John G. Bennett (1897–1974)

It is hard to know where to begin with a book like this. As a review on another printing mentions, Bennett takes all of human knowledge as his purview, so it is rather expansive.

To back up: Bennett has over fifty books to his name, many of them collected transcriptions of talks he gave over his lifetime, many published posthumously. The Dramatic Universe is an exception to this trend: it is a saga written explicitly in the form of a book. Volume IV is the final volume.

This book's subtitle is called "History," but the vast majority of the book focuses on what historians would refer to as "pre-history," and also focuses a lot on metaphysics.

The heart of the book is a force that Bennett refers to as demiurges—intelligences that are lesser than God or the Creator, but seemingly infinitely more all-knowing than humanity. Bennett makes the case for demiurgic intervention of the history of the development of earth and humanity. Although this is something that cannot be proven (and such a mindset comes from the wrong epistemology), Bennett does make a number of good points that, mathematically speaking, the richness and complexity that we find in life would be impossible through truly random chance. This misconception—the significance western thought places on randomness—still plagues our society today.

One of the challenging places for Bennett for readers picking up the text fifty years later is that he cites science of the time extensively, and as he himself calls out, the vast majority of this science has shifted substantially since its writing. For this reason, many of the specific examples Bennett cites are no longer applicable.

That said, his predictions about the future are spot on, and impressively prescient. In reading about the coming age of humanity, Bennett could be writing an opinion piece about social media, alternative facts, or Trump.

Another discomfort to the contemporary reader: Bennett espouses eugenics to the point of breeding superhuman. He doesn't spend much time on this topic, but it is clear why he goes here, as he is trying to make the case for a continuous progression that must necessarily surpass our current state of development. This mindset can feel uncomfortably imperial to those of us that have given up on the myth of progress and have instead given preference to the dimensions of eternity and hyparxis that Bennett frames out here. Even though Bennett clearly understood time in a far more nuanced way than most ever reach, it seems his cosmology overly preferences the importance of linear time.

If you're a Bennett fanatic, you'll love this book; get yourself a reading club and pick up a copy! If not, you will likely find it a slog, and are probably better off with Volumes II and III.… (meer)

> Voir un extrait : https://books.google.fr/books?id=52c2IhBRnOUC&hl=fr&printsec=frontcover&...

> RÉSUMÉ. — S’affranchir de notre esclavage vis-à-vis de nos attractions et de nos répulsions, est la première démarche pratique qui nous fait sortir du monde du rêve. Qu’y a-t-il dans notre nature qui nous maintient dans cet esclavage ? Est-il facile de s’en libérer ? Quelle ouverture nous attend alors ? C’est le principal sujet de la « discipline morale » et nous avons besoin de le comprendre, si nous voulons progresser dans notre vie intérieure.… (meer)