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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.
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Fichte’s Promethean struggle
Tuesday, 1 April 2025 at 21:48
Fichte’s Promethean struggle
Hegel offered a secular ‘New Testament’ to Spinoza’s ‘Old’. In reality, Hegel ended up providing the self-sustaining motor of return to the Absolute that was lacking in Spinoza’s own philosophy. It only needed Marx to turn Hegel on his head, consciously in opposition to Fichte, to complete the return, setting Spinoza ‘right side up’ again in the process. Above all, Marx was a Spinozist rather than a Hegelian. The shadow of the Hegelian dialectic that remained as a materialist teleology in Marx’s work was the determinism, necessitarianism and passive fatalism of Spinoza’s philosophy. The Hegelian dialectic of progression masked the philosophy of return, which had existed from the start in the Lurianic Kabbalah of exile and return, adopted by Spinoza. In academic philosophy, the myth of succession has held sway, with Hegel and Schelling perpetually presented as the heirs and successors of Fichte, rather than his opposite. So what did Fichte represent? He represented the Promethean struggle, the assertion of the same individual will that had attained crown and mitre in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the will which later thundered in the symphonies of Beethoven and the art of other Romantics. What did Schelling and Hegel represent? They were Spinozists.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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