Esmé Partridge
@EsmeLKPartridge
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23. MPhil Philosophy of Religion at @Cambridge_Uni . Words in @TheCriticMag , @FirstThingsMag , @UnHerd and others
London / Cambridge
Joined June 2012
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One of the reasons young people struggle so much with mental health nowadays is because there is a crisis of authority in society - no one actually tells them how to live well, with any suggestion of a normative or “right” way of doing things being deemed problematic
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There’s a specific type of English eccentric (lives in a mansion block in Bloomsbury, has a PhD in Buddhist studies) that’s going to die out with the boomers and honestly it makes me kind of sad
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@enzoriverss
Don’t listen to this. It’s exactly the mindset that capitalism thrives upon, preying on the vulnerability of selfhood & sucking out the inherent magic of being alive. There are opportunities to be excited about at every age, don’t let this postmodern nihilism make you forget that
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What I find offensive about the metaverse and other attempts to ‘augment’ reality is their ingratitude towards the world we were already given - the world we tore up and replaced with concrete, now to decide we want to forge something even more inhuman in the name of progress.
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Insisting that people will be happy if they just do whatever they feel like is not loving. It’s also a sentiment that has so obviously been exploited by capitalism since the 60s: a society that promotes unrestrained self-actualisation is the ideal consumer society
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Instead they have nothing to guide them except deceptive inner monologues and colourful infographics made by San Francisco designers with no life experience telling them “you do you”, “it’s okay to be lazy”, “it’s okay to be selfish” on their instagram feeds
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The secularisation of mental health has meant that we too often misdiagnose (or at least fail to fully account for) conditions which are so clearly of a spiritual as well as psychological nature
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Islamic philosophers like Ibn Rushd were well aware of what happens when religious authorities assume too much power and become tyrannical. Speaking of the ‘Imam-state’ of the Almohad Caliphate, he said:
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And so people end up making mistakes and suffering consequences that could have been prevented had they been given actual advice acquired over centuries of culture and tradition (Scruton’s “answers that have been discovered to enduring questions”)
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But tradition alone is not enough - it needs to be embodied. We need teachers, counsellors, priests, etc. who are personally invested in our self-betterment and can tell us when we are doing things wrong from a place of love
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Coming to appreciate how important it is for children to memorise seemingly random facts and information at school. It can feel pointless at the time but learning the names of trees, clouds, elements etc. off by heart really enriches your thinking and writing in later life
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In all seriousness, STEM graduates would probably offer much more in the way of positive innovation if their courses were philosophically engaged. The bitter divorce of the sciences and the humanities has, among other things, weakened our ability to see things holistically...
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When you think about the fact that our culture has effectively given up on the prospect of the afterlife, it’s not surprising to see these attempts to simulate a kind of heaven on earth.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains his “Metaverse” virtual world concept, which he says is about “connecting with people.”
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We always hear about the Europeans who, under the spell of orientalism, saw Islam as a backwards despotic religion. But we rarely hear about the deists and unitarians who were in positive awe of its theology for hundreds of years…
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It’s interesting how, in the West at least, both sides of the political spectrum have taken to adopting religion as a mere cultural or identity marker rather than as a sincere set of worldview-informing beliefs...
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It’s also a dichotomy that contradicts so much of Western philosophy itself. From Plato and Eusebius to Maimonides and Al-Farabi, the consensus was that reason (conceived as divine nous) points to the same truth as religion. The idea that they are opposed is very modern indeed
The opposition of religion and reason was not diagnosed but invented by the modern West. The religious/secular distinction is a modern invention that directly parallels the invention of the modern state.
– William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 226
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The Wicker Man is a misunderstood film.
On the surface, the Christian policeman Sgt Howie seems to represent the modern establishment, while the people of Summerisle appear as noble savages following the ancient ways of their ancestors; a dichotomy embraced by pagans today...
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Thrilled to announce that I will begin studying at the University of Cambridge for my MPhil in the Philosophy of Religion later this year!
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The fact that the paradigm of the polymath (mastery of many subjects) has been lost to the idea of the ‘Jack of all trades’ (master of none) sums up how integrative education has been abandoned out of the modern belief that we can each have only one ‘specialism’/‘profession’...
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That combination of being both staunchly grounded in one’s own culture but intellectually curious about others, in some ways radical but unconsciously traditional, doesn’t really emerge these days
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Witches ‘hexing’ Allāh is obviously sacrilegious in the literal sense, but what is particularly profane is their reduction of the creator to just another deity in a postmodern pantheon who can be ‘summoned’ on demand...
