Philosophy and the Sacred

by Jason Reza Jorjani

Jason Reza Jorjani cuts to the heart of the most controversial philosophical question of all time, the one that Socrates was condemned to death for having asked...

These are excerpts from Jason Reza Jorjani’s new book Philosophy of the Future (Arktos, 2024).

The most fundamental problem of Philosophy is the question of the future. It is no coincidence that Friedrich Nietzsche, who subtitled his book Beyond Good and Evil with the phrase Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, is the same philosopher who reached back to the ancient Iranian thinker Zarathustra, so as to adopt a “second coming” of this visionary as the mouthpiece for his gospel of the Overman. Actually, as I explain in Novel Folklore (2017), Nietzsche saw himself as a kind of John the Baptist figure who was preparing the way for the return of Zarathustra as the philosopher of the future.

So, it is not lost on Nietzsche how and why Philosophy – as an enterprise in recorded human history – begins with the question of the future in the teachings of “the Persian prophet.” Indeed, Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that “only the Persians had a philosophy of history,” in a recognition of the fact that, prior to Zarathustra, every culture had only a cyclical and fatalistic view of time. The invention of the future and the future as invention is at the core of the revolutionary “revaluation of all values” that Zarathustra is responsible for, and that Nietzsche believes that Zarathustra will come back in order to complete – albeit by means of its dialectical reversal in the destruction of “the moral world order” that he set in motion. Again, this subject is addressed in my book Novel Folklore.

The purpose of the present discourse is to provide the reader with a summary of my philosophical project that can be read either as an introduction to my entire corpus or as a conclusion wherein that project culminates and crystalizes. It is, however, in no way a substitute for reading the many volumes of the corpus that I repeatedly reference throughout this text. That having been said, a number of defunct or revised positions in my thinking are clearly abrogated herein. The title of this overview is aptly taken from the fact that my work as a philosopher has, more than anything, revolved around the future as an idea with extremely provocative ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions with catastrophic implications.

Nietzsche, writing in the late nineteenth century, could just barely discern some of these as viewed through a glass darkly. But one thing is clear. If he were alive today (and perhaps a reincarnation of him is one of my readers), he would lament how Philosophy has apparently given up on the future. Almost no philosophers worthy of the name have addressed the imminent challenges that face humanity with convergent crises that are literally apocalyptic in scope and scale. The Technological Singularity, Catastrophic Disclosure (of putatively “Alien” Intelligence), and what I call the Spectral Revolution (attendant to mainstream scientific validation of Parapsychology). Almost no contemporary philosophers have addressed these inextricable and compound catastrophes, as well as other attendant revolutionary changes, such as for example an inevitable total revision of our understanding of human history and the forces that have shaped it, not just from the past into the present, but from the future into the past. But to make this statement, as Nietzsche no doubt would have with the same hindsight that we are afforded with, is also to make a claim about who counts as a philosopher.

…A philosopher is someone who has developed ontological and epistemological concepts that then also can be reflected in coherent ethical and political concepts and deal with the domain of aesthetics as well. The domain of aesthetics is actually incredibly important because, as Heidegger and Nietzsche both pointed out, the atmosphere or world of a people that shapes their constitution, and patterns their consciousness on the most fundamental level, is determined by the attunement of the poets, artists, and architects of a people. They set up the architectonic of a world and set its tone. They are the tuning forks of the world of a folk and the composers of its lore. Even from the beginning of the history of Philosophy, what question do we find at the heart of Plato’s Republic? The question of artistic censorship, where Plato is explaining why the Guardians who run his proposed Utopia have to censor all kinds of artwork and poetry for the betterment of the population. (Despite my profound respect for Plato, I deeply disagree with this position and have always been opposed to any and all forms of censorship.)

The reason why it is necessary to think in all of these dimensions, is that the task of a philosopher is to take nothing for granted, to accept nothing on authority, and to question everything fundamentally as part of being engaged in an enterprise of groundbreaking conceptualization. One cannot do that if one has unexamined political commitments or an unexamined ethical position. A thinker can be the most brilliant epistemologist in the world, but if he is beholden to a certain political ideology without having properly thought through it or his ethics consists of unexamined beliefs then he is not a philosopher.

This is related to why philosophers have always been so badly persecuted. From the burning of the Pythagorean schools, which ultimately cost Pythagoras his life, to the execution of Socrates, the attempt on Plato’s life in Syracuse, and the exile of Aristotle from Athens, to the martyrdom of Shahab al-din Suhrawardi by the Caliphate and the burning of Giordano Bruno in a public market in Rome. All of these martyrs, or near martyrs, in the history of Philosophy questioned everything and paid dearly for it.

In his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, great advocate of democracy that he was, wrote that the execution of Socrates by the democratic assembly of Athens was justified. The philosopher has as his task – or her task (one can see this in Ayn Rand as well) – fundamental questioning with a view to a novel development of ideas, especially ideas that have the complexity, coherence, and scope of relevance to reorganize knowledge in a way that makes these ideas properly conceptual. In the course of doing that, one is inherently and in principle undermining all of the institutions of society and the unreflective social consensus, whether these involve entrenched scientific paradigms, established religious belief systems, or other kinds of institutions and sacred cows of mass society. This is really why there have been so few philosophers. It is not for a lack of intellect. It is because so few thinkers have had the intellectual courage to think integrally across all of the different dimensions of Philosophy, and to thereby develop or discover concepts that have revolutionary implications and applications – whether in science, culture, politics, or all of them at once.

