Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - Skull Crowned With Snakes And Flowers, 1930

Henry Weston Keen (1899-1935) - Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers, 1930

illustration for John Webster's 'The Duchess of Malfi'

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The philosopher’s stone stands at the culmination of a series of distillations that lead with ever-greater purity toward an absolute, undiluted state. Whoever possesses the stone no longer needs chemical analysis. We can think of this relationship as traversing a series of gardens where each surpasses the one before it. In each succeeding one, the colors and forms become richer and more luminous. Abundance necessarily reaches its limits at the point when it can no longer be enhanced. Then qualitative changes appear, which both simplify and conceptualize. In this way, the colors gradually become brighter, then as translucent as gems as they lose their tint and ultimately transmute into colorless clarity. The forms increase into ever-higher and simpler relationships, recapitulating the forms of crystals, circles, and orbs, ultimately eliminating the tension between periphery and center. At the same time, the demarcated areas and differences merge as fruit and blossom, light and shadow are transformed into higher entities. We emerge from this abundance into its source as we enter the glass-walled treasury rooms.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 May 1943

We live life merely at its edge: it is but a battlefield where the struggle for life is fought. It is a remote fort, hastily built in the dimension of the citadel into which we shall retreat in death.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 8 March 1942

“It is important to bear in mind that the ‘world,’ the 'domain of all domains,’ 'that which is unequal to itself,’ 'unprethinkable Being,’ 'the absolute,’ etc., are always already part of the cobweb of predicates. This means that inconsistency is not a state of affairs, a primordial nameless tohubohu in the beginning happily waiting to be ordered by the divine word. It rather co-originates with logical space as such.”

— Markus Gabriel, ‘The Mythological Being of Reflection’ 

Conversations among men should be conducted like those among gods, among invulnerable beings. To duel with ideas is to use swords of the intellect that cut through matter without pain or effort. The deeper the cut, the purer the enjoyment. In such intellectual encounters, one must be indestructible.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 30 November 1941

“…Being itself is the source of contingency. Being is nothing other than a side effect of the transfinite, nontotalizable plurality of fields of sense. Being, thus, is not conceived in terms of something given in advance, it is not some metaphysical entity behind or beyond appearance. There is no underlying reality, because there is only a plurality of fields of sense. […] Being is manifold. However, this plurality is not quantifiable, but is rather a plurality of fields of sense, each which simulates an origin, hints at something that cannot be given to any particular field of sense.”

— Markus Gabriel, ‘Transcendental Ontology'