John Dunn

Fichte’s philosophico-historical alternative

Monday, 10 March 2025 at 20:08

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte’s philosophico-historical alternative

Practically all official histories present the liberal account that capitalism and the emergence of liberal freedoms went hand in hand as part of the general process of modernisation: feudal restraints were removed domestically, and the expansion of international trade produced economic growth. Marxism is rooted in this same liberal narrative. Marx saw the expansion of the productive forces of society as resulting from an unfettered exchange economy - ‘universal commodity production’ - and he thought the role of the state in capitalism’s development was primarily negative: capitalism succeeded where the state did not hold back the dynamic forces at work in ‘bourgeois society’.

Fichte’s legacy remains a philosophico-historical alternative to the propaganda of the liberal-Marxist-capitalist nexus. In his philosophical works, Fichte had already turned Spinoza on his head. The great Spinozist presupposition,the Substance, was no longer anterior to the individual. Instead, the Absolute I became the presupposition and all else resided there. Fichte had superseded Spinoza’s secularised kabbalistic Judaism with a secularised capax Dei, God incarnated in man, the restoration of humanism in the Renaissance tradition of Dante.

What followed naturally from this was a fresh look at the nation state. Again not surprisingly, consciously or not, Fichte followed the pattern of Renaissance states. His main concern was to establish economic autarky within defined and policed borders, not as a matter of principle in its own right, but as a means of wresting control from a resurgent globalising oligarchy. This oligarchy had mutated from the former tripartite oligarchical alliance of landed nobility, Jewish traders and Venetian financiers, to an Anglo-Dutch oligarchy which exhibited many of the attributes that Sarpi had expressed two hundred years earlier.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Confronting determinism

Sunday, 9 March 2025 at 20:23

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Confronting determinism

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.

Act of inversion

Friday, 7 March 2025 at 20:49

Act of inversion

Hegel is to be credited with being the first to be fully conscious of the need of a new logic to solve the problem of experience. Marx understood this. However, Hegel’s dialectic supplemented Spinoza’s philosophy rather than superseded it, confirming Spinoza’s thinking rather than discrediting it. More important was Hegel’s break with Fichte, who rejected Spinozism. Marx clearly saw the Spinoza in Hegel. As a result, Hegel was easily turned on his head by Marx, i.e. re-Spinozised. Hegel was not Marx’s main target in this act of inversion. By upturning Hegel,Marx rebutted Fichte’s inversion of Spinoza.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The teleological return

Wednesday, 5 March 2025 at 21:55

Hegel and Marx

The teleological return

Notwithstanding this acute observation of the Spinozist position, Hegel’s philosophy was itself all about the teleological return to the Absolute. The dialectical process of Hegel’s Phenomenology was not a process within truth but a process to truth, or the Absolute, the One, Ein Sof.In other words, Hegel conceived the eternal becoming of experience by conceiving the Absolute idea as the fixed end to which finite thinking aspires. This was a declaration of the transcendence of truth to the act of thinking or experience, a return to a pre-existent truth rather than the generation of the truth. Such an exilic Kabbalah of return from exile was too readily co-opted by Marx as the self-sustaining dialectical motor of progression in his own Spinozist schema.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Man’s power to impose

Monday, 3 March 2025 at 21:35

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Man’s power to impose

It was during the French Revolution that Fichte began to establish the importance of national cohesion as a counterweight to a resurgent neo-feudalist oligarchy, a position that was intimately bound up with both his knowledge of and break with Spinoza. It was noted above that in Tractatus Politicus 2/6, Spinoza had attacked the humanist position in which he asserted that ‘the ignorant violate the order of nature rather than conform to it; they think of men in nature as a state within a state [imperium in imperio]’. The phrase ‘imperium in imperio’ appears too in the preface to Ethics III,where Spinoza characterised the non-naturalist view that he opposed. This was a pointed attack upon the Renaissance concept, expounded by Dante, that it is possible for the individual to attain ‘crown and mitre’, i.e. freedom over his own life, temporal and spiritual, a freedom arising out of man’s power to impose order over nature rather than conform to it.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Absolute I as God-like

Sunday, 2 March 2025 at 21:28

Dante

Absolute I as God-like

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’s humanistic interpretation

Friday, 28 February 2025 at 21:33

Jean Jaques Rousseau

Fichte’s humanistic interpretation

Fichte consciously opposed his ideas to those of Rousseau, arguing that for Rousseau, ‘the advancement of culture is the sole cause of all human depravity. According to him there is no salvation for man but in a State of Nature...’ The vices of society might cease to exist in such a condition, ‘but with it, Virtue and Reason too would be destroyed. Man becomes an irrational creature; there is a new race of animals, and men no longer exist’.

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.