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Bring a moral order into being
Tuesday, 9 July 2024 at 21:01
Spinoza inverted
Bring a moral order into being
With Fichte's inversion of Spinozist philosophy, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Man’s purpose is to act upon the world, change it and perfect it, i.e. change what is into what ought to be. The vocation of man is a moral one, which is to transform nature and bring it into accord with his ideals. The world exists so that man can express those ideals and bring amoral order into being. It follows from this that any distraction from man’s moral vocation is a reversion to Spinozist determinism. After all,with trade there is a preoccupation with profit and ongoing subsistence. The lives of individuals are determined by forces external to themselves, principally the controllers of money supply (a truth later masked by democracy), quite apart from the economic forces, which take on a life of their own. Fichte’s politics were at one with his idealist philosophy. In the context of his philosophy, to embrace trade is to renounce freedom, the Absolute I, God and man’s cosmic role in bringing moral order into the world and beyond. This is what drove Fichte to postulate the closed commercial state, a controlled economic environment that would free individuals to follow their true cosmic vocation.
© John Dunn.
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The individual freedom of the Absolute I
Sunday, 7 July 2024 at 16:53
The individual freedom of the Absolute I
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (pictured) presented his ideas in The Closed Commercial State (1800), in which he postulated the withdrawal from foreign trade, the introduction of a national currency, a system of price controls, the balancing of production and consumption, and the regulation of the workforce - as means of securing the industry and the economic independence of all its citizens. His comprehension of the enduring tensions between commercialised society and political freedom was ahead of its time. It was his philosophical idealism, rooted in a reading of Kant, and opposed to Spinozist materialism, that motivated his recommendations, i.e. the desire not simply to subordinate the individual freedom of the Absolute I to the external imperatives and needs of globalised capitalism.
(From Child of Encounter)
© John Dunn.
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Policed borders
Saturday, 6 July 2024 at 21:11
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Policed borders
Fichte followed the pattern of Renaissance states. His main concern was to establish economic autarky within defined and policed borders, not as a matter of principle in its own right, but as a means of wresting control from a resurgent globalising oligarchy.
(From Child of Encounter)
© John Dunn.
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Opposing Spinoza's crypto-politics
Friday, 5 July 2024 at 21:55
Spinoza's crypto-philosophy in the service of his crypto-politics
Opposing Spinoza's crypto-politics
It should be no surprise to find that someone as vehemently opposed to Spinoza’s materialist monism as Fichte, should also be opposed equally to Spinoza’s underlying, crypto-political project of providing the philosophy (a counterpart to Sarpi’s politics), that would serve the interests of his exiled community in a new ‘Republick of Merchants’.
© John Dunn.
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Magna Carta and feudal privileges
Thursday, 4 July 2024 at 20:25
King John ruled England from 1199 to 1216
Magna Carta and feudal privileges
Magna Carta,that supposed written bastion of individual freedom, epitomised the power of the nobility to maintain its feudal privileges, even in the face of fierce opposition from the king. In response to King John’s brave attempt to assert the authority of the monarch, the feudal barons enforced Magna Carta upon him, which was a charter establishing the rights of the nobility against the efforts of the king to rule a unified nation.
(From Child of Encounter)
© John Dunn.
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Banish this Spinozist residuum from the world
Tuesday, 2 July 2024 at 21:41
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - the post-Kantians
Banish this Spinozist residuum from the world
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.
The post-Kantians intended to finish the job. 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.
(From Child of Encounter)
© John Dunn.
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Against universalising Tikkun
Monday, 1 July 2024 at 20:56
Johann Gottlieb Fichte confronts globalist Tikkun
Against universalising Tikkun
Fichte did not attempt to supplement or develop Spinozism; he sought to confront a deterministic, necessitarian, fatalistic and dehumanising philosophy with a ‘hatred of mankind’ that he himself had once espoused.He sought to break out of its closed entrapping mathematical schema. Nowhere is it more clear than in the ‘state within a state’ rebuttal, which represented Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozist kabbalism, his awakening to the socio-political and economic implications within the universalising Tikkun of Spinozism.
© John Dunn.
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