John Dunn

The Spinozist credo that ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’ could be shared by Marxist materialists such as Engels and Stalin. As a Marxist himself, Ilyenkov would have no problem relating to this. This whole Spinozist outlook can be summed up by the ugly word - necessitarianism.
John Dunn

Jesus proclaimed the truth of the awakened consciousness, new life, and was vilified for it by the devil’s children. Nevertheless, his proclamation was the turning point and still separates his God from the idols of the Judaisms, be they the original, Christic, Islamic or atheistic.
John Dunn

Choose Love and the dialectical act of creation, described here in 1 John as a mutual indwelling, maintains the ‘I am’. Reject Love and the ‘I am’ of mutual indwelling is lost. The ‘I am’ that dwells in the individual is lost. The self is lost. Does this not give new meaning to Jesus’ mission on Earth to save you and me?
John Dunn

Whatever love is, it is dialectical. It is upon love that the mystery turns, i.e. upon the fact that there are no criteria by which love can be defined. This is the wonderful mystery of Love and God.
John Dunn

I am in the presence of a mystery i.e. a reality rooted beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? God is Love.
John Dunn

To be conscious is to be human. Encounter awakens consciousness and humanises. This is where the magic resides. Human consciousness is magic. Mind is magic in the sense that our consciousness as fully human beings cannot be subject to rational explanation.
John Dunn

Having travelled the long and hard road to individuation to develop and purify the active element of being, it was hard to accept that consciousness needs another element, a passive element. However, there is no consciousness without these two elements, and the suppression of this duality in the Spinozist Substance, or the Absolute I of Idealism, must necessarily lead to the extinction not of being but rather of consciousness.
John Dunn

And who is promoting the One world schemas? Who is funding the anarchist, Marxist and liberal Left? Their faces will not be revealed. Suffice it to say that financial globalism is the final victory of Spinozism.
John Dunn

The Creation was not the one-off event which kicked off time. Such nonsense is the scientific language of the Big Bang, a conjuring trick based on the ‘rabbit in the hat’ deception that something now exists that did not exist before. Creation is Logos ‘is now and ever shall be’.
John Dunn

Consciously of not, Steiner incorporated Lurianic and Spinozist concepts of return to the original Substance into his cosmography, most likely through the influence of Hegel, who was similarly infected. Steiner’s concept of freedom ultimately denied the individually creative I. Like Spinoza, freedom for Steiner meant the recognition of necessity, except that he presented that necessity as cosmic in scale.
John Dunn

Steiner gave us permission to consider the occult as a means of answering the grail question - ‘what am !?’ He also permitted us to make a cosmic reversal - to upturn Spinoza and Marx - by establishing the working principle that matter originates in spirit.
John Dunn

By taking idealism to its logical conclusion, in an effort to save the ‘I’, Gentile had in fact taken the long route to pulling a pall over the self, of which Spinoza had been guilty in a much more direct manner.
John Dunn

It is clear that Gentile had reached the outer limits of philosophical idealism. If he extended the logic of his own argument, thinking would take place without the thinker. If this were the case, no man as an individual, not even Gentile, is real. It is only the act of thinking which is real, and as such it cannot be attached to an unreal thinker.
John Dunn

Man is not man naturally, but becomes man through self-knowledge and self-choice. Man is a spirit because he can choose to be a beast or an angel. Freedom implies growth from within, not from without. The growth of a plant illustrates the latter; the growth of a man illustrates the former.
John Dunn

There are echoes of Fichte and Coleridge in the shift from a Spinozist left radicalism to the political right. For Gentile, as for the others who had followed a similar path of political conversion, this shift was prompted by an urge to defend the ‘I’. But Gentile believed that he had introduced something new into the struggle, something which overcame the failings of all previous idealisms.
John Dunn

Through a combination of leadership and educing (Fichte’s terminology was translated as summoning, but had similar connotations), the ‘latent man’ would emerge from his former bestial and sub-human state.
John Dunn

It is only through the chance encounter with a fully 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.
John Dunn

The thing-in-itself was not merely the unknowable cause of experience, but much more fundamentally the hypostasis of the highest good. In attempting to de-hypostasise this concept, Fichte was saying that there is no God, no divine justice, except that which we create here on earth.
John Dunn

This Grail is concerned with 'carrying on Christ’s effectiveness in this world,' as a vessel through which the divine can have its way. The inner Christ is Logos incarnated. This is the Grail. The Grail is there to be discovered, but first the individual must ask the Grail question - ‘who am I?’
John Dunn

Perhaps the philosophy that Powys’s actively created self most closely resembles is that of Ernst Junger. Late in his life, Junger published a novel called Eumeswil which postulated the concept of the ‘Anarch,’ a concept that is modelled on Max Stirner’s idea of the ‘Egoist’, an idea that too had a profound influence upon Powys.
John Dunn