John Dunn

Kicking against the Spinozist proposition

Friday, 7 February 2025 at 20:56

Heinrich Friedrich Füger, Prometheus Brings Fire

Kicking against the Spinozist proposition

This was the breakthrough that astonished me, not on first reading, but upon first understanding; and a thorough appreciation of Kant is not possible unless the context of the Spinozan assault on the Promethean spirit is also understood. Now we are getting somewhere. The long-postponed answer to the ‘who am I?’ question will have something to do with me being a maker of reality. The great presupposition of Spinoza’s philosophy, the Substance, the great hypostasis, left no space for a separately generated human experience. In Spinozist terms, all semblance of such an experience was a temporary aberration that must eventually be resolved and dissolved back into Ein Sof through the process of Tikkun or, in Spinoza’s re-interpretation, through rational thought. The Spinozist position answered the ‘who am I?’ question with - ‘as a mere mode of the Substance, you are what you have to be’. I recoiled from such abject necessitarianism, and turned to the Romantics for new hope. I felt an affinity with the Romantics who kicked against the Spinozist proposition that man, along with all multiplicity, must be dissolved into the Substance.


From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

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.

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.