John Dunn

Creative imagination once more

Saturday, 22 February 2025 at 21:11

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Creative imagination once more

F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819), an obsessive Spinozist, saw in Spinoza’s ‘novel conception of God, the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of church’. Jacobi was blinded to an appreciation of the significance of Fichte’s inversion of Spinoza, and yet his criticism of Fichte was unknowingly astute. He claimed that Fichte’s position was nothing more than an inverted Spinozism, and that the concept of the Absolute I played the same role in Fichte’s system as the concept of Substance played in Spinoza’s. What Jacobi failed to appreciate was that whereas Spinozism starts and finishes in materialism, Fichte’s system starts and finishes with thought. The inversion changed everything. With Fichte, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Humanness and the imagination became one.The creative imagination once more became the defining factor of the whole human enterprise.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Kantian rebuttal of Spinozism

Friday, 21 February 2025 at 16:30

Kant and Fichte

Kantian rebuttal of Spinozism

Any move to the political Right from Marxism will be analogous to the one made by Fichte from Spinozism to idealism. One has to know the thing to which one is opposed before one can claim to know the truth of that which one supports. (True modern day thinkers on the political Right will commonly have made the switch from Marxism. A mere move from Marxism to liberalism in any of its variants or vice versa is no move.)

It was after reading Kant that Fichte turned Spinoza on his head. He saw in Kant’s work the rebuttal of Spinozist determinism and the way to freedom.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Ascension

Thursday, 20 February 2025 at 17:07

Fichte’s Dantean Virgil

As a student, Fichte was a devotee of Spinozist determinism. His conversion to philosophical idealism came about only later after reading Kant's Critiques. Kant was Fichte’s Dantean Virgil. Fichte’s The Vocation of Man has stages of doubt, understanding and faith that correspond with the stages of Dante’s pilgrimage. There is a pedagogical parallel between the master (Virgil = Kant) and adept (Dante = Fichte),a learning process which ends when Fichte ascends from Spinozism into philosophical idealism (Purgatory into Paradise). Fichte was aware of the depths from which he had ascended intellectually, writing that ‘so far as dogmatism can be consistent, Spinozism is its most logical outcome...’

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza

Monday, 17 February 2025 at 22:44

Johann Gottleib Fichte

Polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza

All that stood between the Spinozists and the application of the demands of necessity was absolutist sovereignty. This was fated to fall at the hands of the French revolutionaries and Napoleon. And the young Spinozist Fichte too was at the revolutionists’ intellectual barricade, that is, until Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ began to emerge from the clearing smoke. Fichte, once the young and arrogant radical like me, was left with the need to answer the same ‘who am I?’ question as me. The way that he set about the task, by positing the polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza, was critical to the eventual emergence of an answer.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Arrogance of privileged minds

Sunday, 16 February 2025 at 20:39

Arrogance of privileged minds

Think of Spinozism as the Marxism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and you will see why I felt an affinity with the young Fichte and others of his generation, for whom Spinozism was the radical philosophy with which to over- topple the established order. Just like the Marxists a century later, having insight into the necessity behind the events to which others were blind permitted one to enter a ‘masonry’ of brother intellectuals, the future governors of the world. To have history on one’s side was a thrilling source of intellectual strength, which also pandered to the arrogance of privileged minds.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

New hope

Saturday, 15 February 2025 at 20:12

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

New hope

Thepost-Kantians intended to finish the job. Certain that Kant’s thing-in-itself was a creation of mental activity, the post-Kantian idealists attempted to banish this Spinozist residuum from the world. Clearly, the alternative posited by the post-Kantian Romantics would be critical to my own search for an answer to the ‘who am I?’ question. If Spinoza had destroyed the self, seemingly to eliminate any possibility of coming up with an answer - other than ‘you are a passive entity, which is merely a mode of the Substance’ - then a rival philosophy that purported to oppose Spinoza by giving pre-eminence to the ‘I’ offered new hope.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Reawakening of the self

Wednesday, 12 February 2025 at 21:52

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reawakening of the self

Samuel Taylor Coleridge certainly mused upon the idea of capax Dei, representing its secular implications in an eternal context.

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

Counterposed to the Spinozist death of the self, Kant’s philosophy marked the reawakening of the self. The Romantic Movement to which it gave rise was founded upon this resurrection. And yet, despite his seminal role in the reawakening, Kant’s philosophy retained a Spinozist residuum. Spinoza’s great presupposition still stood. Kantian knowledge was limited to objects of possible experience and the form that these objects presented to the ego presupposed a matter which the ego did not produce. Kant’s knower is not an absolute creator, because sensation is the modification of the ego but not its product. Sensation is not the demonstration of the ego’s activity but its passivity, which implies an unknowable external agent, the thing-in-itself, or noumenon. Kant did not see that this thing-in-itself, alien or inaccessible to our experience, destroyed the attributes of knowledge that he was most anxious to defend, i.e. human freedom and agency. The concept of the thing-in-itself was a residuum of the Spinozist Substance (rooted as we know in Lurianic Kabbalah), which Kant’s Copernican Revolution combatted, but did not fully destroy.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.