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One of the reasons I intuitively hate ChatGPT is its erasure of personal idiolect. It’s the little sayings and mannerisms of an author which bring writing to life - lose that to a homogenised mass of dead letters and you lose the very essence of expression
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Plato said that listening to a certain amount of music softens the mind ‘as iron softens in a furnace’ causing it to become workable and creative, but too much causes it to melt and lose its spirit. I think a case can be made for there being too much music in the modern world
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The danger of smartphones is getting trapped inside what Heraclitus called the ‘idios kosmos’ (private world) instead of being in the ‘koinos kosmos’ (common world) of the Logos
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Secular people will often use religious language when faced with the death of a loved one. Is this because the experience brings out the latent religiosity within all of us, or because secular society just doesn’t contemplate mortality enough to have its own language for it?
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An unfortunate outcome of the culture war is that conservatives have become fixated on free speech as an intrinsic good in itself. They focus more on the right to say anything than what is worth saying, forgetting that which freedom should ultimately aspire towards...
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One of the most perplexing things about western civ is that its most revolutionary movements - Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment - were avowed attempts to go *back* to the past, i.e., to the supposed purity of ancient sources
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My favourite books published this year were undoubtedly these two by Karim Lahham and Hasan Spiker. Both offer fascinating insights into the nature of first principles and objective truth in Islam, drawing on an impressive range of sources. Highly recommend!
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This kind of conspiratorial thinking is so ridiculous. It’s like anything recurring or ubiquitous has to be part of a man-made plot, and couldn’t possibly be a reflection of something conceptually / metaphysically universal. It’s really a hyper-modern worldview in that sense
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My paper ‘The Gnostic Pearl in Syriac Christianity, Islam and Beyond’ features in the latest Temenos Academy Review!
It traces the symbolism of pearls from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas to early monastic writings, Islamic mysticism and Sufi poetry.
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Aggressive secularism is not only that, it’s also the imposition of a particular modern (and Western) ideology onto the world’s traditional cultures and belief systems - which is why it’s ironic when progressives (who want to decolonise everything) support it.
Aggressive secularism is an undisguised attempt to marginalise religion in the public sphere. -
@RealStephenKerr
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The idea that religion could be given a software update with artificial intelligence seems partly to come from the deception that AI is itself a transcendent innovation - at first glance, it does seem to offer an almost mystical overcoming of the world…
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‘A society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, therefore we label those people as fundamentalists or fanatics…that’s a measure of how much we’ve become isolated and atomised rather than of their inherent strength’ - Bill Durodié
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My paper 'The Celestial Polished Mirror: The Mystical Dimension of the Moon According to Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi' has been published in Volume 68 of the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society!
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‘The boomer rebellion against Christianity and attempts to modernise the church are themselves becoming outdated. It is now re-enchantment which holds subcultural value.’
Me on the Canterbury cathedral disco for
@unherd
:
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Quite stunned by what Nietzsche had to say about Islam:
‘Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilisation, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilisation…
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Many of the young people studying psychology today would probably have chosen theology 100 years ago. Partly owing to the quasi-mystical naturalism of Jung, they see it as allowing them to probe the mysteries of the unseen in a way that is more ‘scientific’ (>’superstitious’).
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I've often wondered if classical liberalism's main flaw is its reliance on unsaid premises. It's a similar thing with Locke: he (naively) just assumed that people would exercise liberty in accordance with basic Christian morals
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CS Lewis made such a good point in The Abolition of Man about how technology leaves future generations worse off because it removes the need to hone practical skills and so their ability to innovate for themselves. Gen-Zs are absolutely victims of this
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I'm currently writing my diss on digital spirituality (esp witchcraft on TikTok) and have found the anti-Christian sentiment to be astounding; Gen-Zs have fully embraced the 'spirituality = good, religion = bad' dichotomy and, most strikingly, see them as wholly irreconcilable...
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Next week, I will be giving a talk for the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism on 'Platonism, Perennialism, Pluralism: What is King Charles III's Philosophy?'
Friday 3rd March at 4pm in the Divinity Faculty and online!
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Very excited to share my first article for
@RenovatioOnline
, the journal of
@ZaytunaCollege
, where I analyse postmodern spirituality in a ‘liquid’ world through the lens of traditional Islamic metaphysics:
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Al-Kindī defined philosophy as ‘the knowledge of things as they are’ (bi-haqa’iqiha), which would mean that Kant - who denied that we can ever know things as they are (ding an sich) - was not actually a philosopher
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If you take the Platonic view that the soul is naturally inclined toward the Good, then the role of authority should be to inspire that process - to draw out what is already there within - rather than impose it by brute force
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Looks like what Ritzer called 'the globalisation of nothing' - to succeed in a global market, brands have to eliminate any particularities which might appeal to some but not all. So the unique becomes generic, the humanised becomes dehumanised...the enchanted becomes disenchanted
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A chasm between traditional religion and occult spirituality is that one is epistemically humble (acknowledges and values the limits of human knowledge) whereas the other is epistemically hubristic (attempts to know everything, and then manipulate it)...
