John Dunn

Zeus and Spinoza

Wednesday, 15 May 2024 at 22:09

Zeus and Spinoza

Recall how Spinoza began his Ethics with definitions, starting with the ‘cause of itself’ or ‘causa sui’. Definition 3 says: ‘By Substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that, the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed’. This ‘Substance’ is the sole order of nature. It is Spinoza’s great kabbalistic presupposition. It is Luria’s metaphor, Ein Sof. It is the ultimate hypostasis. With Spinoza, Zeus and the gods of a transcendent, external world order reappeared. And Spinoza would chain us again to a rock of external reality, which is opposed to the human thought which thinks it.

© John Dunn.

A fatalist, determinist and necessitarian philosophy

Tuesday, 14 May 2024 at 22:16

A fatalist, determinist and necessitarian philosophy

Spinoza attacked the humanist position in which he believed ‘the ignorant violate the order of Nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in Nature as a state within a state’. Spinoza’s accusation that humanist thinkers formed a state within a state famously appears also in the preface to Ethics III, where Spinoza characterised the non-naturalist view that he opposed. In both of these passages, Spinoza criticised the assumption that man can strive for an existence outside the laws that govern the rest of nature. It is precisely this position that Spinoza underlines when he writes in the Ethics that ‘the laws and rules of nature...are everywhere and always the same’ and ‘all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature and happen in accordance with the eternal laws and rules of Nature’. It was with these words that Spinoza reduced the status of mankind to that of an animal amongst others. In Spinoza, the anti-humanist, Counter-Renaissance, project of the Enlightenment attained its coldest rationality. The subject was leftwith no role other than to submit to necessity. This was a fatalist, determinist and necessitarian philosophy.

© John Dunn.

Sarpi and Spinoza

Sunday, 12 May 2024 at 23:18

Paolo Sarpi

Sarpi and Spinoza

If Sarpi was the consummate statesman for ‘A Republick of Merchants’, then Spinoza was his counterpart in philosophy, as banking and mercantile interests moved from Venice to Amsterdam and London, later to dominate the world through the Dutch and British empires. Spinoza’s was a Counter- Renaissance philosophical system that took its lead politically from Sarpi, as the latter’s ideas spread to Amsterdam along with Venetian banking. Spinoza’s pursuit of esoteric kabbalism clothed in theexoteric form of rationalism combined well with Sarpian political objectives. This potent mixture was inseparable from an oligarchical and increasingly financialised economy in which the realisation of human potential was sacrificed to the realisation of profit.

© John Dunn.

Paolo Sarpi

Sunday, 12 May 2024 at 02:51

Paolo Sarpi

Paolo Sarpi early in the seventeenth century had analysed the Venetian constitution as the expression of mercantile interests. ‘The Spaniards,’he wrote, ‘who have so little kindness for the Venetian Government have not a more odious name than to call it, ‘A Republick of Merchants’. Sarpi, like Spinoza, warned that democratic tendencies were deleterious to a merchants' aristocratic republic. ‘But all Assemblies of numerous Bodies are to be avoided as the Plague, because nothing can sooner overturn the Commonwealth, than the Facility the People may meet with in getting together to confer or debate about their Grievances...’ Sarpi's philosophy of government was a forerunner of Spinoza's anti-humanism. The Italian held ‘that all is just which is any ways necessary for the maintaining of the Government’, and he advised always feeding the people cheaply, ‘For the nature of the rabble is so malicious...’ Worldly-wise and struggle-weary political philosophers like Sarpi and Spinoza could not muster much enthusiasm for the common man. Sarpi, furthermore, felt that a common bond of economic interest and hostility to Spain joined the Venetian and Dutch Republics. ‘It is greatly for the interest of the Republick, to cultivate a strict Friendship with the seven united Provinces of the Netherlands...’ Sarpi urged more trade with the Dutch, and felt that the wills of both commonwealths would easily be united because ‘they are eager Pursuers of Merchandise’.

© John Dunn.

Ein Sof

Thursday, 9 May 2024 at 22:03

Baruch Spinoza

Ein Sof

There is no evidence that Spinoza actually formed a sect, other than his stated desire to do so. Nevertheless, the fact that his philosophy ultimately achieved the goal of Spinozist Tikkun, by forming a near-universally accepted worldview, is due in no small part to the clandestine sect that adopted Kabbalah into its quasi-religious activities, and did so with revolutionary and globalising ambition. The highest divinity of Freemasons is the Ein Sof of Kabbalah and the Substance of Spinozism.

© John Dunn.

Coleridge

Thursday, 9 May 2024 at 01:35

Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Thomas Phillips

Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the Romantic poet and philosopher, long ago knew what was lost in these so-called Ethics. The ‘Sage of Highgate’ recognised the anti-humanism of Spinoza early on, lamenting that Spinoza’s ‘error consisted not so much in what he affirms, as in what he has omitted to affirm or rashly denied . . . that he saw God in the ground only and exclusively, in his Might alone and his essential Wisdom, and not likewise in his moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead’.32 In short, the Ethics lacked the theoretical basis for an ethics and, above all, lacked hope.

© John Dunn.

Imagine worlds

Wednesday, 8 May 2024 at 01:32

Imagine worlds

Dante poses the question - what moves the imagination when the senses offer nothing? ‘A light which takes its shape in heaven moves you’, he answers. The power to move the imagination is held innately within us. It is a faculty that is completely free from the solicitations of the outside world. It is the power within us to imagine worlds that do not even exist.

© John Dunn.