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Difference between subject and serf
Saturday, 3 August 2024 at 21:45
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Difference between subject and serf
Coleridge’s turn against Jacobinism and the French Revolution was expressed as a re-evaluation of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Coleridge described the Social Contract as ‘at once false and foolish’. No two humans should ever be bound by a contract as though it had some pre-existent force and, thereby, eternal validity. Only as an idea can such a contract serve the interests of individuals, rather than oppress them.
But if instead of the conception or theory of an original social contract, you say the idea of an ever-originating social contract, this is so certain and so indispensable, that it constitutes the whole ground of the difference between subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave-plantation. And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of person, in contra-distinction from thing; all social law and justice being grounded on the principle, that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such: and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether and merely as the means to an end; but the person must always be included in the end.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Dante and humanism
Thursday, 1 August 2024 at 22:02
Dante and humanism
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 Encounte
© John Dunn.
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