John Dunn

History on one’s side

Monday, 17 June 2024 at 22:47

Spinoza/Marx

History on one’s side

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.

© John Dunn.

Fichte

Saturday, 15 June 2024 at 21:58

Fichte

For Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), banishment of the Spinozist residuum meant only one thing - that the ground of being is the Absolute I. This turned Spinoza completely on his head. The ground of being for Spinoza, remember, had been the absolute Substance within which the I of the individual consciousness was wholly subsumed. Coleridge recognised the significance of Fichte’s momentous inversion of Spinoza, proclaiming that ‘Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism’.

© John Dunn.

Post-Kantian Romantics

Friday, 14 June 2024 at 21:55

Kant Fichte

Schelling Hegel

Post-Kantian Romantics

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.

© 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.