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Coleridge wrote
Sunday, 5 January 2025 at 21:29
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge wrote
In a notebook Coleridge wrote:
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.
Dante had described just such a place where hope had been abandoned. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate’, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Spinoza’s error
Saturday, 4 January 2025 at 19:04
Spinoza’s error
The Substance, the hypostasis, the underlying reality, is Spinoza’s great and unquestioned presupposition. Spinoza began his Ethics with definitions, starting with the ‘cause of itself’ or causa sui.Definition 3 says: ‘By Substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that, the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the Romantic poet and philosopher, long ago knew what was lost in these so-called Ethics.The ‘Sage of Highgate’ recognised the anti-humanism of Spinoza early on, lamenting 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, the Ethics lacked the theoretical basis for an ethics and, above all, lacked hope.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Religious reality
Thursday, 2 January 2025 at 21:14
Martin Buber
Religious reality
To Spinozists like Marx and Engels, the answer to ‘who am I?’ is - ‘you are what you have to be’. In Spinoza’s concept of God, or the One, or Ein Sof, subjectivity is subsumed within Substance, never allowing for a clear separation of the two. This was the reason why Martin Buber said that Spinoza left no room for dialogue with God. Spinoza, to whom the knowledge of God was everything, nevertheless deprived man of an essential element of religious reality: the ‘approachability’ of God or,as Buber called it, his ‘dialogue’ relation with God. And trust me, there is far more to this ‘dialogue relation’ than Buber or any other religionist would have you believe, as I hope will become apparent by the end of this book.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Uprighting Spinoza
Wednesday, 1 January 2025 at 17:22
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Uprighting Spinoza
For Hegel everything begins with the realisation that there is something exceptional and inescapable in Spinoza’s philosophy. He wrote ‘du hast entweder den Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie’ - you have either Spinozism or no philosophy at all. When Marx ‘turned Hegel on this head’, he was in reality ‘uprighting’ Spinoza, following Fichte's inversion.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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