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Chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel
Saturday, 1 February 2025 at 21:20
Chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel
Ironically, it was the imperfect understanding of Spinoza by his followers that led to the rise of the subjectivist motive of certainty - the appeal to sense-certainty. Innate ideas are not certain, argued Locke, because they are not the product but the presupposition of experience. Sensation for Locke was therefore to be determined by an external world described in Newtonian terms. Mind, for Locke, was originally a passive thing, a tabula rasa. There is a presupposed world, or Nature, that is external to the sentient and inscribes itself upon the human mind. Berkeley’s immaterialism did not challenge what appeared to be its Lockean opposite, but rather confirmed its core principle. Berkeley’s God was Locke’s Nature by another name, imposing the same limits upon the constructive process of experience. Hume’s skepticism - that our belief in an external world cannot be rationally justified - showed that the experience which claims to be the most anti-dogmatic does in fact coincide with its contrary - pure dogmatism. The subject can do nothing.The subject is nothing.
Locke,Berkeley and Hume retained the essence of Spinozist monism i.e. the elimination of the self, except that this apparent death was rather a coma, a state of limbo in a passive state of abject dualism. That which is, exists outside of the comatose subject, and only outside of the subject. This was the materialist metaphysics, the chink in the wall of the Spinozist citadel, which gave Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) something to attack.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Man subsumed
Friday, 31 January 2025 at 21:22
Subsumed by Steven Miller
Man subsumed
Philosophically this ‘truth’ translated too readily into positivism and deference to the objective virginity of cold facts, untouched by any subjective intrusion from mind, and the modern world was transformed into an arid desert of reality. The Spinozist Counter-Renaissance onslaught against humanism was brutally effective. Tikkun and the enfolding of alterity (anti-inclusiveness) into Ein Sofdemanded no less than the death of the self. Out of this came the modern phenomenon of slavery experienced as freedom. It was the elimination of a human experience apart from Ein Sof, the destruction of the self, that led Spinozism to deny free will and the value of the creative imagination. Man has nothing to add to nature, he is not even subsidiary to the original Substance, or an addendum to it. He is simply subsumed into Spinoza’s great presupposition, which is where Spinoza’s philosophy is reflective of Luriunic Kabbalah, in particular Tikkun, the process by which cosmic restoration and repair are to be accomplished.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Certainty resolved into truth
Thursday, 30 January 2025 at 21:51
Certainty resolved into truth
To understand what the Romantic Movement was reacting against, you have toask - what had Spinoza done? Where was the ground of Spinoza’s ‘truth’? Spinoza told us:
By substance I mean that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; that is, that the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed.
This was the great presupposition upon which the Spinozist position rests; it is the Ein Sofof Lurianic Kabbalah, the ultimate hypostasis. It is the great presupposition because it is prior to all else. ‘Substance is by nature prior to its affections.’ Given that the Substance, or God, is all-embracing, then thought does not need an extrinsic arbiter of truth,because it does not have truth outside of itself. Whilst a turn could have been taken at this point to a pure idealism, or subjectivism, the convictions of Spinoza’s kabbalism, and his Marrano resolution to return to pre-expulsion privilege and economic power, led him to a materialist monism in the opposite direction. Spinoza did not resolve truth (objective) into certainty (subjective) but certainty into truth. The subject became the slave rather than the master of truth. The ‘truth’ of the modern world became and remains an instrument of enslavement.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Passive acceptance
Monday, 27 January 2025 at 19:06
William of Orange
Passive acceptance
Having followed Spinoza in eliminating the freedom of creativity and imagination from men’s minds, Locke based man’s ‘freedom’ upon the ‘sanctity’ of property relations. His notion of the ‘social contract’, which guaranteed the players' club members the right to enter the casino, was in fact advanced in order to justify William of Orange’s usurpation of the British throne. James II, in effect, was charged with having denied those rights to his more speculative subjects, thus breaking the contract. What’s more, once the members were in, it was made more difficult for others to open the door. Where a mind is considered to be a tabula rasa, it can be ‘educated’ into the acceptance of a moral code to which the members in the casino do not adhere, despite appearing to do so. Passive acceptance is further guaranteed when the underlying philosophy perpetrated by that ‘education’ is a sociological one of determinism.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Anti-mind
Sunday, 26 January 2025 at 19:23
John Locke
Anti-mind
Locke’s position on property was intimately bound to his Spinozist understanding of man. Spinoza’s kabbalistic god as immutable Substance and ‘natural law’, which set the limit to man’s activities, led to determinism and necessitarianism. Locke developed this into his well-known concept of a human mind that is nothing more than a tabula rasa- a passive register of animal sensations. Locke wrote that the souls of the newly born are blank tablets. He asserted that thinking is only sense perception, and that the mind lacks the power ‘to invent or frame one new simple idea’. He wrote:
The knowledge of the Existence of any other thing we can have only by Sensation: for there being no necessary connexion of real Existence with any Idea a Man hath in his Memory; nor of any other existence but that of GOD, with the Existence of any particular Man; no particular Man can know the Existence of any other Being, but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him...
...GOD has given me assurance enough of the Existence of Things without me: since, by their different application, I can produce in myself both Pleasure and Pain, which is one great Concernment of my present state.
In short, all ideas come from sensation. Locke’s rejection of innatism followed Spinoza’s position, which understood man to be no more than a warped and stunted mode of the absolute immutable Substance of Lurianic Kabbalah.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn
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Deceitfully clothed
Saturday, 25 January 2025 at 17:59
John Locke
Deceitfully clothed
This is where John Locke’s influence was most strong. He strongly upheld the right to hold property as a ‘right’ under a Spinozist ‘natural law’, but that this ‘right’ should be expressed through civil laws. We do not retain our right to punish the transgressors of property rights according to Locke. Instead, it is precisely our abrogation of the right to punish which is transferred to a state that makes the political realm possible.
Within the civil law, the economy became increasingly regarded as a self-governing phenomenon and the basis of liberalism. The meaning of ‘liberty’ in this sense being a Spinozist freedom from moral constraint,with no distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil. The right to punish, which was transferred to the state, made the state a guarantor of Spinozist ‘liberty’. The feigned ‘moral’ element was transferred to those who held political power. A Lockean right to property was Marrano ‘liberty’, deceitfully clothed in political ‘justice’. Nominally ‘free’ trade enjoyed the protection of the state, but not just any enthusiastic would-be entrepreneur could engage in the tea and opium trade, usury, slave trading or the founding of the Bank of England.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Elevated vis-à-vis the overtly moral others
Friday, 24 January 2025 at 20:14
Elevated vis-à-vis the overtly moral others
Spinoza’s god of the Lurianic Kabbalah was what he posited to be the permanent and immutable Substance, the ground of all things. The Renaissance idea that the universe could be both lawful and evolving in a constant process of perfection, was incomprehensible to him. Spinoza’s god was trapped in the same set of fixed rules in which men’s minds were trapped. Since not even God can change these fixed laws, a far less powerful mankind must live in a universe defined by these fixed relationships. It is these fixed relationships, or ‘natural law’, that set the limits to man’s activities, not moral choices of self-restraint.Such a philosophical presupposition was wholly consistent with a Spinozist socio-political outlook and can be taken as a metaphorical presentation of that outlook. In an amoral universe everyone has a ‘right’ to act deceitfully, angrily, discordantly, violently, etc. towards others, in whatever manner they see fit, as long as they are able to do so; their ‘rights’ are only limited by their ability. The holder of such a view is elevated in terms of power vis-à-vis others in society who hold to an overtly moral code of behaviour, especially when he pretends to act by that same moral code.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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