John Dunn

Leading collaborator

Thursday, 16 January 2025 at 21:55

John Locke

Leading collaborator

Born in the same year as Spinoza (1632), John Locke was employed by Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who as a founder of the Whig movement exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. Shaftesbury was a prominent conspirator in the failed Rye House plot, an assassination attempt upon Charles II and the future James II, which aimed to sweep away the barriers to an oligarchical takeover of government. Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement. It is highly likely that from this point on at least, Locke was one of the leading collaborators with the Dutch backers of the 1688 invasion.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Incompatible with free will

Monday, 13 January 2025 at 21:08

Incompatible with free will

Complete Tikkun would undo the material, differentiated and individuated world we know.The answer to ‘who am I?’ would be reduced to - ‘you are what you have to be’. It would mean the death of the self. There would be a denial of subjectivity, creativity and deviation. All you could do is understand the system, not influence it. To maximise your potential, you must understand the motivations of others and work the system; Machiavellian perhaps, but very definitely Sarpian. The Ein Sof to which Spinoza led his people was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants', or the globalists’ vision of modernity.

Spinoza’s self-caused God, or Substance, is incompatible with the freedom of the will. Not surprisingly, both Sarpi and Spinoza feared democracy. ‘Just keep the masses cheaply fed’, insisted Sarpi, whose words probably applied to ideas, as well as food. The politicised seculariser of Kabbalah, who saw the unity or monism of all things, also espoused the unity and oneness of leadership. Spinoza’s intolerance, which resulted from his monism, was wholly compatible with a crushing of difference and humanness into a 1 = 1 sameness. In a Spinozist world, the sovereign alone would have the right to determine not only the state’s laws but also religious law.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Ultimate hypostasis

Saturday, 11 January 2025 at 22:19

Ultimate hypostasis

Recall how 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’. This ‘Substance’ is the sole order of nature. It is Spinoza’s great kabbalistic presupposition. It is Luria’s metaphor, Ein Sof. It is the ultimate hypostasis. With Spinoza, Zeus and the gods of a transcendent, external world order reappeared. And Spinoza would chain us again to a rock of external reality, which is opposed to the human thought which thinks it.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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.

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.

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.

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.