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This St. Augustine quote reminds me of the following from Al-Ghazālī:
‘The lights of knowledge will shine forth from inside of the heart. It is easier to draw water from the surface of the earth by digging canals than it is to bring it from a distant place’.
'Do not go outside, return into yourself; truth resides in the inner man.' - Augustine
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What is conservatism without some kind of religious underpinning? If first principles are overwritten and eternal values tarnished, then what is it actually trying to conserve (other than a previous version of liberalism from forty years ago)?...
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I actually love this because it sums up my transition from being into astrology as a teenager (not that I don’t still find it interesting) to becoming a monotheist
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So in theory Islam should be opposed to tyranny - even if it happens in the name of the faith - because it elevates the human will above God’s, which corrupts even those with ‘priestly’ intentions. At least, this was Ibn Rushd’s view (which seems pretty relevant right now)
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They belong to two distinct faculties; faith comes from the supra-sensory intuitions of the soul, while delusion comes from the contingent sense organs and the mind.
(Kudos to this atheist account for accidentally raising a genuinely good epistemological question).
Where does one draw the line between faith and delusion?
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There’s a lot of hostility towards religious street preachers and I wonder if that’s bc people
a) just don’t like the shouty style of proselytism or
b) feel threatened to hear anything to do with sin, the afterlife or that which is greater than themselves in the public square...
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Illustrations from the 13th century mystic Ramon Llull's Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, depicting how Jews, Christians and Muslims draw from the same “trees of virtue”
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In other words, Summerisle’s paganism is an offshoot of Victorian capitalism - something which turns out to be historically accurate when you consider that, for example, Wicca was invented by a bourgeois Englishman in the 1950s
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Despite articulating it through the language of communism, SL’s anti-family stance is just capitalist individualism on steroids. It also projects her secular Western biases onto the ontology of the family, trying to ‘abolish’ something that is sacred to myriad cultures & faiths.
"Me and my friends can only be happy if we're allowed to destroy what makes life worth living for the other 95% of the population" is not a great position.
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Even if Foucault’s worldview is as nihilistic and spiritually impoverished as it’s made out to be (which it is), theists can still find some sympathy in his critiques of knowledge production - in particular, his attack on modern, Western knowledge…
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I love that feeling of anamnesis when you suddenly grasp the meaning of a difficult philosophical text and you experience a kind of noetic ‘clicking’ like that of Meno solving the geometry puzzle (realising knowledge that was already within you a priori)…
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Regardless of where you stand on the issue at hand, this is a perfect example of how liberal tolerance will only extend to religions once they’ve traded in theological authenticity for conformity with the status quo.
The American right is obsessed with curbing abortion rights for religious reasons. The problem? Not all religions are opposed to abortion. Also, women are people.
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I have officially graduated from
@SOAS
with a First class BA in Religion....
...and just started my new job as an Interfaith Coordinator for a social consultancy which I am really excited about!
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Currently reading about William Whiston, the Newtonian mathematician, Arian heretic and fellow Clare student whose attempt to scientifically verify every detail of the Bible led him to locate hell inside a comet. He literally thought when you go to hell you get blasted into space
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My essay ‘Spirituality in the Postmodern World’ in
@RenovatioOnline
, the (gorgeously presented!) journal of
@zaytunacollege
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My first piece in
@TheCriticMag
on goblin mode, the death of Ideals, and why progressivism loathes Plato:
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E.g. depression isn’t just a chemical imbalance but an affliction of the soul - it impairs your vision such that you cannot see beauty, inhibits your intellectual curiosity such that you cannot noetically ascend,
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Interesting but almost kind of sad that we need data to prove that exercise and fresh air improve mental function? It's as if the connection between body and mind is no longer intuitive
If you are out of ideas, go for a walk.
This paper found walking (whether outdoors or a treadmill) increased key types of creative thinking for over 80% of undergraduates. The reasons are not fully clear, but there seem to be direct effects on the brain.
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This is what happens to spirituality when objectivity has collapsed into relativism; God becomes reduced to one of many entities to be carelessly invoked at the command of human will (considered, as it is made quite clear here, to be infinitely more important than Divine will).
