John Dunn

Free to follow a true cosmic vocation

Sunday, 28 July 2024 at 21:46

Free to follow a true cosmic vocation

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.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The Closed Commercial State

Saturday, 27 July 2024 at 21:46

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

The Closed Commercial State

Fichte 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 Ito the external imperatives and needs of globalised capitalism.

(From Child of Encounter)

© 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.