John Dunn

Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozism

Friday, 26 July 2024 at 22:16

Portrait of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)
Unknown artist

Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozism

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.

From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Freedom means an independence from nature

Thursday, 25 July 2024 at 21:51

Overcoming nature's barriers

Freedom means an independence from nature

Freedom was not for Fichte an end in itself, or something to be found in nature. It was certainly not a return to anything that once existed. Freedom meant an independence from nature. Only then would there be scope for the spontaneous and creative activity, which Dante had held analogous to that of the first Creator in whose image man was made - the creative activity that distinguished man from beasts and deified the Absolute I as God-like. Only with such freedom ‘could a new equality arise - a uniform progress of culture in all individual men’. Rousseau’s reduction of humanity to ‘a race of animals’ was the threat to be confronted. After all, a bestial docility was not altogether undesirable to those who would exploit the productive capacity of such ‘free’ individuals. The return to nature in Rousseau was a Spinozist and kabbalistic ‘return’.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Fichte recognises the threat from Rousseau

Wednesday, 24 July 2024 at 21:48

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte recognises the threat from Rousseau

The Spinozist turn to the French Revolution, fuelled by the writings of Rousseau and others, spelt out danger to Fichte. (The centrality of Spinozism to the French Revolution and the affinities linking Spinoza, Diderot, and Rousseau, was recognised by Fichte long before Jonathan Israel, but Israel’s obsession with Spinoza’s impact bolsters Fichte’s much earlier observation.) In Fichte’s humanistic interpretation of events, Rousseau’s man in ‘his primitive state’ was a sub-human threat to the very existence of the human race. The failure to advance actively mankind’s dominance over nature risked a slide into the passivity that endangered the pursuit of man’s moral purpose and, by definition, his humanness.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Fichte and the the Promethean struggle

Saturday, 20 July 2024 at 21:39

Fichte and the the Promethean struggle

Hegel offered a secular ‘New Testament’ to Spinoza’s ‘Old’. In reality, Hegel ended up providing the self-sustaining motor of return to the Absolute that was lacking in Spinoza’s own philosophy. It only needed Marx to turn Hegel on his head, consciously in opposition to Fichte, to complete the return, setting Spinoza ‘right side up’ again in the process. Above all, Marx was a Spinozist rather than a Hegelian. The shadow of the Hegelian dialectic that remained as a materialist teleology in Marx’s work was the determinism, necessitarianism and passive fatalism of Spinoza’s philosophy. The Hegelian dialectic of progression masked the philosophy of return, which had existed from the start in the Lurianic Kabbalah of exile and return, adopted by Spinoza. In academic philosophy, the myth of succession has held sway, with Hegel and Schelling perpetually presented as the heirs and successors of Fichte, rather than his opposite. So what did Fichte represent? He represented the Promethean struggle, the assertion of the same individual will that had attained crown and mitre in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the will which later thundered in the symphonies of Beethoven and the art of other Romantics. What did Schelling and Hegel represent? They were Spinozists.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Peak anti-feudalism

Wednesday, 17 July 2024 at 22:09

Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(Pencil & ink portrait, Humboldt University Library, Berlin)

Peak anti-feudalism

Fichte’s philosophy represents a peak anti-Spinozism and a peak anti-feudalism, expressing Renaissance ideas, i.e. pro-nation state, but anti-oligarchy,anti-globalism. Fichte had turned the monist materialist Spinoza on his head in formulating his own idealist philosophy of the Absolute I. Rather than continue his work, Hegel and Schelling sought a path of mediation between Fichte’s Absolute I and a persistent and residual external reality.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Dante and Fichte

Tuesday, 16 July 2024 at 21:25

Engraving after the fresco in Bargello Chapel, painted by Giotto di Bondone in the 14th century

Dante and Fichte

Dante was pre-eminent in establishing humanism as the new philosophy of the Renaissance (or post-feudalism). That philosophy reached its zenith with Fichte, even though it did so as the Counter-Renaissance reassertion of feudalism (or neo-feudalism) was complete. Fichte’s philosophy was developed behind enemy lines so to speak. This made Fichte’s philosophy not so much the ideological successor to feudalism, but rather a key influence upon the Romantic reaction to the dominant neo-feudalism

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

The basis of all political and philosophical creeds

Monday, 15 July 2024 at 21:46

Spinozism and Kabbalism

The basis of all political and philosophical creeds

Marx in fact endorsed the subjugation of the straw man capitalists and presented this state of affairs as an historical necessity, which was generated by the capitalists’ own overthrow of feudalism. However, Marx’s presentation of a progression was, in fact, masking a process of return. Marxism thus became the political and philosophical arm of the neo-feudalist financial globalisers. Marxism is the basis of all the so-called Left and Right political and philosophical creeds of our time.Anarchism, communism, socialism, liberalism, libertarianism and conservatism, as well as Marxism itself are all rooted ultimately in Spinozism and Kabbalism, and serve to promote Tikkun.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.