The Portal / Culture Building Update
Thoughts, Summary, Reflections on the Third Philosophy Portal Retreat
The next month in The Portal will focus on the concept of “Futures”, and will include a Concept Cave on “Transhumanism”, The Edge on “Ontological Design” with Daniel Fraga, Thought Lab with Clement Vidal on “Noosphere”, and a Real Talk on “The Torch” with Arran Rogerson. To learn more, or to sign up, see: The Portal.
The next Philosophy Portal course will focus on the concept of Christian Atheism and will include in-depth analysis of German Idealism, Hegelo-Marxism, Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis, Altizer’s Gospel, Zizek’s Philosophy, and Rollins’ Theology. To learn more, or to sign up, see: Christian Atheism.
Philosophy Portal is an online education platform (or even a monastery) dedicated to teaching the foundations of modern discourses. However, Philosophy Portal is also a live event space called The Portal, dedicated to building a living thinking community. One of the principles of Philosophy Portal involves the idea that our creative work needs to engage a digital and physical loop: it is not enough to keep our creative activities online, and at the same time we cannot ignore the powers of the digital dimension that seems here to stay. The digital dimension allows us to connect with virtually anyone in the world without conventional limitations of spacetime, opening up relational dynamics that would have been impossible before the emergence of the internet. At the same time, the ubiquity of the digital-online dimension of life suffocates and drowns us in the imagistic immediacy of a screen-capture, as emphasised by Marxist cultural theorist Anna Kornbluh.1
In an attempt to creatively reinvent using the new tools at our disposal, Philosophy Portal has made possible a new educational learning environment, dedicated to teaching the foundations of modern discourse at the highest possible level. However, this work has also been coupled to the development of “retreat spaces” in physical reality. This past week I led the third official Philosophy Portal retreat dedicated to bringing philosophy to life in an aesthetic setting, coupled with great meals, great company, and a more balanced relation between formal and informal settings. This work is deeply experimental and brings me both to the social edge of my own being, as well as teaches me the importance of why we cannot ignore the physical space to remain human.
In this article I am going to summarise the main focus of this third retreat, the formal aspects of our retreat program, as well as some lessons from The Real which I will be taking forward with me into the future. This retreat, unlike past retreats, attempted to bring to life the structure of The Portal in the physical. That is, we attempted to actualise the four main live event spaces in the physical, those being: Concept Cave, The Edge, Thought Lab, and Real Talk.2 In this way, the third retreat provided the most formally structured retreat space to date, while also keeping this formal structure balanced with a more informal aspect.
(1) Concept Cave: Real Speculations
I led the first Concept Cave with a talk titled Real Speculations. Real Speculations is the tentative title of my next book, and I used the opportunity for a live Concept Cave to outline the main arguments in the Introduction, which justifies the rest of the work. Here I outline the idea that our world historical civilisation, in the first decades of the 21st century, is trying to work out the main dimensions of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This means that world spirit is working through the dimensions of Reason, Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing in real time as major formative dimensions of our intellectual zeitgeist. I see this analysis as what is possible if one dedicates 5+ years to deep study of a fundamental philosophical text and remains committed to applying this lens to the real concrete motion of world spirit. I use concrete embodied examples of leading intellectual figures of our zeitgeist throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Jordan B. Peterson, as examples of world spirit attempting to tarry with the dimensions of Reason (Dawkins), Spirit (Harris), and Religion (Peterson). I furthermore demonstrate how their tensions are fundamentally interconnected and culturally reflective of larger sociohistorical processes. I also use this structure to anticipate the future direction of world spirit in the confrontation with the lack in Religion itself.
