John Dunn

Confronting determinism

Sunday, 9 March 2025 at 20:23

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Confronting determinism

Fichte did not attempt to supplement or develop Spinozism; he sought to confront a deterministic, necessitarian, fatalistic and dehumanising philosophy with a ‘hatred of mankind’ that he himself had once espoused.He sought to break out of its closed entrapping mathematical schema. Nowhere is it more clear than in the ‘state within a state’ rebuttal, which represented Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozist kabbalism, his awakening to the socio-political and economic implications within the universalising Tikkun of Spinozism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Act of inversion

Friday, 7 March 2025 at 20:49

Act of inversion

Hegel is to be credited with being the first to be fully conscious of the need of a new logic to solve the problem of experience. Marx understood this. However, Hegel’s dialectic supplemented Spinoza’s philosophy rather than superseded it, confirming Spinoza’s thinking rather than discrediting it. More important was Hegel’s break with Fichte, who rejected Spinozism. Marx clearly saw the Spinoza in Hegel. As a result, Hegel was easily turned on his head by Marx, i.e. re-Spinozised. Hegel was not Marx’s main target in this act of inversion. By upturning Hegel,Marx rebutted Fichte’s inversion of Spinoza.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.

Fichte’s humanistic interpretation

Friday, 28 February 2025 at 21:33

Jean Jaques Rousseau

Fichte’s humanistic interpretation

Fichte consciously opposed his ideas to those of Rousseau, arguing that for Rousseau, ‘the advancement of culture is the sole cause of all human depravity. According to him there is no salvation for man but in a State of Nature...’ The vices of society might cease to exist in such a condition, ‘but with it, Virtue and Reason too would be destroyed. Man becomes an irrational creature; there is a new race of animals, and men no longer exist’.

The Spinozist turn to the French Revolution, fuelled by the writings of Rousseau and others, spelt out danger to Fichte. (The centrality of Spinozism to the French Revolution and the affinities linking Spinoza, Diderot, and Rousseau, was recognised by Fichte long before Jonathan Israel, but Israel’s obsession with Spinoza’s impact bolsters Fichte’s much earlier observation.) In Fichte’s humanistic interpretation of events, Rousseau’s man in ‘his primitive state’ was a sub-human threat to the very existence of the human race. The failure to advance actively mankind’s dominance over nature risked a slide into the passivity that endangered the pursuit of man’s moral purpose and, by definition, his humanness.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Subject Nature to Reason

Thursday, 27 February 2025 at 21:53

Subject Nature to Reason

Like many a young romantic, Fichte had once embraced the seemingly liberating possibilities of the French Revolution. It was, however, his rejection of Spinozism that led to his rightward interpretation of events. He did not view equality, the rights of man, universal brotherhood and perpetual peace as ends in themselves. His egalitarian concern was to release the full potentialities of each individual in order that a common moral end could be most effectively pursued. ‘The aim of all culture of human capacity’, he wrote in the Vocation of the Scholar, ‘is to subject Nature... to Reason’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.