John Dunn

Fichte turned Spinoza on his head

Sunday, 23 June 2024 at 22:07

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte turned Spinoza on his head

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. Fichte exclaimed with enthusiasm:

I have been living in a new world ever since reading the Critique of Pure Reason. Propositions which I thought could never be overturned have been overturned for me. Things have been proven to me which I thought could never be proven, for example, the concept of absolute freedom, the concept of duty, etc. and I feel all the happier for it. It is unbelievable how much respect for mankind and how much strength this system gives us. (Letter dated August- September 1790 by Fichte to his friend Weisshuhn.)

© John Dunn.

Fichte ascends from Spinozism

Thursday, 20 June 2024 at 22:17

Idealist philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte ascends from Spinozism

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...’

© John Dunn.

Fichte - polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza

Wednesday, 19 June 2024 at 22:08

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

© 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.