Detlef Thiel

A philosophical fable from a great forgotten German fabulist Billed by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for “anonymous” backward)--as “the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus,” The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona’s philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as “a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.,” when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist. Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Children) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called Grostesken. His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

This work throws a new light on Xenocrates, the third leader of the Academy, who is considered in the existing research as merely a derivative doctrinaire. This complete presentation of his philosophy encompasses, in addition to cosmology, theology and ontology, for the first time also his doctrine of principles. This is found in the renowned report of Sextus, Adv. Math., X, 248-283, which can be read anew against the background of the philosophy of Xenocrates. The doctrine of monistic principles proffered in the passage from Sextus derives from Xenocrates, who inserts his own precepts in his report on Platos unwritten teachings. Xenocrates' doctrine of principles constitutes the link between the ontological metaphysics of Aristotle and Plato's metaphysics of unity; Xenocrates' absolute monas is both in its essence connected with the nous, and ontologically transcendent. Xenocrates proves himself to be a thinker who is true to Plato and innovative. He is not only the precursor to middle-Platonism, but was also considered amongst the students of the inner circle of the Academy to be the 'rock' upon which Plato was able to establish his teachings and his school."