John Dunn

The teleological return

Wednesday, 5 March 2025 at 21:55

Hegel and Marx

The teleological return

Notwithstanding this acute observation of the Spinozist position, Hegel’s philosophy was itself all about the teleological return to the Absolute. The dialectical process of Hegel’s Phenomenology was not a process within truth but a process to truth, or the Absolute, the One, Ein Sof.In other words, Hegel conceived the eternal becoming of experience by conceiving the Absolute idea as the fixed end to which finite thinking aspires. This was a declaration of the transcendence of truth to the act of thinking or experience, a return to a pre-existent truth rather than the generation of the truth. Such an exilic Kabbalah of return from exile was too readily co-opted by Marx as the self-sustaining dialectical motor of progression in his own Spinozist schema.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Man’s power to impose

Monday, 3 March 2025 at 21:35

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Man’s power to impose

It was during the French Revolution that Fichte began to establish the importance of national cohesion as a counterweight to a resurgent neo-feudalist oligarchy, a position that was intimately bound up with both his knowledge of and break with Spinoza. It was noted above that in Tractatus Politicus 2/6, Spinoza had attacked the humanist position in which he asserted that ‘the ignorant violate the order of nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in nature as a state within a state [imperium in imperio]’. The phrase ‘imperium in imperio’ appears too in the preface to Ethics III,where Spinoza characterised the non-naturalist view that he opposed. This was a pointed attack upon the Renaissance concept, expounded by Dante, that it is possible for the individual to attain ‘crown and mitre’, i.e. freedom over his own life, temporal and spiritual, a freedom arising out of man’s power to impose order over nature rather than conform to it.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Absolute I as God-like

Sunday, 2 March 2025 at 21:28

Dante

Absolute I as God-like

Freedom was not for Fichte an end in itself, or something to be found in nature. It was certainly not a return to anything that once existed. Freedom meant an independence from nature. Only then would there be scope for the spontaneous and creative activity, which Dante had held analogous to that of the first Creator in whose image man was made - the creative activity that distinguished man from beasts and deified the Absolute I as God-like. Only with such freedom ‘could a new equality arise - a uniform progress of culture in all individual men’. Rousseau’s reduction of humanity to ‘a race of animals’ was the threat to be confronted. After all, a bestial docility was not altogether undesirable to those who would exploit the productive capacity of such ‘free’ individuals. The return to nature in Rousseau was a Spinozist and kabbalistic ‘return’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.