Asymmetrical Dualism

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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dystopia, Fichte, hive-mind, ideality, metaphysics, nature, patriarchy, politics, property, self-possession, sovereignty

Fragment 199, word count: 534.

Tags: nature, metaphysics, ideality, Fichte, dystopia, patriarchy, property, hive-mind, sovereignty, self-possession, politics.

The Primacy of Ideality

The physical world does not care, respond, or prepare. It does not question or answer. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us, as Copernicus observed, but it also has no other accommodations for our sensitivity, desperate caring, freedom, or wishes and plans. Subjective ideality, which is to say, willful spirituality, does not determine objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. However, in a crucial sense ideality comes first because of its crucial evidentiary or experiential primacy.

When Fichte observed that the existence of the objective world occurs in a spirit’s positing (supposing) such a world, he has to be referring to the physical world as a conception of what is being received by a spirit, a conception created by a spirit in its quest for effective agency based in a sense of orientation. No matter what we receive via sensory stimulus we still individually have to make something of it in ideality, come up with a way of conceptualizing something as other than the excitation of a personal sensitivity. Reality is mutable because the structure of reality is crucially suppositional.

Even though ideality senses its condition as a receiver of a world it does not plan into existence on the grand scale, and finds itself placed within and dependent on the world of not-self so received, the primacy of ideality means that however anomalous and superfluous it might seem in relation to the vastness of not-self brute actuality, ideality does exist undeniably and exists in an asymmetrical duality of mutual influence and determination with uncaring actuality. The existence of ideality changes everything by adding a metaphysical principle to existence. It means that a certain sort of incompleteness and uncertain-anticipation is native to existence, to reality. Nature otherwise lacks any trace of anticipation. It’s just physics. With ideality, reality is no longer just fields of force occurring as they must, at rest in nature even when unfixed or unbalanced. Ideality, as metaphysics, is the world now making something of itself, planning out, searching out, and building a multitude of personal ways into the non-actual not-yet. Now the world is at risk and not at rest. It is restless, curious, and living.

The Dystopian Predicament

The human predicament is not metaphysical but rather cultural and political in that we find ourselves surrounded by ubiquitous and pervasive dystopian societies. Historically, dystopia forms as misogynist patriarchy, in which privileges have been seized and claimed along with property through violence and the threat of violence. Competitions for dominance create stacked layers of social stratification, a hierarchy of dominance in which each stratum prides itself on being a superior beings club with a cultured contempt toward the less wealthy and powerful. What often keeps the layers together as a functioning hive-mind, in addition to the core dedication to the language of competition and to accumulating trophies, is a universal orientation up toward a top layer asserting ultimate sovereignty. Deity (or Nature) serves as a cultural paradigm of sovereignty as all-powerful commander and judge with absolute ownership over the less powerful. The metaphysical situation means that this actuality is mutable and that self-possession is viable against hive-mind.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

The World of One and Many

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Nature, Subjectivity

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agency, caring, Hegel, knowing, metaphysics, nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, thinking

Fragment 198, word count: 604.

Tags: nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, caring, thinking, agency, knowing, metaphysics, Hegel.

The world is organized by two very different sets of principles. One is a system of “laws of nature” as described by empirical/ mathematical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy. This system of nature appears to be universal and immutable and presents itself in a vast natural world-structure including enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. The other set of organizing principles is a scattered multiplicity of separate and distinct points, namely the set of busily gazing sensibilities, each encountering and personalizing parts of the natural world, each curious and needy and learning to make sense of its surroundings which it must come to know to situate and orient its personal agency. The personalizing and coming to know is the world organizing activity of sensibilities. Through careful attention to specific qualities among the contents of strictly personal sensitivities, each sensibility organizes an idea of a world that surrounds it, a sense of enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. What is crucial to sensibility is a semi-reliable set of known place-markers for an effective orientation of agency for an unstoppable and dangerously indeterminate future.

It has been speculated that the world of objective nature would be incomplete or insubstantial if not for knowing sensibilities who each personally organize from their sensitivities an idea of the world and then live with and build that idea by sensitively touching fragments of objective nature against it. There is speculation (Hegel) that nature calls sensibilities into existence in the course of perfecting itself, so that it can know itself, reflect and appreciate the awesome grandeur of its intricate existence. Sensibilities mirror nature, certainly, and are often struck by nature’s beauty. The speculation suggests that mirroring the world of nature, knowing its details and its evasions of being known, is the purpose and fulfillment of the existence of sensibilities. However, sensibility is not fulfilled or completed by knowledge severed from the drama and caring in its personal purposes. Sensibilities are very bad mirrors of the objective world since the personal idea of the world that any sensibility organizes to live through is unavoidably very different and largely remote from objective nature. Each sensibility organizes its idea of the world according to its personal principle of caring, with the result that relatively few objects or patterns are noticed or remembered. Any personal idea of the world needs helpfully simplified schematic impressions, abstractions, generalizations, variously structured forms of ideality. (search circle)

As bad as sensibilities are at mirroring the brute actuality of nature, we do manage, in orienting ourselves for ongoing personal agency and expression, to organize our creative ideality into a world we recognize as hugely not-self, and in doing so we manifest what we are as more than objects in nature, as supra-objective particulars existing as neighbours of the hard not-self, the uncaring and unquestioning natural world. Although nature seems to subsist independently of sensibilities, it must be kept in mind that “I think, therefore I am!” highlights that the only certainty of knowledge we have is our own personal existence as a world organizing principle. Thinking is caring and questioning, the ever-questing focus of personal caring. It is caring and questioning so specifically that the focus of attention passes from relevant detail to relevant detail, revising and filling out a precisely pointed future-ward movement. Our certainty of the world of nature is based on the certainty of our personal existence as a caring world builder. The objective world of nature is, after all, an idea, a structure organized by sensibility for the purposes of living and enjoying what it is to be living.

Context

Fragment 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity (word count: 788)

Fragment 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky (word count: 2,752)

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (word count: 2,321)

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

How Reality Matters

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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essentialism, Hierarchy, nature, Nietzsche, perception, politics, reality, spirit, time

Fragment 197, word count: 596.

Tags: nature, hierarchy, politics, essentialism, spirit, perception, reality, time, Nietzsche.

The awesome weight and depth, the clear outlines and forces of resistance, the ‘thusness” or brute presence of Nature-at-large are considered by an essentialist sensibility as unassailably declarative of “what is”, or “what is real”. The essentialist sensibility attaches itself to apparent knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as definite and enduring. Moreover, what is striking in the structure of Nature to the essentialist sensibility is a Great (food) Chain of Being extending into the exercise of power among humans, into social and economic organization. Competitive hierarchies are at the core of this essentialism and competitive hierarchies encourage stark “us against them” conceptual dichotomies: master/ slave, predator/ prey, strong/ weak, victor/ vanquished. Nietzsche, for example, in his darker aspect, embraced this essentialism with enthusiasm, asserting that some people are really aristocratic, giving them the right to dominate, control, and loot the work of others. His view included the aristocracy of men over women. Such realist essentialism defines the political right-wing for whom Nature, understood in this way, is incomparably more important, more authoritative, than ordinary individual spirituality, whatever such spirituality might be. Essentialists assume that the categories of things that make up the world (male/ female, aristocrat/ worker, master/ slave) are predetermined prior to any creative work of ideation, which is to say prior to any application of the particular interests of caring drama-projecting sensibilities. The reason conservatives get so agitated about transgender people is that gender fluidity contradicts the basic conservative essentialism which includes that male and female are different Categories of Being, different substances, different materials or essences.

Fragment 196, February 1, 2023, Spirit is Reality (word count: 283)

In our world in which spirit is reality, though, in which spirit exists as a busy multitude of localizing and personally dramatizing principles of world organization, the general authority of any essentialism is impossible. Meaning, relevance, and portent have to be conferred by acts of a spirit onto the structures and forces that are given in nature, and no kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, holds a monopoly on the power to do that. It is the dramatic conceptual work of individually embodied ordinary subjective spirits. Nothing experienced is or can be beyond the creative work of ideation. Perceiving is part of that creative work. Spirit is the questioning push directing any perceiving gaze to keep opening the world in its dramatic flight, never finished. For living spiritual agents, time is a personal future opening by the power of skills learned in the work of aging and by inherent creativity. These busy personalizing principles of world organization warp their vicinity of objects and events toward some kind of suppositional best case among multiple alternative and variously improbable futures, all non-actualities, separate from the brute actuality of nature. The existence of spirit manifests an unfinished world, always being created, a world new and indefinite in a passionate embrace of time.

