John Dunn

Outer limits of philosophical idealism

Tuesday, 20 August 2024 at 21:51

Giovanni Gentile

Outer limits of philosophical idealism

The outstanding characteristic of Gentile’s Actualism was its attempt to develop a metaphysics (a system of morality) without the use of presuppositions. In such an attempt, the resultant metaphysics must be based upon a Logos, which is not previous to thinking but is within the act of thinking itself. And yet, by starting with the ‘I’ that thinks, Gentile did in fact allow a presupposition. This was surely inconsistent. But if he had started with the act of thinking, he would have lost the very ‘I’ that he and Fichte and Coleridge had endeavoured to protect from the all-consuming Spinozist Substance. It is clear that Gentile had reached the outer limits of philosophical idealism. If he extended the logic of his own argument, thinking would take place without the thinker. If this were the case, no man as an individual, not even Gentile, is real. It is only the act of thinking which is real, and as such it cannot be attached to an unreal thinker. Hence to speak of my thought or of Gentile’s thought or of anyone’s thought is to refer to abstract entities.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Logos is truth

Monday, 19 August 2024 at 21:35

Giovanni Gentile

Logos is truth

Logos is truth in the deepest sense of the word, the generative principle of everything. It is variously translated as word, speech, principle, or thought. In Greek philosophy, it also referred to as universal divine reason, the mind of God, or the deep underlying truth of the cosmos. If you make the truth the search not for what is (i.e. externally and in the abstract) but for what ought to be, then thinking = reality = truth =Logos. If the truth for which we strive is considered to be the Logos, then might Gentile’s doctrine be not so much egocentric as logocentric? I noted above that what horrified Gentile was the degradation of the will and the compulsion to conform to any presupposition. So, if not in presupposed thoughts, which are abstract, the certainty of truth must be found in active thinking, which is concrete. This is where the Concrete Logos is found, i.e. in active thinking.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Spirit is everything

Sunday, 18 August 2024 at 21:21

Spirit is everything

If matter is everything, then spirit is nothing. But in thinking this, the spirit cannot attend, so to speak, to its own funeral. Therefore spirit is everything. Spirit is an absolute creator, not a contemplator. Spirit does not find the intelligible structure of the universe independently of and prior to its coming upon the scene, but creates it in its eternal process of self-realisation. Spirit is pure activity and is not contaminated by anything passive or external. Spiritual life means the life of freedom. Man is not man naturally, but becomes man through self-knowledge and self-choice. Man is a spirit because he can choose to be a beast or an angel. Freedom implies growth from within, not from without. The growth of a plant illustrates the latter; the growth of a man illustrates the former.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

To live is to think

Saturday, 17 August 2024 at 21:50

Giovanni Gentile

To live is to think

And this is the critical point, because Gentile attempted to revive the spirit life of man in the face of socio-economic and philosophical forces that would expunge it. In Gentile’s conception, spirit is man thinking. Man creates the world in the act of thinking - all is spirit. Thinking is the essence of humanity. The human thing to do is to think. To live is to think. Not to think, or to let others think for you, is to be sub-human. Gentile allowed for no compromises. Either spirit is everything, or matter is everything. He had no need of metaphorical bridges between the two.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

A thinker signifying everything

Friday, 16 August 2024 at 21:44

Giovanni Gentile

A thinker signifying everything

Gentile’s point is that knowledge is not about reality but is reality. The world about us becomes ours by knowing it, which means actively creating it. Nosce Te Ipsum (Know Thyself) and you will know the world. Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute immanence. The self of Gentile’s actual idealism is essentially a thinker who wills by transforming the nature of things, the realm of actuality, existence, according to his needs. This type of thinker is a Prometheus, not a Spinoza. The essence of the self is the will to think. The I is strictly speaking not I, but makes itself, or becomes I, constantly defending itself against the seemingly real, whereas ‘reality is a tale told by a thinker signifying everything’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Spinozist passivity

Thursday, 15 August 2024 at 22:22

Spinozist passivity

In the Spinozist conception, reality is nature, the universe, existing independently of human thought which only aspires to know it, without ever attempting to transform it into a better world of its own - the moral world. The will is degraded by this doctrine of realism to a mere device of reasoning, compelling human conduct to conform to the laws of nature. Its function is therefore negative rather than positive. It is destined to put out of man’s mind any foolish desire to oppose himself vainly to reality, which, being what it is, cannot be changed to please us. Ecologism and the green movement are the latest variants of Spinozist philosophical passivity. This is the enchainment of man, for which the Promethean myth provides the allegory. Spinozist realism holds that the objects of knowledge do not depend for their existence on the knowledge of them. It makes knowing not the activity of the subject but its passivity.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Hope abandoned

Wednesday, 14 August 2024 at 22:11

Baruch Spinoza

Hope abandoned

Coleridge lamented that Spinoza’s ‘error consisted not so much in what he affirms, as in what he has omitted to affirm or rashly denied . . . that he saw God in the ground only and exclusively, in his Might alone and his essential Wisdom, and not likewise in his moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead’. In short, Spinoza’s Ethics lacked the theoretical basis for an ethics. The Spinozist God, as the eternal actualisation of the universe, need not impinge upon the temporal actualisation of events at a human level. Such a condition was tantamount to Hell for Coleridge, a world in which all hope had been abandoned.

If like Spinoza, I had contemplated God as the infinite Substance (Substantia Unica) as the incomprehensible mindless, lifeless, formless Substans of all Mind, Life and Form—there would be for me neither Good nor Evil – Yet Pain, & Misery would be—& would be hopeless.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.