Working my way through a pile of NY Times and came across this book review of Jackson Lears’ Animal Spirits, that depicts the American studies of and deployment of “the life force,” a topic I think most O.T.O. initiates have contemplated in the course of their initiatic career. The review begins:
The first traffic jam in U.S. history, Jackson Lears tells us, occurred in February 1913. The cause? A crush of New Yorkers jostling for seats at a lecture (in French, no less) by the celebrity philosopher Henri Bergson. His topic was the élan vital, the notion of a dynamic life force, a “current sent through matter” that “transcends finality” and animates the world. It is Lears’s topic, too: the play of what he calls “animal spirits” across several centuries of American thought. The phrase captures a recurring desire to meld the material and the ethereal, body and soul, self and universe against powerful countercurrents in religious, scientific and commercial culture.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/books/review/animal-spirits-jackson-lears.html.