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

If the truth of metaphysics can be spread about, the truth that there is no Great Chain of Being (that idea being an article of class propaganda) and that in fact the world, especially the social world, is mutable because every individual person is a source of creative power (transcendent opening of possibilities for the shape of things in an otherwise inertial and entropic world), then political essentialists lose their legitimizing ideals.

Spirit is Reality

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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caring, creativity, embodiment, existence, spirit, time

Fragment 196, word count: 283.

tags: caring, embodiment, time, creativity, spirit, existence.

Spirit exists in a multitude of distinct individual instances, but isn’t anything like a thing. Spirit exists in each case as a busy principle of world organization at some location in an unfinished world. It isn’t an almighty principle of world organization, but instead is a personalizing principle, a principle of caring which is anchored to locality by embodiment and confers value and dramatic context onto certain (otherwise) mere things that constitute a surroundings, making the world into staging for living a life. Caring is personalizing and as such an organizing vector directed into a (strictly) non-existent future.

Personalizing the world is always a creative intervention into the shape of brute actuality by a specifically embodied spirit. Creativity operates in the dimension of time, and is not any kind of essentialist thing conforming to neat categories. The phenomenon of spirit is the sense of the passing of time in the personalizing world, with fear and eagerness to live the future, dramas of ceaseless loss and unpredictable ever-emerging differences. Every act of discovery/ perception contributes to an interplay of anticipation and surprise redirecting the vector of caring into an entirely suppositional future.

Spirit is the existence which supposes, and supposes its own existence in a mutable future as a busy expressing, actively representing a personal world organization and always at the point of voicing something of its newness. In this way spirit is the existence which supposes its own existence as an unfinished particular, a future coming into being at the raw edge of the incompleteness of actuality. You can’t know yourself because you never finish inventing yourself. At no moment do you foresee everything you will create in projecting your life.

Spirituality of the Left

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture war, Descartes, Equality, Hegel, Hierarchy, Marxism, politics, realist essentialism, transcendence

Fragment 195, word count: 474.

tags: hierarchy, equality, culture war, politics, transcendence, realist essentialism, Hegel, Marx, Descartes

The left vs right political difference can be clarified by where each side stands on social hierarchy. The political right takes hierarchy to be essential, decreed by God or nature, the proper triumph of the strongest. The political left disputes the legitimacy of hierarchy and asserts an ethics of widespread equality. The left does this ultimately on the basis of spirituality: there is something more important than nature’s food chain or even the realist essentialism of any Great Chain of Being, and the more important consideration is the great equalizer which is individual spirit, not the religious conception of spirituality, which stipulates an external almighty to which mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a philosophical conception which completely removes the external almighty and asserts individual human drama-projection as the only transcendence. The individual self-perfecting of the Renaissance, Luther’s protestantism declaring an unmediated communion between deity and individual, and the mathematical rationalism of the Enlightenment, beginning from around the time of Descartes, all circled around an inkling of individual transcendence.

Materialist Marx

Marx, as a materialist, had no concept of spirit or of spiritual self-possession, and his materialism distorted left-wing political principles in a destructive direction. Hegel’s overarching architecture of spirit in history, identified in the gross units of mass movements, led to Marx’s concept of materially determined collectivism, which was another distraction from the individualism of spirit. Marxism squandered the transformational potential of the political left. Defining the left in materialist terms saddled it with all the apparatus of violence and centralized social control that go with property as a primary standard of personal definition and evaluation. The focus on material equality could only ever be approached through violence. Marx was specifically focused on possession of capital, the kind of property that is the means of production. Wherever there is property possession there is the apparatus of violence, and the apparatus of violence always attracts people who want to prove themselves the strongest. The culture of strength adulation blooms and then there is no escaping patriarchal hierarchy. This was a misdirection, and a distraction from the deep foundation of leftist principles.

Unpicking the Violence-Based State

Self-recognition as creative spirit (acquaintance-based metaphysical knowledge) unpicks the knotted tangle of the violence/ property-based state. Direct acquaintance with creative transcendence discredits declarations of the inevitability of a pre-determined course of nature or history. It eliminates the idea of an external almighty, which is always the ultimate support for an orientation up toward high command to receive the collective plan and story arc, judgment, supervision, and orders. By eliminating the legacy of metaphysical pseudo-knowledge (angels, gods, and demons; along with materialism), unpicking this knot eliminates the orientation toward a commanding height, and disconnects the personal dramas of individuals from the command-based hive-mind.

Embedded links :

Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Spirit Weaves Time into Freedom

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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existence, freedom, spirit, supposing, time

Fragment 194, word count: 90.

tags: spirit, time, freedom, supposing, existence.

Spirit is the existence which supposes, and in supposing weaves time into freedom. Spirit supposes actualities lost and fading, others at hand dependably, and still possible novelties, decreasingly remote and variously probable, approaching actuality. This decreasingly remote approaching but not-yet actuality is a supposition of the world unfinished, unbounded with a raw edge expanding void-ward. Spirit is the existence which, anchored in actuality, desperately asserts its personal non-actual and unfinished existence by moving void-ward, shaping the unfinished world and personalizing it with caring interventions: freedom.

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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creativity, culture war, Ideology, metaphysics, Power, property, self-possession, sovereignty, spirit, time, values, violence

Fragment 193, word count: 1,093.

Tags: culture war, property, spirit, time, metaphysics, violence, sovereignty, creativity, self-possession, values, ideology, power.

There has been a cultural uprising raging in the Euro-American social system from the time of the European Enlightenment (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and even well before that, with, on one side, a culture with property possession as its prime value and, on the other, cultures emphasizing the primacy of spirit at the level of the embodied individual, often with an intellectual focus. This opposition is the deep foundation of the political division between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing political conservatism is the champion of property possession as primary value and is anti-intellectual because intellectual achievement has threatened the cultural primacy of property possession. The political left and the political right are not equivalent in the culture war because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has not yet managed to be clearly specific about its prime value, but a good characterization would be something like: spiritual self-possession. History includes many examples of artists and ‘thinkers’ who overtly value personal creativity more than possessions. The real prospect of universal literacy was the fundamental dignity conceived by the Enlightenment, developed out of Wycliffe’s project of having everybody capable of reading the Bible in vernacular translations.

Trophy Property is Core Conservative Value

Property possession as a means of self-definition and personal evaluation is ideologically foundational for political conservatism, and property possession is meaningless without institutional readiness for violence to protect it. Possession of property is inherently precarious, vulnerable to the point of being socially destabilizing. Private property owners are terrified their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Property can be taken by force or trickery, and so requires a vast system of protection involving personal weapons, organized readiness for violence, an ‘us against them’ conceptual system, elaborate legal/ police systems, and overemphasis on authority and forceful sovereignty. Property owners assert the authority, through police and army, courts, prisons, and the hangman, to protect their possessions. The “haves” project their obsession with property onto everyone else and are terrified of losing their stuff to the underclass. The more property a person has, the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of loss, which means they depend on as much as can be arranged of the power that comes from the barrel of a gun, the machinery of armed violence in the form of the “right hand” of sovereign government: police, military forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as sovereigns always do. Law and order is so prized by conservatives because it is the only way to protect the security of property possession. Such sovereignty also implies the whole dystopian apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of mass subordination to patriarchal power. From that stream of cultural tradition comes the demand for everyone to conform to a strict set of beliefs, behaviours, gender and persona types. Cultish hive-minds of patriotism are a social construct for the protection and enlargement of the value and privileges of property possession. Conservatism is based in an essentialist and violence-ready fear and outrage at the arrogance of anyone meddling with the traditional hierarchy of wealth and privilege.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with the conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant system. Right-wing personal interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego representing sovereign authority.

