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NEGATIVE SPACE DENVER
A think tank of the absurd. Philosophical gatherings. Pro-free association. Topics generated by our members. Building philosophies.
"It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening."
- David Lynch
Upcoming events
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The Philosophy of Aleister Crowley: The Will as Law
Hogshead Brewery, 4460 W 29th Ave, Denver, CO, USHey all,
You might have saw that we experienced the first day of Winter last Tuesday. We rescheduled for this upcoming week. Here's Nick's write-up:
The Philosophy of Aleister Crowley: The Will as Law
This week we'll be discussing a figure who has been well known for over a century now, the English occultist, writer, mountaineer, and religious leader, Aleister Crowley. Nowadays, Crowley is best known by those artists, mostly 20th Century musicians, through whom he long ago entered pop culture as a scandalous and controversial figure. And while much of this image from his association with counter-cultural popular music paints him in a purely contrarian and often satanic light, I think that it's worth taking a look at Crowley as an artist and philosopher in his own right, and in his own words. However, a full dive into Crowley's lifetime of writings and actions; traversing through fiction, poetry, essays on magick practice, religion, tarot, the occult, troves of correspondences, claimed oracular and divinely inspired work, espionage for the British government, emigre life and deportation from Italy under Mussolini, and his various business to spread Thelema, his religious doctrine, to many corners of the world; would be far too much to chew on in our formal hour. For this reason, I'd like to focus specifically on Crowley's core doctrines of Thelema, and their relationships to philosophy as we've discussed it so far. These core doctrines, from his Book of the Law, are as follows:
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law",
and,
"Love is the law, love under will."
These two maxims were, as Crowley claims, channeled through him in a mystical experience, when he was called by Horus' herald Aiwass, after spending a night in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza, to receive the Book of the Law and record it for one hour of each of the next three days until it was completed. Whether we believe this story of Crowley's is beside the point, as the work itself has to my mind an interesting metaphysics and of course the very interesting, and quite variously interpretable, ethics tied to it in the above two maxims. I'll leave a link to the full text of the work below which contains a very helpful summarizing introduction, but I'll cite a passage here to illustrate the style and ideas that Crowley was playing with, or being possessed by:
"Nu! the hiding of Hadit. Come! all ye, and learn the secret that hath not yet been revealed. I, Hadit, am the complement of Nu, my bride. I am not extended, and Khabs is the name of my House. In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found.
Yet she shall be known & I never. Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle. ‘Come unto me’ is a foolish word: for it is I that go."
Crowley obviously goes pretty far afield from our more rigorous philosophizing with his ecstatic metaphysics of Nu (or Nuit) the goddess and divine embodiment of all empty space. Who is contrasted and married with Hadit, the singular point and primordial god which traverses all possible points upon Nuit, upon all points in space, the interplay of the two giving animation to the world. And it might still be difficult to see why Crowley would be of relevance to a discussion of philosophy.
What captured my interest about Crowley years ago is his list of "Gnostic Saints" which he formalized shortly after this work and the birth of Thelema as a religious organization. The Gnostic Saints are pretty self-explanatory by the name, figures who Crowley, voracious reader that he was, identified as proto-Thelemites, perhaps much like Christian views on figures like Plato. This list opens Crowley's artistic and philosophical currents much more directly than any of his occult texts.
It includes figures such as: Paul Gauguin, Richard Wagner, Goethe, William Blake, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Jakob Böhme, Pope Alexander VI, Paracelsus, Christian Rosenkreutz, Catullus, Pythagoras, and of course since I'm presenting this one, Friedrich Nietzsche. Crowley was actually one of the earlier-known English language readers of Nietzsche, likely even before he was a student of philosophy at Cambridge from 1895–1898, while Nietzsche was still alive. And I think the influence of Nietzsche's work, especially upon their shared terminology of "Will", offers a route into Crowley's thinking that opens it up to exploration and critique from a philosophical perspective which was rarely expressed in his writings, and even more rarely present in the religious and aesthetic followers who ultimately carried his legacy to us today. Crowley's pithiest quote on Nietzsche is the simple: "Read Nietzsche!", and he called Nietzsche "almost an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom".
These statements to me, in conjunction with his adroit list of gnostic saints and his educational background in philosophy itself, suggest that a philosophical engagement with Crowley's thought is far from afield of its origins and intentions, and may even offer a more acute view of what exactly the man was trying to get at with his writings, consistently outlandish acts/experiments, and construction of a religious order, which in his life never seemed to quite satisfy him.
Some initial questions about how we might read Crowley's maxims:
If “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", what, if anything, distinguishes one’s “True Will” from mere desire, impulse, or self-deception? Are those things really ‘mere’?
Is the creation of a novel religious system a valid philosophical endeavor? Does Crowley leave philosophy behind, does he step over what philosophy can do?
Would we call Crowley a philosopher?
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