Fwd: J.L. Moreno and the Kabbalah

[Edward Schreiber]

From the unpublished 'Autobiography of 150 Geniuses" by J.L. Moreno

>  Period of Transition, 1908
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>             Extensive and feverish reading of religious, philosophic and esthetic literature set my internal scene for the decisive period to come. The reading of religious books centered around the Old and the New Testament, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Origen, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Master Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and Friedrich Novalis, The Apocrypha, the Zohar and Jesirah, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard and many other men representing the neo-religious movement which swept Europe in the beginning of the twentieth century.  Among the philosophers in whom I was particularly engrossed were Spinoza, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Among the poets and novelists were Dostoyevsky, Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy and Goethe. It is obvious from this list that I shared these books with many of my generation but it was my reaction to them which placed me apart.

>             The result of all my reading in theology, philosophy and art was violent opposition, not so much to the remedies which they offered, which were excellent and beautifully expressed, but against their behavior as individuals and as representatives of the values which they preached. The predicted disaster, but left it to crafty and opportunistic politicians to run the world.  They did not act themselves. They were hiding behind profound books and beautiful sermons.  They seemed to think that with them their job was ended.  No one made the jump out of the book into the reality.  Kant’s categorical imperative implicitly called for a test in action but he never moved from “Das Ding an Sich” in “Das Ding ausser Sich,” as I called it.  God was postulated by Spinoza as a multidimensional objective substance but as he had failed for a supplementation on the subjective level he had missed the point, in my judgment.  We cannot imagine a supreme being who cannot empathize with every part of the universe in the fashion in which that particular part can be reached.  Voltaire said “If God does not exist, he should be invented.”  I extended Voltaire by saying “If we have to invent a God, let’s invent the best one.”  Nietzsche’s superman was another highbrowed fiction, unlived, unacted and untested.  Fear of action out their visions and beliefs seemed to have blocked the best men of the nineteenth century, but the fear of doing and the undoing did not hinder them from becoming mentally disabled.  It was certainly not the acting out which made Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Weininger and others sick.  It can be argued that they may have become sick because of violently non-acting out their profound and provocative fantasies.  The heroes of Dostoyevsky’s novels, the Prince Mishkins and the Alioshas, they cried for the concrete and tangible.  Indeed, Dostoyevsky’s genius made them so concrete in the novel that they did not have to live.  Real or not real, they remained within the covers of the book – and books beget books which beget books which beget books – ad infinitum.  Kierkegaard’s moving reflections on his private life were associated with a pitiful inability to move out of his monodrama and into the monodramas of the other people around him.  Bergson’s moving eloquence in his books and the salons ended in the awe of the listeners for such a spectacle.  But when the reader finished reading and the speech in the university halls had come to and end, the listeners walked out and continued their petty life as if nothing had happened. All efforts, wherever I looked, (? ? ?) goal: (? ?) leader must get out of the book, he must become a real and tangible person, on the level of the encounter.  The written word is not a proof of leadership.  The world must see him, he must be such a kind of an actor that the peole can meet him and understand him.  The p (?unreadable?) the “physical” presence of genius and the encounter with him.
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