The Primacy of Spiritual Self-Awareness

Spiritual self-possession involves, as a matter of metaphysical knowledge, self-recognition as spirit. Spirit is the personalizing principle of world organization, a questioning push directing a gaze at the world in aid of acts which are effective personal expressions of a caring, knowing, and supposing intentional agent, continuously creating a specifically relevant suppositional world that is opening in time. Spirituality is the sense of time passing in this embodied life, featuring fear of the future. Time is the active existence of creativity. Creativity is impossible without a reality which is profoundly incomplete, with time into which to suppose possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Without a supposition of the absolute vacuum of futurity then creativity is impossible. Without creativity there is no time. Meaningless Being exists without time, with only a warp of instability, its instant of momentum, falling. The awareness of time is not a perception, not passively receiving the imprint of a stimulus. Sensing the passing of time involves active suppositions and abstractions to fashion a framework of bearing into the empty opening of a future, searches expressing curiosity as well as desperation, and questions that reconstruct a framework of directional orientation. There is an interior suppositional sense of active positioning relative to the shape of exterior surroundings, updated continually in detail by perceptions of features: ground and sky and passages of accessibility with dramatic portent. The dramas of personal agency integrate learned expectations with a poise for interventions that actualize previously conceived and presupposed acts, new reality in the opening of time. Any gaze of consciousness is a gaze at nature from a particularly embodied drama, and also a creative act in the drama, a move forward that matters personally, integrating personal purposes and questions, suppositions (knowledge), and an arc of interventions.

Spiritual Self-Possession

The spiritual value orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. In this understanding the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a situation in which the best case is as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence) and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 172, January 7, 2021, Dissent by Metaphysics (word count: 680)

What is Real?

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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acts of spirit, drama, dystopia, meaningless Being, metaphysics, nihilism, oligarchy, teen angst

Fragment 192, word count: 537.

tags: dystopia, oligarchy, metaphysics, nihilism, drama, meaningless Being, acts of spirit, teen angst.

Every person reaches a moment of recognition and decision, as a teenager usually, when they have learned enough of the world to assemble the complex fact that the society in which they live is a dystopia. In dystopia the economic and cultural systems are dominated by a parasitic wealth oligarchy which brandishes bogus metaphysics as proof that oligarchic social organization is inevitable. Dystopian metaphysics asserts the realty of primordial commanding heights: willful divine spirits, eternal templates of form, or necessities derived from physical nature, imposing hierarchies which inevitably replicate themselves everywhere including as biological, economic, political, and social systems. The individual’s moment of recognition that, as metaphysics, this is self-serving and wildly implausible fantasy, is a shock of personal isolation because great public media effort is devoted to evading and disrupting any such recognition. At that moment of facing the darkness of the cultural and economic superstructure with which we must live and somehow work, most of us see no alternative but to submit to oligarchic metaphysics and devote ourselves to the values, symbols, and competitions for its markers of self-worth. The choices are stark: first, submit to the oligarchy as we see people doing all around, to enjoy if you can some of the pleasures it boasts of. Alternatively, espouse a resistance or revolutionary ideology which is likely another oligarchic system based in equally bogus metaphysics, or become a nihilist and live entirely through unprincipled impulses.

The question: What is real? is typically a search for a world of stable and measurable forces and structures that exist whether or not they are engaged and interpreted by any limited and ephemeral subjectivity. However, what is undeniably real in the context of this or any question is subjectivity itself, the spirit of questioning, searching, learning, and the personal assertion in every tilt of curiosity. The reality of this spirit is personal uncertainty of survival, the inescapable anticipation of a future reconfigured constantly by loss and a rain of novelty, with personal harms and benefits always at stake. As such, the realities of any such spirit are dramas of caring agency that creatively appropriate the forces and structures at hand, binding them within this spirit’s orientation and bearing in a world now furnished by this work with ground and sky, water and forest and growing things that can (and must) be consumed for pleasure and power, a world with crowds of other embodied spirits, among whom are closely attached family and friends, expressing their own questions and dramas. This individually embodied questioning, interpreting, and intervening is no cosmic commanding height. Meaning, relevance, and portent do have to be conferred by acts of spirit onto primordial meaningless Being, the structures and forces that are simply given, and it isn’t any kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, which does that work. Rather, it is the dramatic conceptual agency of individually embodied subjectivities.

The first philosophical act is to recognize dystopian society as a reality-distorting cultural force field. The next is to abandon dystopian metaphysics, along with oligarchic markers of merit, through direct acquaintance with personal creative power, recognizing the transcendent reality of spirits moving through the uncertainties of their time as effective intervening agents.

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Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Creative Existence

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Aristotle, drama, eternity, Hegel, ideas, metaphysics, Plato, spirit, subjectivity, time

Fragment 191, word count: 371.

tags: time, metaphysics, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, ideas, eternity, spirit, subjectivity, drama.

There is nothing to say about eternity. There is nothing interesting about it. There is no life to eternity. Both Plato and Hegel asserted that things experienced can have different degrees of reality, and that a fully real world would be fixed, final, and eternally unchanging, so completely objective. There could be no subjectivity intervening in the state of things of that world by interpreting, curating, evaluating, and reshaping things according to projected dramas of a personal genius because that would make things unfinished and always at the point of being something new. Time is blatant unreality in that view. The world that is engaged and reshaped by subjectivity is never even remotely real in the Platonic sense, and Plato took that to mean that, for philosophy, it is a distraction, dismissible trivia. Nevertheless, even though Hegel conceived a cosmos that moves dialectically toward perfectly real eternal ideality, the perfection of eternity is not Hegel’s focus. Instead, his focus is the intentional and desperate enactment of the approach to final reality. This drama in time distinguishes Hegel’s fundamental reality from Plato’s. Hegel seems to play out an intuition that, as the primordial opening for creativity, time is the core of the spirit he wants to clarify, a kind of Aristotelian spirit in cosmic nature. It is an intuition that future-projecting teleological drama is the distinctive nature of spiritual existence. For Aristotle, every particular object holds within it an idea of itself, the spirit of itself, just as every individual person does, a self-asserting idea extending beyond what is instantaneously present, beyond the sensory appearance, the perceivable attributes, an idea with future-facing formative force! Such an Aristotelian interiority to outwardly atomic objects integrates each one with a continuity of loss and ever-opening novelty that goes far beyond it, integrating it with, placing it within, an all-encompassing radically unfinished reality. In presenting this conception of ideas as one with time, Aristotle was also already departing from his teacher Plato whose Ideal Forms were strictly eternal and timeless. Maybe Aristotle wasn’t meaning to shift the conception of reality, but he was tacitly recognizing that the drama of spiritual existence in time matters in a way that eternity never can.

Culture War

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capitalism, culture, deity, dystopia, existence, gratification, metaphysics, politics, science, spirituality

Fragment 190, word count: 896.

tags: metaphysics, existence, deity, science, politics, dystopia, capitalism, gratification, culture, spirituality.

There are two opposing explanations for the existence of something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act of intervention, OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and anticipating intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. Each of these explanations is a particular statement of metaphysics. The metaphysics of existence as an intentional act of intervention, in a variety of versions, was ubiquitous in human societies for ages, for example in feudal Christendom, and it always joined forces with the culture of patriarchal dominance which exploits and makes concrete the idea of deity by violently imposing the will of the strongest on everyone within reach (sovereign exceptionalism), and by instituting worshipful cult collectives with the softer attractions of grand cosmic visions and close personal belonging. In opposition to explanation by divine intervention, the mere occurrence explanation dawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the boutique metaphysics of mathematical materialism in the scientific Enlightenment. It began a process of removing wind from the sails of sovereigns and the social structuring around sovereignty. In the current state of modern civilization there remain these same two institutional proponents of metaphysical ideology, each supporting one of the two existential possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Religious institutions champion the deliberate interventionist side, and institutions of science and scientific education champion random occurrence, near enough. This is the shape of our civilization’s foundational culture war. Yet these two have come to an effective peace accord based on the fact that both support the (ready-to-detonate) capitalist incentive and reward system: consumption as identity-defining trophy. Science explains this system as the inevitable working of animal nature, and Christianity explains it as the inscrutable Divine plan in action. Notwithstanding their differences, both sides developed metaphysics on the model of a law-giver, divine law on one side, natural law on the other, and laws always apply top-down (unalterably) to things understood as unalterable building blocks of reality, all tidy and settled in a hierarchical chain of Being extending down into economic and political structure, social roles and relationships, and even into gender and race categories. It is a vision of existence as rigidly pre-structured and is the ideological matrix of the right-wing politics of winner-take-all inequality.

