John Dunn

Geo-political upheaval

Wednesday, 31 July 2024 at 21:42

Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ writ large

Geo-political upheaval

The outcomes of the so-called Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution were no teleological advance. This was not a shift from feudalism to capitalism. Rather they marked a metamorphosed return to pre-Renaissance feudalism, establishing new ways in which to extract and share the surplus produced by the producer-class, not through serfdom, but rather through the wages system, central banking and taxation. The pre-Renaissance exploiters operated in a monetary economy that existed in parallel to a world ruled over by kings and princes. Following the French revolution, economics as monetary accounting moved to centre-stage. The state and state trappings of kings, princes, presidents and parliaments were co-opted as the guarantors, not of a feudal hierarchy, but of central banking, taxation and debt collection by means of physical force. This was the system first established in Venice, then later in the Netherlands, Britain, France and the USA. This was Sarpi’s ‘Republick of Merchants’ writ large. The pressure to extend this system has resulted in constant geo-political upheaval over the past two and a half centuries.

From Child of Encounte

© John Dunn.

The Counter-Renaissance

Tuesday, 30 July 2024 at 21:27

In Italy the Renaissance flourished, and then...

The Counter-Renaissance

Theconcept of a self-driving materialist teleological progress in history was introduced by Marx, based on Hegel. This was a false interpretation of history, but one which was convenient to the neo-feudalists, or ruling oligarchy. So-called capitalism as a successor to feudalism (as in the Marxian narrative) never happened. The socio-historical and cultural phenomenon known as the Renaissance was the actual successor tofeudalism. The Renaissance was the true post-feudalism. The political manifestation of the Renaissance was the Renaissance state, which reached its zenith with the Peace of Westphalia.

TheCounter-Renaissance followed the Renaissance, a socio- historical, cultural and historical phenomenon best exemplified by Sarpi’s Venice, the Dutch Republic and England under William of Orange following the 1688 Dutch invasion. The Counter-Renaissance re-established feudalism, or a neo- feudalism, which was an amalgam of the feudal interests that had served Spinoza’s free-trading progenitors well, but which the Renaissance and the rise of the Renaissance state had restricted.

From Child of Encounte

© John Dunn.

Free to follow a true cosmic vocation

Sunday, 28 July 2024 at 21:46

Free to follow a true cosmic vocation

With Fichte's inversion of Spinozist philosophy, we pass from passivity to activity, from slave to ruler. Fichte pitted man as creator, doer and producer against Spinozist determinism, necessitarianism and fatalism. Man’s purpose is to act upon the world, change it and perfect it, i.e. change what is into what ought to be. The vocation of man is a moral one, which is to transform nature and bring it into accord with his ideals. The world exists so that man can express those ideals and bring amoral order into being. It follows from this that any distraction from man’s moral vocation is a reversion to Spinozist determinism. After all,with trade there is a preoccupation with profit and ongoing subsistence. The lives of individuals are determined by forces external to themselves, principally the controllers of money supply (a truth later masked by democracy), quite apart from the economic forces, which take on a life of their own. Fichte’s politics were at one with his idealist philosophy. In the context of his philosophy, to embrace trade is to renounce freedom, the Absolute I, God and man’s cosmic role in bringing moral order into the world and beyond. This is what drove Fichte to postulate the closed commercial state, a controlled economic environment that would free individuals to follow their true cosmic vocation.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The Closed Commercial State

Saturday, 27 July 2024 at 21:46

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

The Closed Commercial State

Fichte presented his ideas in The Closed Commercial State (1800), in which he postulated the withdrawal from foreign trade, the introduction of a national currency, a system of price controls, the balancing of production and consumption, and the regulation of the workforce - as means of securing the industry and the economic independence of all its citizens. His comprehension of the enduring tensions between commercialised society and political freedom was ahead of its time. It was his philosophical idealism, rooted in a reading of Kant, and opposed to Spinozist materialism, that motivated his recommendations, i.e. the desire not simply to subordinate the individual freedom of the Absolute Ito the external imperatives and needs of globalised capitalism.

(From Child of Encounter)

© John Dunn.

Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozism

Friday, 26 July 2024 at 22:16

Portrait of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)
Unknown artist

Fichte’s climax of conscious reaction to Spinozism

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.

Freedom means an independence from nature

Thursday, 25 July 2024 at 21:51

Overcoming nature's barriers

Freedom means an independence from nature

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 recognises the threat from Rousseau

Wednesday, 24 July 2024 at 21:48

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte recognises the threat from Rousseau

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.