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The summoning encounter
Saturday, 5 April 2025 at 21:07
The summoning encounter
Fichte’s illustration concerns two human beings. The encounter is open to chance. A lifetime might be spent without a truly summoning encounter, leaving the individual to lead a sub-human life, a Hellish life. Not everyone will meet his Virgil or Beatrice. The prospects of a humanising encounter might be limited by cultural insularity for example. Fichte argued that government institutions, education, the law etc. should exist to nurture and protect the conditions that foster the summoning encounter and synthesises. This sentiment was expressed most fully in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), in which he argued for ‘a total change of the existing system of education’. In its place there should be a system of national education to apply to ‘every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its individual members’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Self and not-self
Thursday, 3 April 2025 at 21:49
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Salutation of Beatrice
Self and not-self
Here we come to Fichte’s concept of encounter, which would certainly become central to my ‘who am I?’ quest. Fichte argued that up-bringing, or education, amounted to a summoning, a call to encounter in the ‘outer’ world an instance of subjectivity other than oneself. He invited his readers to imagine the first encounter of two human beings, i.e. how otherwise entirely solitary human beings would react upon meeting one another for the very first time. The summoning to a mutuality of the experience, a ‘reciprocal interaction,’ leads to a synthesis that is uniquely human, with potential for change on a cosmic scale. An encounter with the unpredictable other leads to a recognition of:
meas a rational being in conformity with his and my consciousness, synthetically united in one (i.e. in conformity with a consciousness common to both of us) such that – just as surely as he wants to be regarded as a rational being – I can compel him to acknowledge that he knows that I am one as well.
Before the synthesis there was self and not-self. Each was in a state of hypostasis without the other.But in a chance encounter, thesis (self) meets antithesis (not-self) resulting in synthesis (the triadic progression later commandeered and adapted to their own ends by Hegel, Marx and Engels). Out of the web of syntheses comes the uniquely human capacity to transcend the confines of the natural world and realise freedom. Such is the basis of human creativity that in the words of Dante’s Beatrice makes man ‘the odd one out’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Human freedom
Wednesday, 2 April 2025 at 21:23
Human freedom
Fichte defined what it is to be human as a freedom from necessity. Schelling, Hegel and, ultimately, Marx, as followers of Spinoza, denied that humanity in a submission to necessity. Perhaps this moves me forward in my quest. In answer to the ‘who am I?’ question, I might at least venture to say that I aim to be free from necessity.
In the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte described the process by which individuals must be educated into becoming human beings before they can participate fully in a post-feudal society. He wrote:
The summons to engage in free self-activity is what we call up-bringing [Erziehung]. All individuals must be brought up to be human beings, otherwise they would not be human beings.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Fichte’s Promethean struggle
Tuesday, 1 April 2025 at 21:48
Fichte’s Promethean struggle
Hegel offered a secular ‘New Testament’ to Spinoza’s ‘Old’. In reality, Hegel ended up providing the self-sustaining motor of return to the Absolute that was lacking in Spinoza’s own philosophy. It only needed Marx to turn Hegel on his head, consciously in opposition to Fichte, to complete the return, setting Spinoza ‘right side up’ again in the process. Above all, Marx was a Spinozist rather than a Hegelian. The shadow of the Hegelian dialectic that remained as a materialist teleology in Marx’s work was the determinism, necessitarianism and passive fatalism of Spinoza’s philosophy. The Hegelian dialectic of progression masked the philosophy of return, which had existed from the start in the Lurianic Kabbalah of exile and return, adopted by Spinoza. In academic philosophy, the myth of succession has held sway, with Hegel and Schelling perpetually presented as the heirs and successors of Fichte, rather than his opposite. So what did Fichte represent? He represented the Promethean struggle, the assertion of the same individual will that had attained crown and mitre in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the will which later thundered in the symphonies of Beethoven and the art of other Romantics. What did Schelling and Hegel represent? They were Spinozists.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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