John Dunn

Romantic reaction

Monday, 14 April 2025 at 17:20

Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Thomas Phillips

Romantic reaction

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge viewed education as synonymous with the humanising process. It offered the encounter with the ‘other’, or ‘not-I’, that was essential to the development of the ‘I’. But this had been just one facet of Coleridge’s Romantic reaction to Spinozism. Where Coleridge surpassed Fichte was in the exploration of what it means to be human at all. A reading of Coleridge’s struggle with this issue was inspirational to my own attempt to answer the ‘who am I?’ question, particularly in relation to conceptions of God.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Humanising

Sunday, 13 April 2025 at 21:42

Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge

Humanising

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Humanising

Saturday, 12 April 2025 at 21:55

Rousseau (left) subverted by Coleridge

Humanising

Taking his lead from Fichte, Coleridge subverted Rousseau’s social contract, turning it instead into something which tends towards an ideal future, in which we contract freely with each other as autonomous individuals, each treating each always as an end in himself rather than as a means to an end. For such an ‘idea’ to be realised, individuals had to be transformed from ‘things’ into human beings. And taking his cue from Fichte, Coleridge would place national education at the heart of the humanising process.

From Child of Encounter

© 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.