Introduction: The poetic topos of the doctrine of transmigration -- Genealogy of the doctrine of transmigration -- Beyond mysticism and science : symbolism and philosophical magic -- The emergence of mystic cults and the immortal soul -- Philolaus and the question of pythagorean harmony -- The alleged critique of Pythagoras by Parmenides -- Between the earth and the sky : on the pythagorean divine -- The pythagorean bios and the doctrine of transmigration -- The path of the event -- The (...) path of remembrance or return -- The platonic rupture : writing and difference -- Plotinus : the ascent of the soul toward the one -- Plotinus as neoplatonic mystic : letter to Flaccus -- Epilogue: The fate of the doctrine of transmigration. (shrink)

An essential addition to the Reader's Guides series, Luchte offers the ideal companion to study this most influential of texts.

There is an infinity of figures and of movements, present and past, which enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and in its final cause, there are an infinity of slight tendencies and dispositions of my soul, present and past.1.

In this essay, I will explore the much neglected relationship between Heidegger and Spinoza—and thus of Heidegger and the modern sense of freedom. The free man, for Spinoza, is one who has not only cultivated the stronger active emotion of acquiescence to the univocal chorus of necessity, but has also learned to disengage external factors which are coincident with such passive emotions—to organise an ‘order of encounters’ as Deleuze describes in his Expressionism. Heidegger, on the contrary, who undertakes a meditation (...) upon ‘Spinozism’ in the context of his 1936 lecture course, Schelling’s Treatise on Freedom, would seem to take issue with Spinoza in his own contention that the one who faces his or her ownmost possibility of death without evasion, is the one who is most free—or, who will have found him or herself in a moment that discloses the necessity of one’s own singular freedom. It will be in the context of this divergence between substance and event that I will argue that Spinoza’s notion of freedom as it consists in the acquiescence to substance is a falsification of human existence for the sake of a hedonistic escapism. (shrink)