogs, measuring pulsations along the aorta with his bare hands. "I have spent much time on dissection during the last eleven years, and I doubt whether there is any doctor who has made such detailed observations as I." His conviction that animals are machines enabled him to torture them with an ease that shocked his time. It was said that the test of his followers was "whether they would kick their dogs". Even now, in the nursing profession, 'Cartesian' means lacking compassion.

Descartes was in communication and competition with William Harvey in pursuit of the solution to the problem of the heart and the circulation of blood; Harvey got there first. Harvey was also an Aries hothead, "very cholerique; and in his young days " would be too apt to draw out his dagger upon every slight occasion." (see Aubrey's "Brief Lives".) The profound relationship between blood and iron, Mars' metal, is worth noting: chemically iron is blood's quintessential element, the source of its red color. The most renowned doctor of the 19th century, the great surgeon Joseph Lister, said to have amputated over three thousand limbs, was an Aries.

Hobbes' violent state of 'original' nature prefigures Dawkins's 'selfish' genetic determinism. Analogously, Descartes' discovery/invention of the Subject, the 'I' who thinks and is the only indubitable existent, underlies the current neurophilosophy of mind and consciousness, of the meat/brain mind and mind-in-vat consciousness, dominated by Horseman Daniel Dennett, and David Chalmers, another Aries-born philosopher (and sometime performance artist). It might be mentioned here that as the first sign, Aries has a particular relationship to the head and brain.

Dennett and Chalmers claim much of the attention in their field because of their use of the popular figure of the zombie. For some reason a pursuit as abstract as philosophy of mind leads us back to an epitome of violence and terror. Hobbes, in the very first sentences of "Leviathan", raised the hypothetical specters of 'Artificial Animal', 'Automata', and 'artificiall life'. Descartes was rumored to travel with a mechanical daughter identical to his dead child. (Until, during a stretch of bad weather, the Captain threw the cursed thing overboard.) The Zombie is the reductio ad absurdum or Jungian shadow that haunts Cartesian rational materialism. Like the creepy replicant genes of Dawkins, a pre-human vitalism, activity without soul, unthinking energy, and primitive animism propel the Aries process. Aries philosophers as dissimilar as Dennett and Edmund Husserl both entertain quasi-vitalistic concepts with the very same terminology: emergentism and intentionality.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).