John Dunn

Subject Nature to Reason

Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 23:34

Fichte, the anti-Spinozist philosopher

Subject Nature to Reason

Like many a young romantic, Fichte had once embraced the seemingly liberating possibilities of the French Revolution. It was, however, his rejection of Spinozism that led to his rightward interpretation of events. He did not view equality, the rights of man, universal brotherhood and perpetual peace as ends in themselves. His egalitarian concern was to release the full potentialities of each individual in order that a common moral end could be most effectively pursued. ‘The aim of all culture of human capacity’, he wrote in the Vocation of the Scholar, ‘is to subject Nature... to Reason’.

© John Dunn.

To be human, even divine

Tuesday, 25 June 2024 at 22:24

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

To be human, even divine

Even so, to act upon the world was more than a moral purpose for Fichte, it was by definition what it meant to be human at all, even divine. He sometimes referred to the concept of the Absolute I as God and at other times as pure rational and spontaneous activity. From this standpoint, to hold to a Spinozist passivity was to expunge the Absolute I and bring about the death of the incarnated God. The preservation of humanity’s moral destiny against the threat of deterministic genocide was therefore the duty of everyone who considered himself fully human. Failure to inculcate the benefits of an actively moral culture into each member of society served not only to dehumanise those individuals, but also to endanger the human race as a whole. This destruction of man was the fear that Fichte expressed in The Vocation of the Scholar.

© John Dunn.

Fichte's inversion of Spinoza changed everything

Monday, 24 June 2024 at 22:11

Fichte's inversion of Spinoza changed everything

F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819), an obsessive Spinozist, saw in Spinoza’s ‘novel conception of God, the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of church’.80 Jacobi was blinded to an appreciation of the significance of Fichte’s inversion of Spinoza, and yet his criticism of Fichte was unknowingly astute. He claimed that Fichte’s position was nothing more than an inverted Spinozism, and that the concept of the Absolute I played the same role in Fichte’s system as the concept of Substance played in Spinoza’s. What Jacobi failed to appreciate was that whereas Spinozism starts and finishes in materialism, Fichte’s system starts and finishes with thought. The inversion changed everything. With Fichte, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Humanness and the imagination became one.The creative imagination once more became the defining factor of the whole human enterprise.

© 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.