Kali Tribune

Category: Essay

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Essay / Knowledge

A Touch of Reality: Life as ἐνέργειᾰ, pt.1

“You don’t have to be religious … it’s just common sense” – one often sees this kind of preface to arguments against practices sometimes branded as fruits of what is sometimes called “culture of death”. But is this so? Compromise is unavoidable in political struggle, but can there be a compromise between mind and reality? In this two parts essay we’ll argue in favor of the negative answer. We take an example of the most consequent form of advocating for equality of death and life – the advocacy for the institutionalized euthanasia – and attempt to show how it runs directly contrary to primary act of knowledge – that most obvious, yet rarely examined, state of mind we call “being in touch with reality”. In the first part we examine the notion of reality and life as forms of ἐνέργειᾰ and why modern system based thinking, which is the presupposition of most modern and postmodern political debates about religious and metaphysical issues, runs counter to it and can never touch, let alone grasp, it.  

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Essay / Knowledge

In the Ending of the Year

A poignant yet for this reason truly merry Christmas to all KT readers courtesy of Mihai Marinescu

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Essay / Knowledge

Re-enchantment of the world: The state of amnesia, Part 2

In the second part of his series of essays, Mihai puts forward one of the most important subjects one could think of, although it occurs surprisingly rarely: that of memory and the struggle between oblivion and recollection. In the Christian Tradition the faculty of memory is being traditionally understood as a sort of backdoor for the divine influence – aptly so, because we tend to forget about having it throughout our daily lives – and “thief in the night” rarely enters the house through the front door. Mihai draws our attention to some traditional notions about memory as such and the nature of its object and then proceed to explain why the proper use of this faculty is essential for overcoming the perils posed by essential flaws in human nature.

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Essay / Knowledge

The Word of Old: Tradition, Revelation and the Impossibility of Revolution (pt. 2)

We present second part in the series on relationship of Christianity and high culture of antiquity, summarized in the notion of the palaios logos. Here, by interpreting one remarkable passage from Origen’s classical apologetic work Contra Celsum, we draw some distinctions in understanding of time, knowledge of future, human conscience and the relationship of God to man that are unique for Christianity. Our inquiry leads us before the specific problem – a pitfall most characteristic of our own age: human urge to posses the knowledge of the future, which will be treated in detail in the third part of the series. 

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Essay / Knowledge

Re-enchantment of the World, Part 1: A Feeling of Claustrophobia

In the first part of the series of essays Mihai provides us with a unique approach to a unique pathway to knowledge – symbolism. While the use of symbol as such is not unknown to our day and age, Kali Tribune’s Ministry of Metaphysical Discernment, Semiology and Apophatic Affairs will aptly demonstrate just what level of difference there is between what modernity and Tradition understand as symbol.

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Essay / Knowledge

An Incommunicable Given, Pt. 1

It is often said that dignity of person is in itself the greatest moral “given”; that person is “a purpose unto itself” (Kant); that it is inviolable “given” of humanity. And so on and so forth, from the popular moralizing to the real basis of legislature, this perpetually used, yet rarely pondered upon notion strikes us as something that should be the most comprehensible and closest thing to our minds, but, on closer inspection, it is hard to be sure where it really stems from and how we came to understand it as a self evident “given”. In this two parts essay we’ll inquire about the origin of this “given” in the singular event in history when, quite literary, the “given” was handed to us, while employing help of our regular assortment of traditional authorities. In the first part we treat metaphysics that can prepare the mind for the approach to the heart of the matter, beyond the subject/object split, but that can nevertheless take us only one part of the way. Also we juxtapose the traditional understanding of the relationship of intellect and being against Immanuel Kant’s idea of “transcendental philosophy”, which could be understood as an epitome of all attacks on metaphysics, by metaphysics, in modernity.

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Analysis / Essay

Casual Malificence

On principle we don’t speculate about the obvious crisis de jour. But, then again, why let the good crisis go to waste? In her short, but poignant, reflection on the reaction of a doomsday cultist, whose cult lost the undue attention it had literary over night, Deirdre makes the point we should keep in mind.

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Essay / Miscellanea

Miscellanea: The Fractured Mirror

We continue our regular Miscellanea series with an opening passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and ask: what knowledge is the good knowledge and why Science Fiction could very well serve as the modern compensation for the lack of it.