John Dunn

The Spinozist residuum

Thursday, 13 June 2024 at 22:14

The Spinozist residuum

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.

© John Dunn.

Kant restored the creative imagination

Wednesday, 12 June 2024 at 21:08

Statue of Immanuel Kant in front of the University of Kaliningrad

Kant restored the creative imagination

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. With his ‘discovery’ of the ‘subjectivity of knowledge’, Kant restored the creative imagination as the defining act of what it is to be human. With this, the Romantic Reaction began as Renaissance Humanism in secular form. The answer to the ‘who am I?’ question was no longer a tabula rasa to be written upon, but rather the stylus which writes upon the tablet. Central to Romanticism was the idea that the human imagination creates worlds, defying all external constraints upon it. It was a return to Renaissance Humanist thinking, in that the creative power of man was understood to be an echo or reflection of the power of the first Creator in whose image man is made, i.e. St Augustine’s concept of capax Dei.

© John Dunn.

The active involvement of the human mind

Monday, 10 June 2024 at 22:58

The active involvement of the human mind

Kant rejected the blind acceptance of the all-consuming presupposition and the consequent theory of truth, i.e. that our ideas, if true, must conform to the presupposed reality. He proposed the revolutionary thesis that objective reality, to be known at all, needs the active involvement of the human mind. Thinking ceases to be passive, a ‘subjective act’, but is instead a ‘constitutive act’ of the very being of the object.

© John Dunn.

Reality is of our making

Sunday, 9 June 2024 at 21:55

Reality is of our making

It was Kant who led the revolution against Spinoza, describing his new ideas as Copernican in their likely impact upon established philosophical cosmologies. Kant would have been better calling his thought anti-Copernican, because he revolted against the cosmocentric and advocated instead an egocentric view of the universe. In the revolution, or the nascent Romantic reaction, Christian Renaissance Humanism was reasserted in secular terms, to conceive reality not as the limit of spirit but the same as spirit, which to be real must have everything inside itself. Kant’s revolutionary thesis was that objective reality, to be known at all, must conform to the subjective structure of the human mind. We know reality because it is of our making.

© John Dunn.

Kant attack

Friday, 7 June 2024 at 22:49

Kant attack

Locke, Berkeley and Hume retained the essence of Spinozist monism i.e. the elimination of the self, except that this apparent death was rather a coma, a state of limbo in a passive state of abject dualism. That which is, exists outside of the comatose subject, and only outside of the subject. This was the materialist metaphysics, the chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel, which gave Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) something to attack.

© John Dunn.

The subject as nothing

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 at 23:42

George Berkeley

The subject as nothing

Ironically, it was the imperfect understanding of Spinoza by his followers that led to the rise of the subjectivist motive of certainty - the appeal to sense-certainty. Innate ideas are not certain, argued Locke, because they are not the product but the presupposition of experience. Sensation for Locke was therefore to be determined by an external world described in Newtonian terms. Mind, for Locke, was originally a passive thing, a tabula rasa. There is a presupposed world, or Nature, that is external to the sentient and inscribes itself upon the human mind. Berkeley’s immaterialism did not challenge what appeared to be its Lockean opposite, but rather confirmed its core principle. Berkeley’s God was Locke’s Nature by another name, imposing the same limits upon the constructive process of experience. Hume’s skepticism - that our belief in an external world cannot be rationally justified - showed that the experience which claims to be the most anti-dogmatic does in fact coincide with its contrary - pure dogmatism. The subject can do nothing.The subject is nothing.

© John Dunn.

Destruction of the self

Wednesday, 5 June 2024 at 23:33

Destruction of the self

Lurianic Tree of Life

Philosophically this ‘truth’ translated too readily into positivism and deference to the objective virginity of cold facts, untouched by any subjective intrusion from mind, and the modern world was transformed into an arid desert of reality. The Spinozist Counter-Renaissance onslaught against humanism was brutally effective. Tikkun and the enfolding of alterity (anti-inclusiveness) into Ein Sof demanded no less than the death of the self. Out of this came the modern phenomenon of slavery experienced as freedom. It was the elimination of a human experience apart from Ein Sof, the destruction of the self, that led Spinozism to deny free will and the value of the creative imagination. Man has nothing to add to nature, he is not even subsidiary to the original Substance, or an addendum to it. He is simply subsumed into Spinoza’s great presupposition, which is where Spinoza’s philosophy is reflective of Luriunic Kabbalah, in particular Tikkun, the process by which cosmic restoration and repair are to be accomplished.

© John Dunn.