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John Dunn
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Buber's famous distinction between ‘I it’ and ‘I thou’ modes of existence.
Martin Buber
The former reflects how we live in today’s Spinozist ‘Republick of Merchants’. We see an object of experience as a collection of qualities and quantities, as a particular point in space and time. There is a necessary distance between the experiencing I and the experienced It: the one is subject, and the other object. Also, the experiencing I is a passive observer rather than an active participant in this mode of engaging the world. This was the passivity that the idealists tried to overcome by turning the tables on the objective standpoint, making the subject into the active creator, rather than the inactive observer. This led ultimately to the removal of the distinction between subject and object altogether, culminating in the solipsistic Actualism of Gentile and the Unus Mundus of Jung.
© John Dunn.
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Sin's redeeming power
Like Spinoza’s, Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism was a social, economic and political phenomenon, wrapped in an interpretation of Lurianic kabbalistic metaphors of exile and return. It was to the exiled Marranos who sailed eastwards for the Ottoman Empire that Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism appealed.
John Dunn
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Quote every hour:
All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty. Ezra Pound
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Edomite Red
Napoleon’s conquests cemented the spread of French revolutionary legislation to much of western Europe. The powers of the Roman Catholic church, guilds, and manorial aristocracy came under the gun as the goal of an unimpeded borderless movement of money came into view. Traditions crumbled. 'All that is solid melts into air’, wrote Marx in a Sabbatian fervour, ‘all that is holy is profaned'.
John Dunn
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