John Dunn

Anti-mind

Sunday, 26 January 2025 at 19:23

John Locke

Anti-mind

Locke’s position on property was intimately bound to his Spinozist understanding of man. Spinoza’s kabbalistic god as immutable Substance and ‘natural law’, which set the limit to man’s activities, led to determinism and necessitarianism. Locke developed this into his well-known concept of a human mind that is nothing more than a tabula rasa- a passive register of animal sensations. Locke wrote that the souls of the newly born are blank tablets. He asserted that thinking is only sense perception, and that the mind lacks the power ‘to invent or frame one new simple idea’. He wrote:

The knowledge of the Existence of any other thing we can have only by Sensation: for there being no necessary connexion of real Existence with any Idea a Man hath in his Memory; nor of any other existence but that of GOD, with the Existence of any particular Man; no particular Man can know the Existence of any other Being, but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him...

...GOD has given me assurance enough of the Existence of Things without me: since, by their different application, I can produce in myself both Pleasure and Pain, which is one great Concernment of my present state.

In short, all ideas come from sensation. Locke’s rejection of innatism followed Spinoza’s position, which understood man to be no more than a warped and stunted mode of the absolute immutable Substance of Lurianic Kabbalah.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn

Deceitfully clothed

Saturday, 25 January 2025 at 17:59

John Locke

Deceitfully clothed

This is where John Locke’s influence was most strong. He strongly upheld the right to hold property as a ‘right’ under a Spinozist ‘natural law’, but that this ‘right’ should be expressed through civil laws. We do not retain our right to punish the transgressors of property rights according to Locke. Instead, it is precisely our abrogation of the right to punish which is transferred to a state that makes the political realm possible.

Within the civil law, the economy became increasingly regarded as a self-governing phenomenon and the basis of liberalism. The meaning of ‘liberty’ in this sense being a Spinozist freedom from moral constraint,with no distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil. The right to punish, which was transferred to the state, made the state a guarantor of Spinozist ‘liberty’. The feigned ‘moral’ element was transferred to those who held political power. A Lockean right to property was Marrano ‘liberty’, deceitfully clothed in political ‘justice’. Nominally ‘free’ trade enjoyed the protection of the state, but not just any enthusiastic would-be entrepreneur could engage in the tea and opium trade, usury, slave trading or the founding of the Bank of England.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Elevated vis-à-vis the overtly moral others

Friday, 24 January 2025 at 20:14

Elevated vis-à-vis the overtly moral others

Spinoza’s god of the Lurianic Kabbalah was what he posited to be the permanent and immutable Substance, the ground of all things. The Renaissance idea that the universe could be both lawful and evolving in a constant process of perfection, was incomprehensible to him. Spinoza’s god was trapped in the same set of fixed rules in which men’s minds were trapped. Since not even God can change these fixed laws, a far less powerful mankind must live in a universe defined by these fixed relationships. It is these fixed relationships, or ‘natural law’, that set the limits to man’s activities, not moral choices of self-restraint.Such a philosophical presupposition was wholly consistent with a Spinozist socio-political outlook and can be taken as a metaphorical presentation of that outlook. In an amoral universe everyone has a ‘right’ to act deceitfully, angrily, discordantly, violently, etc. towards others, in whatever manner they see fit, as long as they are able to do so; their ‘rights’ are only limited by their ability. The holder of such a view is elevated in terms of power vis-à-vis others in society who hold to an overtly moral code of behaviour, especially when he pretends to act by that same moral code.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

‘Whig Magnificoes’ were not interfered with

Thursday, 23 January 2025 at 21:11

John Locke

‘Whig Magnificoes’ were not interfered with

Post-1688 Britain might have been nominally a kingdom, but in reality it became a 'Republick of Merchants' and its head of state was not a king but, as Disraeli pointed out, really a doge. The sovereign might be allowed absolute power, as long as the economic interests of the ‘Whig Magnificoes’ were not interfered with. The Liberal system of government,economy, and social philosophy was the offspring of the oligarchy-ruled Venice of Sarpi’s time. The Venetian model had transferred to the two maritime powers best placed to exploit the trading opportunities in America and Asia - the Netherlands of Spinoza and the England of John Locke. The crucial feature of the Anglo-Dutch liberal model was the independence from national government, elected or otherwise, enjoyed by a privately controlled central banking system. In effect, that central bank became the agent of the landholding, financier-oligarchic class.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

“I will not be a Doge”

Monday, 20 January 2025 at 19:12

“I will not be a Doge”

In his novel Coningsby,Disraeli wrote: ‘The great object of Whig leaders in England, from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian....William the Third told ...Whig leaders, “I will not be a Doge” ...They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I was a Doge; George II was a Doge....George III tried not to be a Doge....He might try to get rid of the Whig Magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution.’

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’

Sunday, 19 January 2025 at 21:40

Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’

What Spinoza, followed by Locke, had theorised was Sarpi’s 'Republick of Merchants’. As in Sarpi’s Venice, the consensus of the community was that of a small clique of property-owning oligarchs. Their rejection of absolute monarchy was in fact a Counter-Renaissance opposition to any form of sovereign national rule over the economic sphere. The 1688 Dutch invasion of England, or Glorious Revolution as it was dubbed by the financial beneficiaries, established a Sarpian ‘Republick of Merchants’ on English soil, as Venetian and Dutch commercial and banking interests transferred to London. The Anglo-Dutch model of oligarchical rule was established, with the formerly centralising authority of the King transformed into the nominal authority of a Venetian-style Doge.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Collaborationist role

Saturday, 18 January 2025 at 21:49

John Locke

Collaborationist role

During his exile in Amsterdam, Locke would have been receptive to the ‘Counter-Renaissance’ ideas of Spinoza. The philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein argues that during his five years in Holland, Locke chose his friends ‘from among the same freethinking members of dissenting Protestant groups as Spinoza's small group of loyal confidants’.53 Spinoza had died in 1677, but Locke almost certainly met men in Amsterdam who spoke of the author of the Ethics, whose ideas were compatible with the expansionist ambitions of a commercial oligarchy. Locke accompanied William of Orange's wife back to England in 1688, a high profile indication of his collaborationist role in the build-up to the invasion.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.