The Creator is not gone. Let us quit the apophatic mysticism of the God gone missing, of the gods in retirement. We know no less than Hölderlin and all the delirious patients in the waiting-room of the Messiah that the gods who have retired may fancy coming back. No, the creator never chanced upon the creation and this is why the creation never stops creating. An open universe is a creating universe. And this means that even the quarks create.
This impulse of creation, Chaos as a force of differentiation, Eros as clinamen, the flux of the apeiron, the creating vortex – the meteoric time that binds together thermodynamics and alchemy, cosmology and magic, this practical extremization of knowledge, is the passion of the philosophical fantastic.
Bruno’s definition of the Magician – the Magus – precedes and seemingly preconditions Marx’s famous definition of philosophy as transformative praxis (Theses on Feuerbach):
‘So as it is used by and among philosophers, ‘magician’ then means a wise man who has the power to act.’
(Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, And Essays on Magic, trans. Robert de Lucca, Richard J. Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 107).
[A philosophis ut sumitur inter philosophos, tunc magus significat hominem sapientem cum virtute agendi.]