…The point is that once Philosophy has been deracinated and compartmentalized or siloed into various areas of research, the philosopher stops performing his proper task as a thinker who is questioning the foundations of science and the foundations of politics in order to ultimately free people from unconscious submission to the tyranny of established methods, ideologies, and systems of law and order – whether scientific or social.

The most dangerous example of this abdication of responsibility is when it comes to the philosopher’s stance with regard to religion. It is also the most striking example of the way in which Philosophy has given up on the future. All of the major world religions, which is to say all of their adherents, deny that we have a future – in other words, a future that is ours to make. Those who believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God intrinsically deny that our individual or social will could play any role in shaping a future for which we would be responsible. If God is both all-powerful and all-knowing, then the future is both determined by the will of God and known in its entirety in advance by the mind of God. Meanwhile, the major religions that do not quite share this conception of divinity, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, accept a cyclical view of time wherein all of the possible configurations of existence will eventually be exhausted and then the world will start over again, as it has many times, with the same succession of world ages that each inevitably have their own typical characteristics. Whether the identity of the atman with Brahman is accepted, as it is by those who follow the Vedas, or whether an adherent rejects both the Macrocosm and the Microcosm together with Gautama Buddha, in either case these forms of the Dharma are in complete agreement that it is a harmful delusion to believe that a future state of affairs could be brought into being by our own thought and will, which future would be significantly different from anything that has ever been achieved or experienced by any person or society in the past. There is never anything new under the sun for these Dharma bums, which is one reason why life should be seen as an ultimately unfulfilling wheel of pain and suffering that ought to be escaped.

It is a very different relation to the sacred that is pregnant with possibilities and that philosophers have a responsibility to promote as a religion of the future. Not a religion that happens to crop up at some future time. No, a religion structured around promethea or the sacralization of the future as such. In as much as, despite the protestations and apologetics of the Tantric Vajrayanists, the historical Gautama rejected erotic desire as a snare of Mara, the philosophy of the future that determines the future form of religiosity affirms eros as the volcanic wellspring of creation and contemplation – of contemplation as creation. This is what Zarathustra called Spenta Mainyu and what the Mithraic initiates knew could not be disentangled from the Az or Primordial Concupiscence that seduces Zurvan to become pregnant both with Ohrmazd and with Ahriman.

…The most fundamental problem at the core of Plato’s work, and consequently the essential concern of Philosophy from its foundation in (what remains to us of) recorded history, is the problem of Man’s relationship to the sacred. As I point out in Erosophia, in his book Erotism Georges Bataille wrote that Philosophy cannot comprehend eros or the essence of the erotic. In that book, Bataille also claims that the erotic has the same essence as the sacred. In a truly erotic situation, we are standing in the same relationship to the same object as mystics are. Consequently, this claim that Bataille makes is extremely dangerous. In a way, he is actually saying that Philosophy cannot comprehend the core of Religion.

This brings us back to Plato, specifically to Republic, where Plato argues that the philosopher rulers have to make up a new religion by twisting and changing the folklore and the myths of a culture in order to create what I call a “novel folklore.” They would contrive a religion that would be more conducive to the development of people – and especially of the youth – than the very deleterious extant form of religiosity (in his time, what was epitomized by Hesiod and Homer). The same Plato that, in Symposium, tells us that the only thing that Socrates ever understood is eros, is a Plato who in Republic argues that Philosophy has to establish dominance over religion. If there is to be religion at all in society, it is the philosophers who have to come up with the form of this religion because otherwise the masses are going to believe in a retarded religion and on the basis of that belief philosophers, like Socrates and Pythagoras before him, will be condemned to death by the raging mob.

Recall that Plato not only witnessed the democratic assembly of Athens sentence his mentor, Socrates, to death for “disbelieving in the gods of the State and corrupting the minds of the youth,” but before writing Republic he also went on to become a member of the Pythagorean Order, the founder of which, namely Pythagoras, lost his life from injuries sustained in the burning of the Pythagorean schools by the traditionalist masses in Italy who, among other things, were angry that he was educating women and teaching that what follows death is metempsychosis or reincarnation. Plato himself is eventually almost killed three times in the course of trying to turn the tyrant of Syracuse into a philosopher king. In one of his letters to Dion, the uncle of Dionysus of Syracuse, and his point of contact in the tyrant’s court, Plato claims that no written work exists that sets forth his own philosophical thought. What he means is that all of his dialogues, written in the dramatic style adopted from his own youthful pursuit of a career as a writer of tragic plays, are only exoteric works. He wears masks and speaks through dramatic personae. But there are a few places where we get to peek behind the mask, especially in the drunken Dionysian dialogue Symposium.

Philosophy has to establish dominance over Religion by operating at the same level as the most profound mystical experiences that are the wellspring for the formation of religious systems. It is not enough to have a relation of philia towards Sophia. If one wants to be a philosopher who seeks to challenge the dominance of some established form of religion in society, one has to be in an erotic relationship with Sophia. She has to claim a philosopher, and he (or she) has to accept Her on that level. Only within that extremely dangerous relationship – wherein She can easily destroy him (or her) – can the philosopher come up with a new religious system that can act as a tether or life raft for people who need some kind of religion in order to hold their psyche and their society together. This would be a belief system that is conducive to actually cultivating their ethos and promoting their spiritual growth and eventual flourishing. Not a belief system like the Homeric religion or the many forms of established retardation today, from the Abrahamic faiths to mainstream Hinduism.

Purchase Philosophy of the Future here.