John Dunn

Humanity’s moral destiny

Sunday, 23 February 2025 at 21:10

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Humanity’s moral destiny

The vocation of man for Fichte was a moral one, which meant to transform nature and bring it into accord with his ideals. The world existed so that man could express those ideals and bring a moral order into being. Even so, to act upon the world was more than a moral purpose for Fichte,it was by definition what it meant to be human at all, even divine. He sometimes referred to the concept of the Absolute I as God and at other times as pure rational and spontaneous activity. From this standpoint, to hold to a Spinozist passivity was to expunge the Absolute I and bring about the death of the incarnated God. The preservation of humanity’s moral destiny against the threat of deterministic genocide was therefore the duty of everyone who considered himself fully human. Failure to inculcate the benefits of an actively moral culture into each member of society served not only to dehumanise those individuals, but also to endanger the human race as a whole. This destruction of man was the fearthat Fichte expressed in The Vocation of the Scholar.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Creative imagination once more

Saturday, 22 February 2025 at 21:11

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Creative imagination once more

F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819), an obsessive Spinozist, saw in Spinoza’s ‘novel conception of God, the way toward a new religion or religiousness which was to inspire a wholly new kind of society, a new kind of church’. Jacobi was blinded to an appreciation of the significance of Fichte’s inversion of Spinoza, and yet his criticism of Fichte was unknowingly astute. He claimed that Fichte’s position was nothing more than an inverted Spinozism, and that the concept of the Absolute I played the same role in Fichte’s system as the concept of Substance played in Spinoza’s. What Jacobi failed to appreciate was that whereas Spinozism starts and finishes in materialism, Fichte’s system starts and finishes with thought. The inversion changed everything. With Fichte, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Humanness and the imagination became one.The creative imagination once more became the defining factor of the whole human enterprise.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Kantian rebuttal of Spinozism

Friday, 21 February 2025 at 16:30

Kant and Fichte

Kantian rebuttal of Spinozism

Any move to the political Right from Marxism will be analogous to the one made by Fichte from Spinozism to idealism. One has to know the thing to which one is opposed before one can claim to know the truth of that which one supports. (True modern day thinkers on the political Right will commonly have made the switch from Marxism. A mere move from Marxism to liberalism in any of its variants or vice versa is no move.)

It was after reading Kant that Fichte turned Spinoza on his head. He saw in Kant’s work the rebuttal of Spinozist determinism and the way to freedom.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Ascension

Thursday, 20 February 2025 at 17:07

Fichte’s Dantean Virgil

As a student, Fichte was a devotee of Spinozist determinism. His conversion to philosophical idealism came about only later after reading Kant's Critiques. Kant was Fichte’s Dantean Virgil. Fichte’s The Vocation of Man has stages of doubt, understanding and faith that correspond with the stages of Dante’s pilgrimage. There is a pedagogical parallel between the master (Virgil = Kant) and adept (Dante = Fichte),a learning process which ends when Fichte ascends from Spinozism into philosophical idealism (Purgatory into Paradise). Fichte was aware of the depths from which he had ascended intellectually, writing that ‘so far as dogmatism can be consistent, Spinozism is its most logical outcome...’

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza

Monday, 17 February 2025 at 22:44

Johann Gottleib Fichte

Polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza

All that stood between the Spinozists and the application of the demands of necessity was absolutist sovereignty. This was fated to fall at the hands of the French revolutionaries and Napoleon. And the young Spinozist Fichte too was at the revolutionists’ intellectual barricade, that is, until Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ began to emerge from the clearing smoke. Fichte, once the young and arrogant radical like me, was left with the need to answer the same ‘who am I?’ question as me. The way that he set about the task, by positing the polar opposite philosophical perspective to Spinoza, was critical to the eventual emergence of an answer.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Arrogance of privileged minds

Sunday, 16 February 2025 at 20:39

Arrogance of privileged minds

Think of Spinozism as the Marxism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and you will see why I felt an affinity with the young Fichte and others of his generation, for whom Spinozism was the radical philosophy with which to over- topple the established order. Just like the Marxists a century later, having insight into the necessity behind the events to which others were blind permitted one to enter a ‘masonry’ of brother intellectuals, the future governors of the world. To have history on one’s side was a thrilling source of intellectual strength, which also pandered to the arrogance of privileged minds.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

New hope

Saturday, 15 February 2025 at 20:12

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

New hope

Thepost-Kantians intended to finish the job. Certain that Kant’s thing-in-itself was a creation of mental activity, the post-Kantian idealists attempted to banish this Spinozist residuum from the world. Clearly, the alternative posited by the post-Kantian Romantics would be critical to my own search for an answer to the ‘who am I?’ question. If Spinoza had destroyed the self, seemingly to eliminate any possibility of coming up with an answer - other than ‘you are a passive entity, which is merely a mode of the Substance’ - then a rival philosophy that purported to oppose Spinoza by giving pre-eminence to the ‘I’ offered new hope.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.