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John Dunn
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John Dunn home page
Resurrection of the self
The great presupposition of Spinoza’s philosophy, the Substance, or hypostasis, left no space for a separately generated human experience.
All semblance of such an experience was a temporary aberration that must eventually be resolved and dissolved back into Ein Sof through the process of Tikkun (or in Spinoza’s re-interpretation, through rational thought).
The Romantics kicked against the Spinozist proposition that man, along with all multiplicity, is dissolved into the great presupposition.
Kant rejected the blind acceptance of the all-consuming presupposition and the consequent theory of truth: that our ideas, if true, must conform to the presupposed reality.
Kant proposed the revolutionary thesis that objective reality, to be known at all, must conform to the subjective structure of the human mind. John Dunn on reality. We know reality because it is our own making. Thinking ceases to be passive, a ‘subjective act’, but is a ‘constitutive act’ of the very being of the object.
At a stroke Kant generated a formidable weapon against the presuppositional philosophy of Spinoza and his heirs. His revolution swallowed all of the presupposed Substance, Ein Sof, the fact as fact, Nature, and so on.
© John Dunn.
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'Human god'
In his pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, to the mind of God, Dante had arrived at man, not the passive and bestial victim of natural law or sirenic distractions, but man governed by an ability to create, with an intention of creating a future worthy of his relationship to the divine. Dante had established the humanist principle of the Renaissance uprising.
John Dunn
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Quote every hour:
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market. Ezra Pound
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'Republick of Merchants'
Assuming the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason, a consistent rationalism must be deterministic and fatalistic. Spinoza’s self-caused God, or
Substance, is incompatible the freedom of the will. Not surprisingly, both Sarpi and Spinoza feared democracy. ‘Just keep the masses cheaply fed’, insisted Sarpi, whose words probably applied to ideas, as well as food.
John Dunn
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