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TikTok libs Ethno-nationalists
🤝
Glorifying ahistorical reconstructions
of paganism on the internet
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‘The similarity between the ‘priestly’ and the tyrannical states often leads the ‘priestly’ parts that exist in these states to be transformed into tyrannical ones, thus bringing into disrepute him whose aim is ‘priestly’’
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In Colin Campbell’s book ‘the Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism’, he claims - contra Weber - that modern capitalism resulted not from Protestantism, but rather the 18th century romantic turn towards self-actualisation; the same turn that powered the pagan revival
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So, The Wicker Man is a genius film because it points to this paradox: modern neopaganism may appear to be anti-modern and anti-establishment, but really is wedded to both of these things. The reality is a reversal of how the dichotomy is usually perceived;
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Here he was drawing on Plato, but Plato’s critique of how authorities become corrupt seems perfectly compatible with Islam - if no one is equal to God, then no one should try to emulate His omnipotence by attempting to exert their will over the whole of society.
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I'd also add that it's not only beauty itself that renders the conclusion of a creator, but the very fact that we are able to /perceive/ that beauty.
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Mindfulness was never going to last long. Without anything to venerate or an authentically spiritual state to attain (as in actual Buddhism), doesn’t it get boring after a while? You can only so far inward when the substrate is secular
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Autocorrect trying to impose its scientistic dogma onto me
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The Taliban's ministry of vice and virtue sounds like something out of Plato's Republic and yet is effectively anti-Platonic, trying to enforce the good through bureaucratic force rather than pedagogy or actually nourishing the soul
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Whilst studying religion (not theology), I have often found it strange how reluctant the discipline is to take actual religious beliefs seriously. Constructivist approaches which treat religions as no more than sociocultural artefacts are unanimously accepted as the default…
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Many have observed the cultural impermanence of our current epoch - generation rent, TikTok trends changing by the hour, etc - but rarely is this seen in relation to metaphysical impermanence, i.e. the demise of Platonic forms and indifference toward eternity.
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I wrote for
@unherd
about the growing allegiance of Islam and the online Right, how it compares to so-called 'Islamo-Leftism' and what it tells us about the predicament of religious individuals in the culture war:
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Lord Summerisle is in fact the embodiment of bourgeois hedonism - the ethos of the modern establishment - while Howie is the real subversive who refuses to give into the islanders' decadent ways
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On Rue Saint Victor, the former site of the Abbey of Saint Victor - a major centre of medieval mysticism and later Renaissance humanism in Paris
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If you look at societies lead by polymaths, e.g. the Islamic Golden Age, their intellectual & scientific output was so prolific precisely bc knowledge itself was imbued with reverence and a desire to understand the world qua creation as a whole, thus they became ‘masters of all’.
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Among those seeking to revive traditional values in the West, there is a tendency to glorify the ‘high culture’ of European aristocracy. This is understandable insofar that classical art and architecture evoke the beauty that modern society has forgotten, however...
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On the the 50th anniversary of the film, I wrote about this for
@TheCriticMag
, in the latest print edition and online:
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Much of contemporary ‘spirituality’ is orientated around the experience of physical and cerebral sensations such as ecstasy, hallucinations and altered states of consciousness (a form of which, known as ‘Reality Shifting’, has recently become popular on TikTok)...
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Francis Bacon’s description of the mind as ‘an uneven mirror receiving rays from things and merging its own nature with [their nature], which thus distorts it’ is remarkably akin to the Sufi idea of ‘polishing the mirror’ - only once we are not tarnished can we reflect the truth
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Somehow satisfying to see science come back around to ancient theological problems
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‘The future brings us nothing…it is we who have to give it everything. But to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past…of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than the past’ - Simone Weil
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I’ve always wanted to start a matchmaking site for Neoplatonists with the slogan ‘helping you find The One’
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It signifies a metaphysical inversion characteristic of witchcraft, wherein humans believe not only that they are entitled to manipulate nature and their fate - an anthropocentric, Enlightenment ideal - but also that they can ‘slay’ God along with all that He represents.
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E.g. the deist Henry Stubbe saw Islam as a return to a ‘primitive monotheism’ which he felt Trinitarian Christianity had corrupted, and the Prophet Muhammad’s mission as a way to restore ‘the old Religion, not to introduce a new one’.
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You can understand why religions have historically prohibited astrology - it’s not because there isn’t any truth in it (e.g. for Al-Kindī, the stars are ‘proximate agents’ of Divine command), but rather because it lures people into worshipping creation rather than the Creator.
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A small detail in one of the dialogues, however, reveals that paganism was actually introduced to the island in the 19th century. Lord Summerisle tells Howie that his Grandfather, a Victorian agronomist, promoted it in the interests of yielding bountiful harvests
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We often associate ‘uprootedness’ with cities, but being back in my parents’ village - where they don’t know any of the new neighbours and the local newsletter has stopped running - makes it clear that the social atomisation of this stage of modernity is prevalent everywhere…
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