(2) Concept Cave: Anthropology
Girardian theorist Thomas Hamelryck led the second Concept Cave.3 In Hamelryck’s work he emphasises the subordination of philosophy to anthropology. Thus, if the first Concept Cave was an explication of concrete philosophical speculation, the second Concept Cave seeks to offer an anthropological perspective that contains philosophy itself. For Hamelryck, we must think about philosophy from the point of view of Girard’s distinctions of ritual and prohibition, or sacred and profane time. When we think anthropology as a dialectic between the two dimensions, we are forced to confront a difficult split in society itself that is necessary in order for society itself to continue. Here ritual is sacred time, it is the time of transgressive ecstasy, breaking of rules and norms, and a space of sex, violence and release. In contrast, prohibition is profane time, it is the time of rules and order and work, it is the space of formal civilisational identity and polite society. The balance between work and play, rules and transgression, order and chaos, can be mapped onto these dimensions to some degree, and getting the relationship right between these two dimensions seems to have, not just a pragmatic importance, but perhaps also an existential importance, i.e. without this balance our societies risk ruin, decay, and destruction. For Hamelryck, we should even view the philosophical enterprise from inside this distinction, with some philosophers writing from the time of the sacred ritual, some philosophers writing from the time of profane prohibition, and some philosophers holding the dialectic between the two.4
(1) The Edge: Hyperhumanism
Media theorist and psychonaut Carl Hayden Smith led the first event at The Edge. Throughout the past few years, Smith has been developing the concept of “Hyperhumanism” at Philosophy Portal.5 In his contribution to the retreat he continued to develop the idea as both an expansion of the notion of humanism, which he claims has been too individualistic and anthropocentric; as well as in opposition to transhumanism, which he claims defines the ideology of our age in an attempt to overcome or escape or exit the human and human experience. For Smith, with Hyperhumanism we are looking to think of the human as an interconnected being with the other kingdoms of life, including bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. He conceives of our being, our actual bodies, as including within themselves all the other kingdoms, and that if we do not conceive of ourselves as interconnected with all other beings, we undermine our own bodily foundations. He has also been driven to emphasise that the transhuman is equal to Nietzsche’s “last man”, and that it is a drive to comfort, security and safety against the adventure and the mess of being human. In this way the hyperhuman invites struggle, difficulty, challenge, and most importantly, an openness and a collision and confrontation with the other. In this way, we have to overcome both the humanistic centric perspective on the individual and the transhuman transcendence of the human by way of a new found capacity to open ourselves to the other human.
(2) The Edge: Future Finance
Member of The Portal David Weinstein developed the second session at The Edge with a focus on future finance. For Weinstein, his expertise and background is in finance and business, but his interest and calling towards philosophy has forced him to think the intersection between his work in finance and business with his interest and calling to philosophy. His work emphasises that we need to learn to invest in the dimension of lack as the dimension that escapes reduction to both artificial intelligence and capitalism, which try to fill or erase lack, either with machinic algorithms or with profit maximisation. For Weinstein, it is the lack that makes us human, inclusive of all the mess, as well as our necessity to open to the other in their lack. He is also thinking of our society as in the midst of a systematic paradigm shift towards decentralised finance and a movement away from central banks as intermediaries between human individuals. Thus, he conceives of the future as much more distributed where people have a more direct control over financial transactions. While his ideas are still speculative and fuzzy, his project reminds us that when we think of our society as in the midst of a major transition, we ourselves, our actions, are the very material of the next system. In daring to go into the lack, into the unknown, we cannot predict the future, but we can create it.
(1) Thought Lab: Spirit Science
Dimitri Crooijmans leads off his first ever Thought Lab with a presentation on Spirit Science. Crooijmans attempts to teach us Spirit Science through his own being as an experimental process (applying scientific principles not only to substance, but also to subject, following Hegel). He gives us a window into his own intellect and his emerging system of thought as a whole in reflecting to us his drive and journey since starting to write philosophy with Philosophy Portal.6 This work starts for Crooijmans with applying Hegel’s method to the real life context of his self-experimentation with tantric sexuality. In tantric sexuality you are encouraged to avoid ejaculation or clitoral stimulation, and instead to learn to stay with the intensities of sexual energy to embody a deeper level of relationality with the other. For Crooijmans, this experimentation has led to the self-discovery that we cannot directly get at sex, but rather must learn to sublimate sexuality itself, as art and through comedy, towards the work of love. This line or drive of thinking from sex to love offers us the direct and embodied examples of how we might think of our being itself as a given contradiction (sexuality) and that through sublimation, we are challenged with a reflective free choice, to embody the monstrous contradiction of love itself.
