John Dunn

Against serfdom

Friday, 11 April 2025 at 21:32

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Against serfdom

Like Fichte too, Coleridge’s turn against Jacobinism and the French Revolution was expressed as a re-evaluation of Rousseau’s Social Contract. Coleridge described the Social Contract as ‘at once false and foolish’. No two humans should ever be bound by a contract as though it had some pre-existent force and, thereby, eternal validity. Only as an idea can such a contract serve the interests of individuals, rather than oppress them.

But if instead of the conception or theory of an original social contract, you say the idea of an ever-originating social contract, this is so certain and so indispensable, that it constitutes the whole ground of the difference between subject and serf, between a commonwealth and a slave- plantation. And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of person, in contra-distinction from thing; all social law and justice being grounded on the principle, that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such: and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether and merely as the means to an end; but the person must always be included in the end.

This clearly was a treatise against serfdom, even though written by Coleridge in the most rapidly advancing industrial nation of its day. There was no notion of economic progress necessitating political progress. He was writing in an early nineteenth century Britain, the epitome of Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’, truly behind enemy lines asa Romantic, and yet clearly he recognised the reality of a neo-feudalism in which individuals were treated as ‘things’ to be exploited.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

On the Constitution of the State and Church

Thursday, 10 April 2025 at 21:30

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the Constitution of the State and Church

Fichte’s philosophical response to Spinozism was inseparable from his political response. The same was true of another leading figure and disciple of Fichte in the Romantic reaction - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose most sustained presentation of politicised anti-spinozism was in his On the Constitution of the State and Church. From the outset in this polemical work, Coleridge stressed the power of imagination and ideas. Many people can conceive of what is meant by Church and State, he argued, but few possess the idea of either. This emphasis upon ideas was the bedrock of Coleridge’s politics, implying that all social constructs must originate in the mind of man as ideas, from the imagination. Man must not be subservient to entities that he confronts as pre-existent, or pre-supposed and external to him. Just as for Fichte, Coleridge believed that the state and other institutions were only what individuals think and make of them.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Sinister ‘education’

Tuesday, 8 April 2025 at 21:56

Edward Bernays

Sinister ‘education’

What passes for education under neo-feudalism (or modern capitalism, under its current misnomer), is prescription, with a certificate issued to whomever is adequately prescribed upon, i.e. pre-scribed, pre-written, pre-programmed. At its best education is the summoning of children by their teachers to discover and exercise their faculties and capacities in ways that they cannot on their own. At its most sinister, ‘education’is the deliberate stifling of the summoning process in order that the potential for change, a threat to the interests of dominant interest groups, does not emerge. The blocking of the summoning process and the deliberate feeding of ‘acceptable’ information through the controlled media was central to the development of propaganda methodologies by Edward Bernays in the twentieth century, which amounted to the subjugation of the individual’s free will by the manipulation of the mob. In such circumstances it is only through the chance encounter with afully human being that the slave will realise that he is being subjected to an injustice by a third party, otherwise he thinks the present state of affairs is the natural order of being. In short, there is no guarantee of escaping from the ‘dark wood’, à la Dante.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The summoning encounter

Monday, 7 April 2025 at 21:29

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.

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.

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.

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.