Both bastions of metaphysics are able to embrace the capitalist incentive and reward system because each misconstrues something crucial about the reality it holds dearest. Religious institutions attach themselves to the overriding reality of creative teleological interventions, the power of spirituality for spontaneously expressive novelty, so much so that they project spiritual teleology outward as the great cosmic parent hidden inside all existence, literally deifying it and proclaiming it the origin of everything. By doing that they reduce individual human-scale spirituality to ignorance, vanity, and misery. On the other side, science attaches itself to knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as unalterably definite. Science focuses so much on material objectivity that it disappears human experience into mere mechanism. Each of these entrenched metaphysical doctrines so drastically discounts the importance of the other that actual human spirituality is distorted grotesquely by both. Dystopia follows from the denigration of individual-scale human spirituality from which certain factions gain power and benefits. Setting aside the grotesque exclusivity of the sides in this culture war, we are left with ordinary human scale experience which absolutely depends on both novel teleological creativity at the level of individual persons, and with the stability and clear discernibility of some material objectivity. We have no direct experience of deliberative interventions at a cosmic level, but we have no end of experience of them in our everyday social interactions.

Getting beyond the all-destroying capitalist incentive and reward imperative to consume requires getting beyond the outrageous denigration of individual-level spirituality in metaphysical culture. It demands nothing more than a dualistic synthesis of the opposing metaphysical visions in a new configuration: recognition of random occurrence at the cosmic level and of creative novelty, foresight, learning, and personal expression, which is to say, spontaneous spirituality, at the level of the individual person. Removing the genius of agency in our scenario from some top-down imposer of laws, and relocating it instead to ground level where everyone breaths and talks and carries on living day to day, provides a profound equality of persons. The fact is that a standard practice of creativity as personal expression is the most gratifying and self-affirming of experiences. This is the ultimate grounding for democracy because every individual brings an inherent personal fountain of gratification that bypasses the competitive market economics of trade and barter. This is a metaphysics more congruent with a leftist politics of universal dignity, equality, and mutual support. The left has always been weakened by the lack of a strong and special metaphysical foundation, and so the authentic culture war between left and right politics has not yet even really started.

Context:

Fragment 180, August 28, 2021, Existence and New Reality (word count: 505)

Fragment 173, January 30, 2021, Absolute Incompleteness (word count: 202)

Fragment 171, December 9, 2020, Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia (word count: 779)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Instead of Nothing

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caring, existence, knowing, spirit, wonder

Fragment 189, word count: 95.

tags: wonder, caring, knowing, existence, spirit.

The wonder is not that there is something instead of nothing, but rather that there is so much caring about what there is instead of nothing, and so many different reasons for caring and so many different and independent vantage points and dramas that are contexts of caring. Wonder itself, the spirit in wonder, is the great wonder, not only for its peculiar existence as drama-powered sensitivity in its own blind spot but also for the shape of its placements, its distribution, and the contexts it assembles for discovering and knowing what there is.

Measures of a Self

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capitalism, consumption, decadence, dystopia, empathy, exceptionalism, malaise, wealth

Fragment 188, word count: 329.

tags: dystopia, wealth, capitalism, consumption, empathy, malaise, decadence, exceptionalism,

It is delusional to think that people who use yachts and private jets have any ability to reduce their environmental impact. They have constructed that impact as an overt essence for themselves. People who devote themselves to that system of self-definition and personal evaluation can never abandon their holdings and privileged consumption, or membership in the club of exceptional beings that the trophies declare.

Dystopia is not an accident that befell humanity, nor is it the inevitable working of nature. Dystopia is the product of human factions taking macro-parasitic benefits, largely obscured behind veils of deception and patronage, and it has to be maintained by the work of legions of busy people every day, some of whom have decided to devote themselves to climbing some branch of the pyramid of social esteem, who choose to raise their public profile through celebrated competitive achievements to the full extent of their talent and energy for symbols and comforts that declare membership in a club of exceptional beings. This incentive and reward system of money-enabled lifestyles with high consumption, travel, and celebrity status calibrated by titles, honours, control, and trophy properties of various kinds, trophy memories, is inherently the catastrophic looting of the planet’s resources driving global heating and climate disruption. This is the built-in concluding detonation at the core of capitalist civilization.

Empathy and the Malaise of Exceptional Beings

The alternative is to come empathically into the company of all who find themselves embodied into the temporal drama of ceaseless loss and novelty. Living this is dramatic agency and drama is a personal time-vector, a tilting into anticipated openings through a partly predicted flow of conversation among multiple agents of emerging personal dramas, playing around the resistant inanimate world-structure. Empathy is the ultimate spiritual power and value. Every exceptional beings club shuts off the possibility, the legitimacy, of empathy for large numbers of our fellow beings. That is the spiritual decadence, the malaise of exceptionalism.

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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aristocracy, Christendom, Hierarchy, Nietzsche, nihilism, patriarchy, Stoicism, values, will

Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Nietzsche didn’t do anything like revalue all values, and it is revealing to consider what values he did not question: namely aristocratic superiority within the social hierarchy of wealth and power. Nietzsche was retreating into a strong cultural current from feudal Christendom, namely the ‘feudal’ current: aristocratic crime-family culture, derived originally from patriarchal dominance in herding culture: men with weapons on horses. Nietzsche loathed and worked to discredit the other cultural current from Christendom, namely Christianity, because it promoted an otherworldly (heavenly) focus that gave priority to “selfless” values. He dismissed altruism, selflessness, meekness, and turning the other cheek, which he thought of as slave values, feminine values, and nihilistic, in favour of ancient and traditional masculine dominance values, as exemplified in ancient Greek warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, dominance, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Nietzsche despised and blamed the victims of conquest and oppression. He gazed upon the same European history as Rousseau and Marx but did not fault the crime family aristocracy for being parasites on the subsisting majority, but instead accepted their claims of nobility (projecting onto them the nobility he experienced in his own creativity) and admired their viciousness. He blamed the oppressed for being weak. Their weakness made them deserve whatever oppression they experienced. Nietzsche gave the crime family class credit for whatever he found positive in European culture. As historical fact, European aristocracy could not have established the wealth and power it did without the senior partnership of the Church of Rome promoting its elaborate religious ideologies. In a superstitious age, it was the religious culture of desperate fear and hope that utterly subdued resistance and solidified mass resignation. Yet, Nietzsche blamed the Church for proclaiming a set of values that persuaded the weak and oppressed to find meaning in their oppression and de-valued the manly military values of aristocracy.

Within the legacy of Zarathustra, to which Nietzsche was drawn, the world where we humans live is irredeemably abysmal as the creation of an evil god, the lesser of the duality of high gods. Rejecting any heavenly escape, Nietzsche found himself faced with a choice between utter nihilism or the Stoic (and Romantic) determination to prove personal transcendence by a supreme act of will to accept existence as whatever it is, and even to will its eternal recurrence in every ugly detail.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Nietzsche Autonomous

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culture, embodiment, empathy, individuality, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, voice

Fragment 186, word count: 340.

tags: empathy, embodiment, culture, individuality, voice, Nietzsche, Plato, Kant.

Nietzsche’s thinking did not have a lot in common with Plato’s. In fact, Nietzsche had the thought that overcoming Plato’s way of conceiving reality was the most important thing that western civilization could accomplish to improve itself. The thing Nietzsche didn’t like about Platonism was its heavenly focus, obsession with a remote world that could be thought but not lived with the richness of embodiment, a world of eternal perfection which put worldly normality in a dismissing and frightening light. However, there is a point of contact between Nietzsche and Plato.

Nietzsche judged that individuals are normally conditioned uncritically into a cultish herd mind, a collective set of values and judgments. He presented personal creativity as the elevating human power, a power that can be the portal out of human herd banality and into a particularizing individuality of spirit. On Nietzsche’s view, the distinctness and individuality of the felt human body, awash with personally specific sickness, pain, and fatigue, kinetic power and sexual arousal, are made spiritual by being taken up by creative impulses which construct expressions in a unique voice. Nietzsche’s conception of this process of self-created individuality, separating from cult minds which are always ambient for social beings, is reminiscent of Plato’s metaphor of the cave. In Plato’s cave narrative we are shown a map of where philosophical curiosity, cultivated as a personal mission, leads in relation to immersion in the collective orientation of some cultural community at a given moment. From an initial placement within culturally stipulated forms of experience and dramas, the person devoted to philosophical thinking begins a process of questioning the assumptions, categories, and values of this moment of culture, and in doing so is relocated to individuality. Between Plato and Nietzsche, historically, Kant had already taken a crucial step further. In his balletically formalized way, he observed that people consistently exercising inherent rationality don’t need any external sovereign to proclaim laws because inherent rationality coupled with universal empathy, applied to all sentient beings, enables them to be self legislating in all situations.

