John Dunn

Crushing of difference and humanness

Saturday, 18 May 2024 at 21:12

Crushing of difference and humanness

Spinoza’s self-caused God, or Substance, is incompatible with 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. The politicised seculariser of Kabbalah, who saw the unity or monism of all things, also espoused the unity and oneness of leadership. Spinoza’s intolerance, which resulted from his monism, was wholly compatible with a crushing of difference and humanness into a 1 = 1 sameness. In a Spinozist world, the sovereign alone would have the right to determine not only the state’s laws but also religious law:

It is the duty of the sovereign alone to decide what is necessary for the welfare of the entire people and the security of the state, and to command what it judges to be thus necessary, it follows that it is also the duty of the sovereign alone to decide what form piety towards one’s neighbour should take, that is in what way every man is required to obey God. From this we clearly understand in what way the sovereign is the interpreter of religion.

If Kabbalism, Spinozism and Freemasonry were the key components of the dehumanising process, then the ‘Republick of Merchants’, in which all opposition is viewed with hostility as a state within a state, was the desired outcome. Thus were the goals of the secularised Tikkun and the rise of the ‘Republick of Merchants’ inseparably linked.

© John Dunn.

Globalists’ vision of modernity

Friday, 17 May 2024 at 21:54

Globalists’ vision of modernity

Spinoza was not prepared to trifle with the Kabbalah. His rationalising of the Kabbalah had a deadly serious purpose. In the ninth chapter of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he wrote, ‘I have read and known certain Kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment’. Far from trifling with theKabbalah, Spinoza secularised it, rationalised it and applied it to a specific socio-economic and political end. Subjectivity would be once more enfolded into Substance, never allowing for a clear differentiation between the two.

Complete Tikkun would undo the material, differentiated and individuated world we know.The answer to ‘who am I?’ would be reduced to - ‘you are what you have to be’. It would mean the death of the self. There would be a denial of subjectivity, creativity and deviation. All you could do is understand the system, not influence it. To maximise your potential, you must understand the motivations of others and work the system; Machiavellian perhaps, but very definitely Sarpian. The Ein Sof to which Spinoza led his people was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants', or the globalists’ vision of modernity.

© John Dunn.

Undifferentiated and ultimately globalised

Thursday, 16 May 2024 at 21:07

Undifferentiated and ultimately globalised

Within Lurianic Kaballah, the Shevirat HaKeilim- ‘The Shattering of the Vessels’ -resulted in a broken, or fallen world, the irrational world, which to Spinoza was concomitant with the Renaissance humanism that exiled his people. Central to this ‘fallen world’ was the Renaissance humanist view that in his capacity for creative spontaneity and play, frivolity even, man is the ‘living image of God’ (imago viva Dei) and has the capacity to be a ‘human god’ and a ‘second creator’. Rationality and play are polar opposites in terms of worldviews. Spinoza held the Counter-Renaissance position. His self-imposed challenge was to determine how to mend the injury suffered by the Godhead, how to reverse the fall and how to return to oneness from a shattered world. It would be through reason that Spinoza would lead his people home. Reason would equate to the Tikkun of the Lurianic Kaballah. It would be through a self-contained and kabbalistic rationality that a return to the divine perfection of Ein Sof, the undifferentiated ‘Substance’, would be understood. Ein Sof would serve as a metaphor for the undifferentiated and ultimately globalised ‘Republick of Merchants’.

© 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.