The Thought of the Heart ( the 5th and 19th of May)
Dear friends
Over two evenings in May, Thursday the 5th and 19th, the Ship of Fools study-group will be meeting once again at Virkelig to explore a little gem of a text; “The thought of the Heart” by James Hillman.
It was originally delivered as a lecture at Eranos and is a highly imaginative and powerful attempt to rediscover - or “re-vision” - what the heart might signify for us today. Following in the footsteps of the French philosopher Henri Corbin, Hillman argues that the heart is an organ of perception that we have essentially forgotten how to use in our culture, because we forgotten the world of the imaginal. As Hillman puts it:
“...we are bereft in our culture of an adequate psychology and philosophy of the heart, and therefore also of the imagination. Our hearts cannot apprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts, because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels, and that imagination leads us astray from both. Even when the heart is allowed its reasons, they are those of faith or of feeling, for we have forgotten that philosophy itself - the most complex and profound demonstration of thought is not ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’ in an abstract sense of ‘sophic’. Rather, philosophy begins in a philos arising in the heart of our blood together with the lion, the wound, and the rose. If we would recover the imaginal we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy"
What we will be exploring then, is a kind of philosophy; “a philosophy of the heart” that seeks to shift our perspective toward the world, so that we might re-discover - or recover - the world of the imaginal, or what Corbin called the “Mundus Imaginalis”.
If you would like to join then please let me know at nikolajknub@hotmail.com or 26 70 51 89. I will then send you the text, so you have the chance to read it beforehand.
The essay is about 40 pages long, but we will read it over two evenings, so around 20 pages each time. Next time will be Thursday the 19th.
As we pay a bit of rent to Virkelig there is a suggested donation at 80 kr. So please bring a bit of cash or a phone with mobilepay.
Hope to see you there!