Embedded links:

Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Fragment 157, December 11, 2019, Philosophy in the Dystopian Context (word count: 552)

The Metaphysics is You

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culture, dystopia, embodiment, freedom, metaphysics, nature, personality, philosophy, Plato, politics, reality

Fragment 185, word count: 505.

tags: philosophy, metaphysics, dystopia, embodiment, personality, reality, politics, culture, nature, freedom, Plato.

Rarely does an individual have much control over the evolutionary momentum of multigenerational cultural entities such as religions, sovereign states, cities, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a well contextualized sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink, as we transform through the life cycle of a human animal. This combines with generational amnesia, the personal-level, deeply experienced knowledge lost with the mortality of each generation, and also with the new-generation’s innocence and its inclination to have a joyful life in a joyful world. Biologically, our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for some unthinkable duration. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. It is not surprising then that, socially, accommodations are made for whatever activities and systems of relationship are practiced at our moment of intervention, even if they have a dystopian core, because often enough that seems to make it easier to find some joy in being alive. This makes a certain sort of philosophical work almost impossible.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of a fixed and eternal structure of existence, are always canonized in dystopia to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. For example, the commanding heights of Plato’s conception of metaphysical reality, typical of dystopia, exist somewhere on the invisible far side of objects, a substrate behind the impersonally given world of objective things. They are meant to make sense of how the never-ceasing fluidity of familiar things can be connected to a stability profound enough to count as essential reality. On that view, the situation may be tragic, but it is nature and you can’t change nature. Things are what they must be, manifesting an existential bedrock of categories and laws. Although canonical, this is only wild speculation.

There is an opposing metaphysics of primordial existence, a conception that denies any categorical commanding heights. In the most straightforward way, you are the metaphysics in your world, the living ideality here on the near side of phenomena. All forms of ideality occur in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. Ideality is always personality, the creative transcendence of ordinary, individual-level, temporal agency living a creativity that transcends nature and makes what sense it will of the physical or divine givens of nature. There may be a system of stark givens, but it has no intrinsic purposes, doesn’t matter to itself and cannot care, and that system has no immutable grip on the conceptions of us agents of temporal ideality. Social systems derived from this metaphysical source can be perfectly free of any influences from the patterns of organization in brute actuality.

What Knowing Is

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drama, existence, metaphysics, physics, reality, spirituality, time, transcendence

Fragment 184, word count: 198.

tags: existence, reality, drama, physics, metaphysics, spirituality, time, transcendence.

Spirituality has nothing to do with immortality, eternity, or qualifying for immortality. Instead, spirituality is bringing drama to existence, so, knowing the passing of time.

Awareness of the boundless world of enduring structures and processes, cycles repeating within cycles, a world that doesn’t matter to itself and doesn’t care, discover, or regret but goes on existing and shape shifting, structured and complex but just falling through the ways of least resistance: physical reality! Any beholding and knowing such physical reality expresses and demonstrates an order of existence which is different and higher than physics, an order of existence which does care and which questions, discovers, supposes, and contextualizes: the order of existence which is ordinary subjective spirituality. The physical universe cannot identify you and me, but we identify the physical universe. The physical universe can’t care what happens. It doesn’t wonder or fashion a demeanour expressing curiosity or determination. In no sense can it identify and remember the features of a context for initiatives, a framework of orientation and purpose. Metaphysical reality is exactly the power to construct some understanding of the system of physical reality, to construct an appreciation of the existence of a world of objects.

Another step:

Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335).

What are Ideas?

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caring, essentialism, existence, idealism, living, metaphysics, personality

Fragment 183, Word count: 375.

Various answers to the question “What are ideas?” mostly have in common that ideas exemplify a distinct immaterial face of existence. Idealism encompasses answers to that question which emphasize the foundational or primordial status of such immaterial existence. Essentialist idealism presents ideas as primordial templates for the categories of all things that exist, absolutely independent of any living consciousness, excepting possibly a unique eternal divine consciousness. These ideas are prior to the rest of existence in some profound sense and supposedly cause the rest of existence. As exemplified by Platonic idealism, there is a certain sense of metaphysics presented by essentialist idealism: a primordial reality that is profoundly different, in its immutable immateriality, from the world of ordinary appearances, a reality of predetermined forever templates for the forms that any physical existence must take.

A non-essentialist idealism presents a very different sense of metaphysics: ideas are ephemeral features which shape the frame-work of orientation that guides the future-ward tilt or bearing of some living individual. Ideas exist only in the intentional agency of living individuals. Instead of standing as eternally enduring categories and structures, the special genius of ideality is its fluid subsistence by leaping ceaselessly into losses and novel opportunities expressing personal dramas of caring; plunging, partly falling, into an ever-just-opening non-existence, evaluating the uncertain prospects for improvisations of personal dramas within a mix of expected and unexpected circumstances and expressive impulses. There is no question here of ideas existing separately from the living of particular sentient and intentional agents. Even as such, ideas cannot be left out of a description of fundamental existence, of what there is, since they present an undeniable complication to neat conceptions of reality as fixed, atomized, and final. As necessarily temporal and immaterial (even though organized as embodied), ideas are anomalous existences, inseparable from the subjectivity of personal experiences. Ideality is still metaphysical but its meta-physicality is in its living spontaneity and creative agency, in its sentient-intentionality at the raw ever-becoming edge of existence. Human existence is living: experience-derived anticipation as context and inspiration for important intentions and aspirations. It is an actively reaching incompleteness or openness to existence at its core: discontinuous, multiple, monadic, locally limited, ephemeral.

The Thrill of It

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Christendom, embodiment, enchantment, History, magic, privilege, Romanticism, science, spirituality

Fragment 182, word count: 335.

tags: romanticism, science, spirituality, embodiment, history, privilege, enchantment, Christendom, magic,

With the explosion of mathematical science as an effective and prestigious ideology radiating from the Republic of Letters in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there emerged among culture-pods with long-established privilege and dominance, both religion based and military/ property based, a sharp sense of loss and nostalgia for the thrilling fear and wonder of pre-modern Christendom: a culture gripped in the drama of intervention by gods, angels, demons, witches, and sorcerers, all cashing out as supernatural justifications for established privilege and dominance. Romanticism was one expression of that sense of loss and nostalgia, an heroic effort to re-enchant the modernizing world by conflating deity and nature. It was an effort to rescue the concept of nature from scientific mechanization, insisting that nature is a single living divinity with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and powers far beyond those commonly perceived, power to overcome its own normal regularity.

Those efforts at re-enchantment, reviving the fear and thrill of Christendom, were futile and misdirected. Even in the absence of magic, deities, demons, or personified nature, the fact of any living subjectivity always enchants existence as a whole. The fact that spirituality is structured as a distinct body among other animate individuals with whom each fashions an apparently ordinary life does not erase its wonder and transcendence. Embodiment is the foundational structuring principle of spirituality. Sensation, so perception, is structured in the shape of the body. Deliberate personal interventions into a given exterior surroundings, making objective markings, are movements of a person’s body. The capabilities of body movements and their range of forces impose a shape on personal intentions to mark the objective world. Still, any subjectivity is a gaze from inside unique dreams at the spring of a personal self-injection into exterior surroundings. Enchantment radiates in that gaze itself, from the interiority at the source of every outward reach. Spirituality, the desperate living will, the knowing, questioning, learning, and creating will, is the enchantment, the mystery and wonder of existence.

Also:

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312).

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189).

Knowing is Caring

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caring, Edmund Husserl, evidence, knowledge, learning, phenomenology, representation, sensation, sensibility, time

Fragment 179, word count: 621.

Tags: caring, knowledge, learning, sensibility, phenomenology, sensation, time, representation, evidence, Edmund Husserl.

