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Revolution against Spinoza
Monday, 3 February 2025 at 19:40
Immanuel Kant
Revolution against Spinoza
It was Kant who led the revolution against Spinoza, describing his new ideas as Copernican in their likely impact upon established philosophical cosmologies. Kant would have been better calling his thought anti-Copernican, because he revolted against the cosmocentric and advocated instead an egocentric view of the universe. In the revolution, or the nascent Romantic reaction, Christian Renaissance Humanism was reasserted in secular terms, to conceive reality not as the limit of spirit but the same as spirit, which to be real must have everything inside itself. Kant’s revolutionary thesis was that objective reality, to be known at all, must conform to the subjective structure of the human mind. We know reality because it is of our making.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel
Saturday, 1 February 2025 at 21:20
Chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel
Ironically, it was the imperfect understanding of Spinoza by his followers that led to the rise of the subjectivist motive of certainty - the appeal to sense-certainty. Innate ideas are not certain, argued Locke, because they are not the product but the presupposition of experience. Sensation for Locke was therefore to be determined by an external world described in Newtonian terms. Mind, for Locke, was originally a passive thing, a tabula rasa. There is a presupposed world, or Nature, that is external to the sentient and inscribes itself upon the human mind. Berkeley’s immaterialism did not challenge what appeared to be its Lockean opposite, but rather confirmed its core principle. Berkeley’s God was Locke’s Nature by another name, imposing the same limits upon the constructive process of experience. Hume’s skepticism - that our belief in an external world cannot be rationally justified - showed that the experience which claims to be the most anti-dogmatic does in fact coincide with its contrary - pure dogmatism. The subject can do nothing.The subject is nothing.
Locke,Berkeley and Hume retained the essence of Spinozist monism i.e. the elimination of the self, except that this apparent death was rather a coma, a state of limbo in a passive state of abject dualism. That which is, exists outside of the comatose subject, and only outside of the subject. This was the materialist metaphysics, the chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel, which gave Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) something to attack.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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