John Dunn

The ‘state within a state’ rebuttal 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.
John Dunn

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 to Fichte 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.
John Dunn

Fichte spelt out a specific, all‐transforming, intervention into history, advocating a socialist utopia that emphasised a shared language, culture and moral destiny.
John Dunn

Fichte contended that God is not dead Being before which man is passive, but rather pure action. In effect Fichte posited God as the moral world order, which humanity continually strives to realise here on earth.
John Dunn

The Romantic Movement was an emanation of the Promethean struggle for freedom against a mind-independent reality, ‘the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things’, first articulated by Zarathustra.
John Dunn

The Romantic Movement in turn will then be seen as an emanation of the Promethean struggle for freedom against a mind-independent reality, ‘the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things’, first articulated by Zarathustra.
John Dunn

The concept of the thing-in-itself was a residuum of the Spinozist Substance (rooted as we know in Lurianic Kabbalah), which Kant’s Copernican Revolution combatted, but did not fully destroy. The post-Kantians intended to finish the job. Conscious that Kant’s thing-in-itself was a creation of mental activity, the post-Kantian idealists attempted to banish this Spinozist residuum from the world.
John Dunn

Locke, Berkeley and Hume retained the essence of Spinozist monism i.e. the death of the self, except that this apparent death was rather a coma, a state of limbo in a passive state of abject dualism.
John Dunn

The ‘truth’ of the modern world was and remains an instrument of enslavement. Philosophically this ‘truth’ translated too readily into positivism and deference to the objective virginity of facts, untouched by any subjective intrusion from mind. The modern world became an arid desert of reality.
John Dunn

Napoleon’s conquests cemented the spread of French revolutionary legislation to much of western Europe. The powers of the Roman Catholic church, guilds, and manorial aristocracy came under the gun as the goal of an unimpeded borderless movement of money came into view. Traditions crumbled. 'All that is solid melts into air’, wrote Marx in a Sabbatian fervour, ‘all that is holy is profaned'.
John Dunn

Like Spinoza’s, Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism was a social, economic and political phenomenon, wrapped in an interpretation of Lurianic kabbalistic metaphors of exile and return. It was to the exiled Marranos who sailed eastwards for the Ottoman Empire that Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism appealed.
John Dunn

Spinoza rejected orthodox Judaism for the pursuit of esoteric kabbalistic metaphors clothed in the exoteric form of rationalism. Sabbatai Zevi pursued another course, but towards the same ends in the rejection of rabbinical tradition.

As such, their ‘messianic’ roles were to lead mankind into the modern world.
John Dunn

Nominally ‘free’ trade enjoyed the protection of the state. Not just any enthusiastic would-be entrepreneur could engage in the tea and opium trade, usury, slave trading and the founding of the Bank of England.
John Dunn

The germ of tikkun was in Spinoza’s reworked Lurianic philosophy. The restoration of oligarchical rule was Ein Sof. After 1688, the predominant political philosophy of Britain and those regions of the globe under its influence would be transmogrified Spinozism.
John Dunn

The crucial feature of the Anglo-Dutch liberal model was the independence from national government, elected or otherwise, enjoyed by a privately controlled central banking system. In effect, that central bank became the agent of the landholding, financier-oligarchic class.
John Dunn

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. A Lockean right to property was Marrano ‘liberty’ deceitfully clothed in political ‘justice’.
John Dunn

Assuming the universal applicability of the principle of sufficient reason, a consistent rationalism must be deterministic and fatalistic. Spinoza’s self-caused God, or
Substance, is incompatible the freedom of the will. Not surprisingly, both Sarpi and Spinoza feared democracy. ‘Just keep the masses cheaply fed’, insisted Sarpi, whose words probably applied to ideas, as well as food.
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’, a model that too had a profound influence upon Powys.
John Dunn