Caring is more important than sensation in the perception of anything, and caring is personal. Knowledge is always dependent on and derived from someone’s caring. It is always an elaboration, specification, and development of caring. Knowing is a personal effect and consequence of caring. That means that perception, as a means of coming to know, is also an application of caring, a personal act of anchoring care in certain particular actualities presenting as phenomena. Caring and what it is that cares are not adequately presented by a description of the most immediate actualities to which this caring is anchored. You can’t get anywhere near understanding the richness of a moment of personal caring (the living moment of a sensibility/ intentionality*) by mapping the most evident actualities it is conscious of. Phenomena don’t count as anything without being identified within the context of a perceiving sensibility. Larger dramatic vectors of personal caring are necessarily involved. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, it is also a creative act in the drama, a move forward motivated by personal drama, and meaningful because of the essentially dramatic integration of knowledge and personally intended interventions. A perceiving and learning gaze is a personal drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world.

Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), a definitive move of philosophical Phenomenology is to remove any suggestion of deriving from perception any knowledge of a Kantian “thing in itself” as absolute reality, so, bracketing off the question: does this experienced appearance represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?. What is bracketed off is the question of the representation of phenomena, the question of whether or not they represent, depict, or disclose some existent object which is independent in its reality of being perceived or not being perceived, being cared about or not. In this context, phenomena are technical objects of consciousness definable with maps of sensations, positioned quanta of sensory stimuli with specific qualities. They are impersonal arrangements of appearances (sense data) that may suggest an internal integrity. “To the things!” declare Husserl’s phenomenologists.

However, instead of putting attention on what might or might not be on the ‘far side’ of phenomena as given in sensations, it is decisively more important to deal with what is on the ‘near side’ of phenomena, the source of caring that is reaching future-ward through its sensory display. No matter what uncertainty there might be about sensory appearances as true depictions of impersonal actualities that lie beyond, there can be no doubt that the shape of caring in phenomena truly represents a personal sensibility and intentionality*.

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

In spite of the fact that the technical definition of phenomena excludes the personal, there is a sense in which actual phenomena must always represent a person, by a kind of backward representation. A personal ideality is always the matrix of phenomena. Whatever definitions might be imposed on phenomena, they are primordially experiences, and experiences are always acts of an experiencing sensibility, a person living a particularly embodied life. The most important representation by phenomena is a person, what it is that cares and brings caring to this existence. Caring is personal, a complex personal vector of drama within a willful sensibility. It isn’t possible to reveal what it is that cares and constructs a life of dramatic movements of caring by using descriptions of phenomena that bracket off the desperate ephemerality of what is personal. Although what-it-is-that-cares is never a phenomenon, the existence of phenomena is necessarily the existence of a unique dramatic ideality that is expressing its caring in its engagement with these phenomena.

‘Intentionality’ in the sense of a pre-conceiving of future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

The World that Matters

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caring, collective identity, herd mind, human attachment, knowing, perception, sociability, war

Fragment 177, word count: 450.

Tags: sociability, human attachment, war, caring, perception, knowing, collective identity, herd mind.

Recognizing the presence of a separately embodied intelligence, another caring, sensitive, knowledge-building, and future-opening agent, is a different order of perception from recognizing sand or a piece of wood. There is a kind of perceiving going on in the recognition of another future-inventing agent that requires something other than an empirical explanation. Recognition of caring is crucial in this perceiving and another person’s caring is not an arrangement of sense-data, not a visual impression nor any other sensory impression. Sensory perception cannot assemble an objective image of whatever questing sensibility is expressing the arc of its personal drama in its acts, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of open possibility. Sensibilities as creative shapers of actuality require a conception such as ideality or intentionality that distinguishes them from strictly perceivable actuality. There is an absolute dependence on inherently personal, interior, sources of knowing in the recognition of another sensibility, since familiarity with sensibility as such is entirely self-acquaintance. This is more like a rationalist sort of knowing. * You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your drama. We find in the presence of other caring agents a reflection and a variation of our own dramas of fear and delight, misery and ecstasy, and there is an irresistible sense of enlargement, of energy and exciting possibility, in this not being alone.

It isn’t long into a person’s life before the most important and interesting focus of awareness is an ambient collective of separately embodied intelligences: bodies expressing the spirituality, ideality, or intentionality that is caring sensitivity, searching curiosity, and ever-increasing knowledge in aid of the actualization of personally created intentions. Of course a person learns a sense of location within a structure of surfaces and objects, of food, shelter, and footings for power-projecting activities, but constellations of other people displaying caring intentionality always form the core and organizing pattern of the world that matters.

Hive Minds Make War

The reality that hive minds make war confronts us with the challenge of conceiving a way for people to express and enjoy the profound human talent for interpersonal attachment and social interconnectedness without constructing or participating in collective identities which prevent personal creativity from forming an identity grounded on spiritual autonomy and individual agency. We can be sure that the surrounding population of separately embodied idealities remains personally crucial even when an individual dismisses the misconceptions, prejudices, and superstitions which form the common currency of a human hive mind, herd mind, or collective identity. In the arc of human interconnectedness, the socio-cultural formation of herd identities, hive-mind identities, will become an artifact of the past.

* Compare Avicenna’s “inner senses”, in particular: wahm. The sheep recognizes the wolf’s hostility. This is empathic recognition of an outside intelligence with conscious intent and emotional force in that intent. See p. 137 of:

Philosophy in the Islamic World: Volume 3 of: A History of Philosophy without any gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2016), ISBN 978-0-19-957749-1.

Embedded links:

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).

Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3) (word count: 390).

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Christendom, Copernicus, creativity, culture, Darwin, embodiment, individuality, nihilism, spirituality

Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Christianity taught, and European Christendom accepted for centuries, that the human spiritual drama, our unique opportunity for ethical elevation by coming to know and align with the transcendent deity, is the purpose of all existence. Humans were thought to be the primary achievement of the all-creating God. Born as an exile into an initial state of disgrace within the lusts, pains, and thrills of a mortal body, each human is capable of recognizing its existence as more authentically one of transcendent spirituality and changing its way of life to express that spirituality. The worldly society of Christendom, controlled at all levels by the hierarchy and laws of the Roman Church in partnership with the secular military aristocracy, was accepted as the means by which individuals were guided to the spiritual life, a state of grace whose reward was blissful immortality. In the sixteenth century, within a broad advance of science, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered and revealed that the human home planet was not the centre of God’s cosmos, suggesting a more marginal status for human being. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin presented findings suggesting that humans are indistinguishable from animals, just naked apes, driven by instinctive drives and passions beyond individual control, with no qualitative specialness placing us in a uniquely elevated category. For much of the educated stratum of nineteenth century Europe, this apparent loss of human standing in the great scheme of things was a revelation of nihilism, a catastrophic loss of purpose and value. This was the context in which Nietzsche conceived his mission of thinking.

With God removed from the human situation, the Christian drama of existence faded out and with it the sense of meaning and purpose derived from that drama. Reflecting on human history soon reveals that no eventual outcome of biological evolution can give value and meaning to human existence, since it is unknowable, nor can the historical progress of human civilization do it since that reveals no verifiable arc toward a fulfillment. In the absence of these large structures as navigational guides the problem of meaning and purpose becomes entirely the individual’s problem and actually defines, on Nietzsche’s view, the monadic singularity of the human individual, the loneliest loneliness. As it happens, however, the fundamental nature or quality of individual spirit, the will to power, contains within itself a dramatic dynamic capable of achieving happiness, and so defeating nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the universal ethical and existential imperative for every individual is self-perfection, though that achievement is possible only for strong domineering spirits. Only the strongest spirits are capable of the happiness of self-perfection because only the strongest are capable of self-domination or self-overcoming by sublimating the instinctive animal impulses (Dionysian) into products of a dominant personal rationality (Apollonian), imposing a unifying form and style on all expressions of that sublimated energy. This Dionysian – Apollonian dialectic is the intrinsic dynamic of the will to power, the fundamental living force. Culture that is elevating to behold and appropriate is created from the sublimation of bestial impulses and instincts. Even though those impulses and instincts originate in and always declare the body, without them there is no energy to be sublimated into high art and culture. Strong and passionate impulses require an even stronger force of rationality to impose form and style on them. Artists and philosophers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, are typically the people who discipline themselves to sublimate their great passions into creative activities. Nietzsche calls such spirits ubermensch, higher men, the only people of value in his estimation because in the ecstasy of their original creation they uniquely manifest authentic individuality. Specimens of higher men are rare and occur unpredictably in various times, societies, races, and ethnic groups, and it seems that for Nietzsche they are “The Elect”, forever predetermined for blessedness. The rest of us are a herd of doomed beasts of no interest or value, sometimes spiritualized to some extent by encountering the achievements of the higher ones.

