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Fatalist, determinist and necessitarian
Thursday, 9 January 2025 at 21:41
Fatalist, determinist and necessitarian
Spinoza attacked the humanist position in which he believed ‘the ignorant violate the order of Nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in Nature as a state within a state’. Spinoza’s accusation that humanist thinkers formed a state within a state famously appears also in the preface to Ethics III,where Spinoza characterised the non-naturalist view that he opposed. In both of these passages, Spinoza criticised the assumption that man can strive for an existence outside the laws that govern the rest of nature.It is precisely this position that Spinoza underlines when he writes in the Ethics that ‘the laws and rules of nature...are everywhere and always the same’ and ‘all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature and happen in accordance with the eternal laws and rules of Nature’. It was with these words that Spinoza reduced the status of mankind to that of an animal amongst others. In Spinoza, the anti-humanist, Counter-Renaissance, project of the Enlightenment attained its coldest rationality. The subject was left with no role other than to submit to necessity. This was a fatalist, determinist and necessitarian philosophy.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Human potential was sacrificed
Wednesday, 8 January 2025 at 22:33
Human potential was sacrificed
If Sarpi was the consummate statesman for ‘A Republick of Merchants’, then Spinoza was his counterpart in philosophy, as banking and mercantile interests moved from Venice to Amsterdam and London, later to dominate the world through the Dutch and British empires. Spinoza’s was a Counter- Renaissance philosophical system that took its lead politically from Sarpi, as the latter’s ideas spread to Amsterdam along with Venetian banking. Spinoza’s pursuit of esoteric kabbalism clothed in the exoteric form of rationalism combined well with Sarpian political objectives. This potent mixture was inseparable from an oligarchical and increasingly financialised economy in which the realisation of human potential was sacrificed to the realisation of profit.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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A Republick of Merchants
Monday, 6 January 2025 at 17:44
Paolo Sarpi
A Republick of Merchants
Paolo Sarpi early in the seventeenth century had analysed the Venetian constitution as the expression of mercantile interests. ‘The Spaniards,’he wrote, ‘who have so little kindness for the Venetian Government have not a more odious name than to call it, ‘A Republick of Merchants’. Sarpi, like Spinoza, warned that democratic tendencies were deleterious to a merchants' aristocratic republic. ‘But all Assemblies of numerous Bodies are to be avoided as the Plague, because nothing can sooner overturn the Commonwealth, than the Facility the People may meet with in getting together to confer or debate about their Grievances...’ Sarpi's philosophy of government was a forerunner of Spinoza's anti-humanism. The Italian held ‘that all is just which is any ways necessary for the maintaining of the Government’, and he advised always feeding the peoplecheaply, ‘For the nature of the rabble is so malicious...’ Worldly-wise and struggle-weary political philosophers like Sarpi and Spinoza could not muster much enthusiasm for the common man. Sarpi, furthermore, felt that a common bond of economic interest and hostility to Spain joined the Venetian and Dutch Republics. ‘It is greatly for the interest of theRepublick, to cultivate a strict Friendship with the seven united Provinces of the Netherlands...’ Sarpi urged more trade with the Dutch, and felt that the wills of both commonwealths would easily be united because ‘they are eager Pursuers of Merchandise’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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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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