(2) Thought Lab: Terence Blake
Professor of philosophy, and author of Agent Swarm blog, Terence Blake, also joined us as a special guest for the second Thought Lab.7 In Blake’s session he introduced us to a philosophical investigation of the relationship between Lacan and Deleuze in a creative re-reading of the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? Here Blake is putting to work his own personal philosophical project of developing a meta-ontology committed to a deep ontological pluralism which finds connections between thinkers that are usually conceived of as opposites. In his session he analyses line by line the opening paragraph of What Is Philosophy? and puts it into conversation with Lacan’s graph of desire. There are many fruitful interconnections that result from Blake’s meta-ontological project, and at the same time, many connections about how far we can push synergy between traditionally opposed thinkers, for example, the relation between Lacan and Deleuze on questions of desire, drive, philosophy and psychoanalysis. However, the results of Blake’s work also help us to interpret contemporary Žižekian philosophy, which has found a way to bridge dialogue between the two thinkers.
(1/2) Real Talk: Sex Work and Power
While not-recorded, we also hosted sessions for Real Talk with Lina Quarto and Jurij Jukic, with the first session led by Quarto orbiting the question of Sex Work, and the second session led by Jukic orbiting the question of Power. In the first session, we encounter many questions about the tension in sex work related to sex and capitalism, as well as sex and power, and specifically the dizzying inversions of the master-slave dialectic that appear (who is the master? who is the slave?), especially in BDSM styles of sex work. In the second session, Jukic sought to provoke us on the questions of the age-old relation between philosophy and politics, specifically in regards to the tendency of philosophy towards pure ideality disconnected from the world, and the tendency of politics towards unreflective manipulation and exploitation. Here we seek to embody in the work at Philosophy Portal a drive where philosophy is not afraid to get its hands dirty (so to speak) in the political real; but also where we seek to investigate the way in which the political real can benefit from philosophical speculation and cognition.
After Retreat Reflections: The Real
While the formal events certainly opened a lot of new ideas and perspectives, as well as demonstrated the capacity for the structure of The Portal to express itself creatively in a physical setting, when we make the move towards the physical embodiment of space, we always and seemingly inevitable encounter the mess that is being human. What I am learning as I continue to experiment with these styles of events and processes, is that we really need to work more actively and carefully with the distinction between the space of sacred ritual and the space of profane prohibition. If we do not relate to these dimensions properly then the entire space can be destroyed and undermined. This is not simple problem, and it is also a problem as old as human society itself. These retreats aim for both a high level of academic rigor and clarity, while also aiming for a new way to relate, commit, and connect. There are not many good models out there of organisations that are aiming to do both well and at the same time.
Connected to this, there is a deep learning experience in what it means to be a leader, but also what it means to develop a leadership structure. This raises issues about how to properly communicate with other leaders in the space about our goals, intents, and strategies for diffusing conflict well when it inevitably arises. This also raises issues about sexual difference and perhaps also including more explicitly into the leadership structure the balance of feminine and masculine energies into the structure itself.
While the details of these dimensions require further discussion and explication in more private settings, it is enough to share here that even if you make mistakes in the attempt to develop physical spaces from originally online relations, the effort is always worth it. We learn from mistakes, and mistakes are the very source of knowledge about truth.
Onwards and upwards!
Formal recordings of all these events are available exclusively for members of The Portal.
There is an attempt at The Portal to institute a “professorship”, and this includes participants at the retreat such as Thomas Hamelryck and Carl Hayden Smith.
He offers this perspective in his contribution to the second Philosophy Portal anthology, Abyssal Arrows, see: Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s Tantra and Girard’s Sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 171-205. (link) (note: members of The Portal get free PDF access to all of our publications).
See: Smith, C.H. 2023. Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 547-574.
See: Crooijmans, D. 2022. Hegelian Tantra: Edging the Absolute. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 107-132.; Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.; Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.
Blake has been following my work on Zizek since 2017, and you can find our first public conversation here: DELEUZIAN-ZIZEKIAN BRIDGE CONCEPTS.
Excellent update, Cadell, and the work and tarrying with negativity that Philosophy Portal is doing is invaluable. If we can't face these tensions, nothing we're doing can be Real. Again, well done.