There are striking similarities between Nietzsche’s conception of the drama and tragedy of existence and the previously dominant one from Christendom. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. Separation of people into The Elect and the damned is one similarity. Both dramas involve a tension or dialectic between animal embodiment and some version of a transcendent spirituality which exerts itself against animality and offers a happier and more authentically meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s version, however, the impulses of the body are never left behind but always remain the source of life’s energy. In addition, Nietzsche’s spiritualizing, sublimating, force is militant rationality, giver of expressive form, stability, and style, replacing the poor Christian spirit of meek obedient submission, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, and altruism.

Such was Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. It is philosophically unusual in recasting the Christian drama by eliminate a commanding and controlling deity while still finding a way to divide blessed from damned. That vision clearly doesn’t defeat nihilism for everyone, only for the precious few his message was apparently designed to reach. However, if we discount Nietzsche’s peculiar aristocratic exclusivity, we can appreciate his “Yes” to embodiment as inseparable from the ecstasy of personal creativity, his close attention to the interior experience of creativity and its independence from any conformist herd mind.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.

Zarathustra’s Secret, written by Joachim Kohler, translated from German by Ronald Taylor, Published by Yale University Press (English edition June 2002), ISBN-10: 0300092784, ISBN-13: 978-0300092783.

Superego and Self-Possession

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Fragment 175, word count: 604.

Tags: war, dystopia, creativity, gratification, reality, hive mind,

Every instance of collectivism known to us is dystopian. All are institutional systems of human-on-human macro-parasitism: exploitative, unequal, misogynistic, devoted on principle to arbitrary hierarchies of gender, race, and class, poised for overwhelming violence, controlled by patriarchal factions which channel disproportionate benefits to themselves at the expense of the marginalized majority. This is not a product of divine will or natural law, but an historical aggregation of inventions, actions, communications, and imitations by individual humans in particular situations. The existence and effective activity of creative ideality at the level of the embodied individual completely invalidates any claim of an immutable natural order or a fixed hierarchy of being. Reality as experienced is completely structured by the interests, ideas, of particular humans, which means reality is mutable because ideas make up much of its structure.

Superego

Ambient society presents itself as the indispensable means for realizing every individual’s vestigial core being, the truth of who and what we really are. As young innocents we are guided by its assertions of what we must do to manifest and display our quality and potential. Since we need to function within the norms of our society to survive, we accept its sovereignty, its hierarchy of esteem and supervision, as a guide or roadmap of personal expectations and intentions. Civilization is a structure of increasingly prized and exclusive gratifications instituted as rewards and incentives through which people prove and reveal themselves. Internalizing norms means submitting to supervision within the chain of official power, doing a personal best with the incentives and rewards, conceiving an identity within exemplary career arcs in their cultural context encompassing nature, community, human fulfillment, and the supernatural, which, taken together, define a culturally stipulated collective orientation, effectively a human-style hive mind. Hive minds make war.

Self-Possession

Given the profound dystopian characteristics of all known societies, it is not surprising that individuals experience a discordance between cultural role models (presented in schools and popular culture, for example) asserting praiseworthy behaviour, values, aspirations, and beliefs, on the one hand, and on the other, their own actual experience of gratifications, reality, and fulfilling self expression. This discordance reveals important aspects of existence as an individual and is inescapably political in the broadest sense. The individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive mind, always bigger than placements on offer within competitive hierarchies or culturally identified functions (tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor). The felt discordance is a questioning of not only the narrow functioning of institutional sovereignty but also the wider systems of authority (economic, patriotic, religious, and social) which are the cultural foundations of sovereignty. The experienced discordance manifests an antagonism felt by individuals against any conception of them as owned, as property for use by some external entity.

The socio-cultural formations which are collective hive-mind identities have dominated much of human history but will eventually be an artifact of the past. Human hive minds, each unified culturally by false metaphysical assertions and shared narratives featuring emotionally triggering tricks, are always dystopian in conceiving value in exclusivity. Happily, you don’t have to wait for the ultimate fall of dystopia to be free of it. When you encounter creative personal interiority, ideality, as the fountain of value it is, you don’t need to construct an exterior ego-facade of trophy possessions. You don’t have to peg your value to markers or applause from the ambient cultural and economic system. Even within dystopia, it is already common for people to quietly experience their best gratification from creating and nurturing instead of from trophy gathering.

Freedom and Actuality

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Fragment 174, word count: 176.

Tags: consciousness, agency, freedom, drama, ideality, perception, personality

The presence of a quality of stimulation from somatic sensitivity, say vision, or even a combination of many different sensory qualities, does not as such qualify as consciousness. Consciousness can lack any and all sensory stimuli. Rather, consciousness is a questing vigilance, a searching, or a recognition in forwarding the care-drama or sensibility of an embodied agent in a life in the world. Forwarding a personal care-drama is the act of a person as ideality, a point and arc of agency projecting itself as a particular caring into the absolute incompleteness, the non-existence, that is the future. This point and arc of dramatically caring agency, personality, cannot be constructed from sensory qualities but instead is what recognizes sensory sensitivity as presenting things of interest, certain things that matter personally. Conceptualizing freedom requires this life of ideality which is inseparable from the absolute incompleteness of existence in the passing of time. Freedom is real because of the co-existence and co-involvement of creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of the world of actuality.

Absolute Incompleteness

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agency, care-drama, consciousness, effort, embodiment, eternal recurrence, existence, freedom, spirituality, time

Fragment 173, word count: 202.

Tags: spirituality, time, agency, care-drama, existence, eternal recurrence, effort, embodiment, consciousness, freedom.

Spirituality has nothing to do with inherent guilt or fear and love of a higher power or supreme Being which is removed from the desperate care-drama and agency of living an always incomplete existence. Spirituality has everything to do with awareness of the passage of time because the personal drama of caring depends on ephemerality to extend, shape, and renew itself, opening its ongoing by intentionally inventing acts based on expectations and suppositions learned and abstracted from a career of caring and effortful engagement with the world around. Any moment of consciousness is loaded with abstractions that frame and locate an immediate effort. We have to disconnect understanding time from cosmic loops and circles, the apparent paths of stars and planets that have been observed and identified from eras immemorial by people watching the sky. Theirs was a vision of completeness in eternal recurrence. Instead, time is the asymmetrical continuity of context that consciousness supposes in orienting its desperately creative plunge into freedom that is its enduring incompleteness and the incompleteness of the world. The intentional ongoing of individually embodied consciousness constitutes spiritual (subjective) reality, and spiritual reality connects irremovably to absolute reality. The personal exists as absolutely as the cosmic.

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Fragment 169, October 25, 2020, Wildcard Time-World Idealism (word count: 1,230)

Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia

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birthright, culture war, dystopia, empathy, Fascism, History, patriarchy, philosophy, progress, science, spirituality, technology

Fragment 171, word count: 780.

There is a western consensus that the rapid launch of mathematical science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe drew the decisive line in human history, the crossing of which heralded a future with unlimited improvements in all human affairs. There was some speculation that after understanding the energies of nature humans would use them first to perform essential production work and then venture on to accomplish our fondest hopes. It was thought to be self-evident that ingenious mechanisms for channelling energies far greater than human and animal muscle power would free people from the physical burden of work and create such abundance that none would suffer privation. This, roughly, was the theory of science for a better world, material progress. It didn’t work out because understanding the energies of nature did nothing to change the cultural limits on how the wealthiest groups distributed empathy toward other breathing beings. The result is that now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the idea of progress, Better World Theory, is confused and seriously disputed. Developments in digital technology over the last half-century have given a new boost to STEM-based hopes for a better world, although weapons of mass destruction and climate change loom larger than ever and technology still doesn’t break down the cultural barriers to expanding empathy.

The reasons for intractable and extinction level problems in this age of mathematical science, which promotes itself as the means for solving all human problems, cannot be discovered by scientific research. Materialist science cannot settle the culture war between the core values of patriarchy from feudal Christendom along with other antique societies which similarly control strictly and sparsely licensed empathy, over against an emerging conception of culture and society based on a universality of empathy. Nostalgia for an imagined past along the lines of feudal Christendom is still widespread and a characteristic feature of fascism, a worse dystopia than what we have. From this perspective, what makes a society dystopian, a mortal danger to itself and others, is a poverty of empathy.

