Kali Tribune

Tagged: revolution

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Analysis / Podcast / Politics

Hard to be a God

We all heard so much about infantile masses, of an ability to hide in the anonymous mass - in a word: the first association we tend to get when we think in terms of mass man is irresponsibility. However, rarely do we hear anything about equally deprived mass responsibility; rarely, of course, except on Kali Tribune. 

In this podcast we'll address the subject of the flip side of popular power - popular responsibility as exemplified by idea, prevalent among the masses, that every problem and indeed everything occurring in this world is due to man or, more precisely, average man.

To demonstrate the absurdity of this notion and some of its possible roots, we'll employ the help Joseph de Maistre, with the special focus on ideas from his essay On the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, most eminently his insight into impossibility of creating the a priori legislature and the inferiority of written, i.e. systematized, laws and the impossibility of sovereignty coming from below.

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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. 

2

Essay / Knowledge

The Word of Old: Tradition, Revelation and the Impossibility of Revolution (pt. 1)

It is said that "Christianity is against human nature". Well, if you think that unspoken reason for saying this was originally: "because it prevents people of wanting to conquer and shag each other, thus at the same time deadening their more creative impulses", you would be quite wrong. The original intellectual objections to Christianity came from people who denounced Christians for rejecting the palaios logos - "the word of old" - that is, ancient metaphysical tradition and civilization built around it, and thus ushering a sort of, what we would now call, a revolutionary new beginning. In this series of essays we'll attempt to indicate not only how and why this was a fundamental misunderstanding, but how Christians who in turn unequivocally rejected the proverbial "Athens" for the sake of absolute - in fact: isolated - "Jerusalem" committed quite a congenial mistake.