I sketch out the pyrological cosmology of the Zohar, focusing on the “spark of impenetrable darkness” (buẓina d’qardinuta) as the paradoxical origin of creation. Contrary to classical theological and philosophical understandings of fire as the union of light and heat, the Zohar situates the beginning of the cosmos in a dark, concealed spark emerging from the “head of infinity” (ein sof). The...
Gaston Bachelard brings the forgotten classical elements of earth, water, air and fire back to philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s by writing at least one book dedicated to each of these elements. The elements are not at all what science, for example, chemistry says of them, but something experiential, phenomenological, imaginative, psychological and poetic as they inspire us to live, dream,...