Populist Sense of Loss: Birthright and Patriarchy

The sense of loss that drives right-wing populism results from progress made in extending empathy, bringing with it some degree of dignity and equality, to previously denied people, and especially from the successes of feminism and its inexorable drift of values toward nurture and away from the masculine culture of dominance-derived pride. Right-wing populism is nostalgia for misogyny, racism, celebration of masculine strength, patriarchy, and terror of a supernatural masculine mind in the universe at large which decrees all those dystopian arrangements and certifies their eternal endurance.

There is also a populist rage against the elite status and honour of education and scholarship, of expertise, study, scribal skills and their culture, because they override the tradition of birthright. Birthright claims to be the decree of nature or the almighty creator, in which people are born to a certain social status as a man or as a person of the dominant race, a meaningful niche with a certain richness of rights, privileges, and dignities. In a world of education, there is no birthright. Everyone must accomplish what they can through effort and ingenuity. That has given women, racial minorities, and marginalized groups generally, a way to bypass birthright in dominant cultures.

The broadening of empathy is not an accomplishment of science or technology, and not likely to be helped by artificial intelligence. It is instead a product of the two culture engines identified as threats by the political right-wing: the culture of nurture and attachment cultivated mainly by women, and the scribal culture of broad literacy, inquiry, and scholarship. The posture of inquiry that is philosophy, for example, covering the whole of culture and experience, arises from a judgement, beginning from Socrates, that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions.

Early on in the twenty-first century, the political left-wing might be desperate in its struggle against advances by traditional patriarchy in a conservative, neoconservative, and neofascist onslaught, but in a long historical perspective the political right-wing is at least as desperate because people generally have become and continue to become more nurturing and to embrace nurturing ethics and values. Violence is less tolerated in many cultures than it was even one generation ago, although there are still forces striving mightily to legitimizing authoritarian patriarchy and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, brandishing and glorifying the tools of violence. The truth about individual human spirituality is that the potential for empathy is inherent and as near universal as we need for a better world.

Embedded links:

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Consciousness is a Time-Wave

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Fragment 170, word count: 377.

Consciousness can’t be adequately described by even a complete catalogue of its objects. Objects have only a passing and tentative almost-presence unless they are made to matter by a rich personal context of ideality. Consciousness is formed of anticipatory intentions of agency and the reasons for agency within a personal life-drama. There is an emotionally committed questioning, a desperately caring gaze from an ever-learning knowledge-poise of orientation with its bearing onward, defining a point and arc of creative agency improvising the personal drama which is an individual embodied life.

We individually create a supposition of not-yet and been-and-gone defining a newness and incompleteness as the primordial context in which we exist as dramatic free agents, leaping future-ward in our drama, aware that everything in our envelopment of entropic actuality is falling away continuously. The supposed content of not-yet and been-and-gone is changing constantly. Knowledge and expectation are forms of supposition that constitute a drifting context-content slipping into proximity and then into an increasingly remote separation, a sense of things slipping by and falling away in the ephemerality of objects. Such is the context of personal agency as it leaps into anticipated openings of not-yet. That everything actual is slipping away is essential to the drama of individual human existence, to the willful creative leap open-ward which answers it as a moment-by-moment affirmation of a power of living to open reality and make it unexpectedly more than it was. Ideality moves to make actual a specific not-yet, to realize a new non-actuality, and that is the creativity for which freedom is possible.

The medium (non-actual past and future) in which time-waves exist is not independent of the knowing, curious, questioning, dramatically desperate agents who propagate ourselves in ceaseless ephemerality. Consciousness thinks itself as a time-wave, a formation of ephemerality through which freedom is possible in the genius of ideality as not-a-thing but a self-propelling continuity of creative expression across time. It is a fountain of future possibilities from which is enacted, having learned and conceived aspirations in been-and-gone, an original arc of developmental continuity that is the personal drama of life-creation.

Embedded links:

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

Fragment 118, November 8, 2017, A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory (word count: 1,656)

Asymmetrical Dualism

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Fragment 199, word count: 534.

Tags: nature, metaphysics, ideality, Fichte, dystopia, patriarchy, property, hive-mind, sovereignty, self-possession, politics.

The Primacy of Ideality

The Dystopian Predicament

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

The World of One and Many

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agency, caring, Hegel, knowing, metaphysics, nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, thinking

Fragment 198, word count: 604.

Tags: nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, caring, thinking, agency, knowing, metaphysics, Hegel.

Context

Fragment 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity (word count: 788)

Fragment 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky (word count: 2,752)

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (word count: 2,321)

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

How Reality Matters

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Fragment 197, word count: 596.

Tags: nature, hierarchy, politics, essentialism, spirit, perception, reality, time, Nietzsche.

Fragment 196, February 1, 2023, Spirit is Reality (word count: 283)

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

Spirit is Reality

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Fragment 196, word count: 283.

tags: caring, embodiment, time, creativity, spirit, existence.

Spirituality of the Left

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Fragment 195, word count: 474.

tags: hierarchy, equality, culture war, politics, transcendence, realist essentialism, Hegel, Marx, Descartes

Materialist Marx

Unpicking the Violence-Based State

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Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Spirit Weaves Time into Freedom

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Fragment 194, word count: 90.

tags: spirit, time, freedom, supposing, existence.

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Fragment 193, word count: 1,093.

Tags: culture war, property, spirit, time, metaphysics, violence, sovereignty, creativity, self-possession, values, ideology, power.

Trophy Property is Core Conservative Value

The Primacy of Spiritual Self-Awareness

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 172, January 7, 2021, Dissent by Metaphysics (word count: 680)

What is Real?

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Fragment 192, word count: 537.

tags: dystopia, oligarchy, metaphysics, nihilism, drama, meaningless Being, acts of spirit, teen angst.

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Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Creative Existence

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Fragment 191, word count: 371.

tags: time, metaphysics, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, ideas, eternity, spirit, subjectivity, drama.

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

tags: metaphysics, existence, deity, science, politics, dystopia, capitalism, gratification, culture, spirituality.

Context:

Fragment 180, August 28, 2021, Existence and New Reality (word count: 505)

Fragment 173, January 30, 2021, Absolute Incompleteness (word count: 202)

Fragment 171, December 9, 2020, Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia (word count: 779)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Instead of Nothing

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Fragment 189, word count: 95.

tags: wonder, caring, knowing, existence, spirit.

Measures of a Self

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capitalism, consumption, decadence, dystopia, empathy, exceptionalism, malaise, wealth

Fragment 188, word count: 329.

tags: dystopia, wealth, capitalism, consumption, empathy, malaise, decadence, exceptionalism,

Empathy and the Malaise of Exceptional Beings

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Nietzsche Autonomous

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Fragment 186, word count: 340.

tags: empathy, embodiment, culture, individuality, voice, Nietzsche, Plato, Kant.

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Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Fragment 157, December 11, 2019, Philosophy in the Dystopian Context (word count: 552)

The Metaphysics is You

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Fragment 185, word count: 505.

tags: philosophy, metaphysics, dystopia, embodiment, personality, reality, politics, culture, nature, freedom, Plato.

What Knowing Is

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Fragment 184, word count: 198.

tags: existence, reality, drama, physics, metaphysics, spirituality, time, transcendence.

Spirituality has nothing to do with immortality, eternity, or qualifying for immortality. Instead, spirituality is bringing drama to existence, so, knowing the passing of time.

Another step:

Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335).

What are Ideas?

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Fragment 183, Word count: 375.

The Thrill of It

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Christendom, embodiment, enchantment, History, magic, privilege, Romanticism, science, spirituality

Fragment 182, word count: 335.

tags: romanticism, science, spirituality, embodiment, history, privilege, enchantment, Christendom, magic,

Also:

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312).

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189).

Knowing is Caring

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caring, Edmund Husserl, evidence, knowledge, learning, phenomenology, representation, sensation, sensibility, time

Fragment 179, word count: 621.

Tags: caring, knowledge, learning, sensibility, phenomenology, sensation, time, representation, evidence, Edmund Husserl.

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

‘Intentionality’ in the sense of a pre-conceiving of future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

The World that Matters

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Fragment 177, word count: 450.

Tags: sociability, human attachment, war, caring, perception, knowing, collective identity, herd mind.

Hive Minds Make War

Philosophy in the Islamic World: Volume 3 of: A History of Philosophy without any gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2016), ISBN 978-0-19-957749-1.

Embedded links:

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).

Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3) (word count: 390).

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.