Monthly Archives: April 2012

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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The international financial collapse of 2008 completely revealed the contemporary high culture of leadership. The undeniably world-class leaders of the biggest financial corporations in world history, along with the political leaders of the most powerful nations in world history, could think of nothing better than to use any means at hand to get back to the way things were before, as quickly as possible, all the while denying all responsibility for any problems. Creative reform for accountability and transparency was ridiculed as impractical.

As such a fresh and vivid example illustrates, what keeps the whole social system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, habits repeated unthinkingly, traditions, sometimes encouraged by appeals to popular misconceptions such as “we’re all in this together”, “people reap what they sow”, “our political representatives have our best interests at heart”, or “there is a meritocracy of the most competent people in control”. However, even more important than habit, tradition, and popular misconceptions, is the interconnectedness of intrinsically rewarding human attachments learned within the female-managed nexus of first-language acquisition, child nurture, play, unconditional love, practical support and care, sharing, and mutuality. Please see below, blog posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations for some elaboration of nurture culture. Those are the binding forces of social systems, a framework within which ordinary individuals work at building interesting and sustainable lives, and in doing so keep production and support systems working. Recognition of these foundations of societies is the root system of left-wing political thinking and the reason it can be described generally as “bottom-up” politics.

It is remarkable then, that the extraordinary cultural emphasis on leadership reveals a worldview in which it is a superstructure of leaders who hold the social and economic system together. In the discourse of management/ professional ideology, it is leadership which brings a community together and makes it function, and in doing so sustains and benefits everybody to the degree possible given the specific powers and impediments that individuals bring with them. The leader is presented as bringing people into effective accord by displaying superior energy and dedication, hard work and a work ethic, optimism, self-confidence, self-knowledge, communication and visioning skill, prudent judgment, strategic plans, in sum a tower of strengths upon which others can fix their gaze and be inspired together. This ideology of leadership is the taproot of right-wing political thinking, and the reason it counts as “top-down” politics. That this is an especially alpha-male cultural product reveals that the key to differences between leftist and rightist policies is not class war based on wealth inequality but instead it is gender culture.

There is a deeper layer to the culture of leadership. There is an assumption that leadership is so essential and effective that it brings into being a sort of singularity, a version of the idea of divine power, a power of sovereignty. In the case of sovereignty, the divine entity is “the nation”, “the people”, a social collective united into a “more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” creature, superhuman and even supernatural, meriting privileges, powers, and licenses that no individual can claim on his or her own, such as sending people to death in war, or deliberately exposing them to dangerous living and working conditions generally. Sovereignty is an extraordinary abstract power imagined to reside in a supra-individual social entity, and it is often invoked to create a warm glow of uncritical belonging in residents of a geographical area, sometimes with a uniformity of culture, language, and ethnicity, but more often not. (In appealing to the warm glow of interconnectedness, leaders are stealing credit for the nexus of first language acquisition, which is really created by people who nurture children.) For achieving the magisterial feat of leadership, the stars of the system take credit for creating legitimate power over life and death, and entitlement to act beyond law and morality to whatever extend they may wish.

People talk about “rising above” or “getting beyond” the political division between the left wing and the right wing, but beneath that division are profound conflicts which are standard features of human communities. Due to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) there is elaborate ideology basing the left-wing orientation in the working class of industrial societies. Left-wing political activists do their best to represent the interests of people who must earn a living by working for wages. However, placing exclusive emphasis on the worker – capitalist relationship is a vast oversimplification, and has been used to cast leftist ideals into disrepute as merely the politics of envy.

Plural Conflicts

Certainly there is an opposition between those families who can live from ownership and those who must live from working for wages. Working for wages is a life-warping burden. However, a far more pervasive and longstanding conflict is between an especially masculine trophy culture and an especially feminine culture of child nurture. There is also a structural conflict between generations, between people old enough to be approaching the last stages of life in opposition to those in the first stages of life. Young people generally are still carrying memories of the female managed culture of nurture, and without having been bent out of shape by irresistible incentives and rewards, have little but an innate sense of justice to guide them.

Appeals to “family values” sound like bottom-up politics, but in fact refer to family values as perceived by the alpha-male focused patriarchal family. The female managed first-language-nurture culture tends to ignore family separations and instead creates informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. It is the culture of predatory masculinity which insists on using family groups as rigid stand-alone cells, reminiscent of the alpha-male harem social organization of gorillas, for example. Again, gender culture illuminates the political alternatives.

Groundwork of Political Dualism

The domestic nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. In addition, the domestic nexus always had a competitive alpha-structure to struggle against. The agenda of that trophy-winning superstructure has always been to use the commonality of people to fight wars, cook, clean, work plantations, mines, and assembly lines; and to have them part with their wages to borrow money, land, or a roof. Problems with that result from the retrograde culture of norms and values cultivated by the alpha-structure. The gender culture of novelty seeking masculinity could be progressive, but is exactly the opposite because of historical courses of development.

Alpha Trophy Ideology

The most glamourous culture of masculinity has its source in the ancient life of nomadic animal herders, a variety of cowboy. Ever since human communities began to abandon the nomadic life of gathering and hunting and created surpluses of vital resources, wonders of physical culture, and records of wisdom, their outlying surroundings of still nomadic peoples were drawn in to loot. An important part of the attraction of looting is to avoid having to live by daily work. A whole system of masculine pride was founded on living by other people’s work. It was the high point of accomplishment to murder rival males, destroy what property could not be used and take the rest, including women. Looting is inseparable from mass murder, rape, and enslavement, and those are still attractions of war. Empire building is nothing more than sustained looting. A remnant of the romance and pride of looting exists in the glorification of trophies won in competitive sport, and fortunes won from financial speculation.

Nomadic tribes that devised ways of surviving by animal herding often turned that parasitic technique onto communities of human farmers and city-dwellers. The cowboys became aristocrat estate owners. Social control by aristocracies, warrior-estate families, derives from that innovation. It was capitalism within the context of a rural agrarian production system. Settled aristocracies had the same values as the nomadic herders from whom they descended, values limited to maintaining a life of manly fun, competitive pride, pleasure, power, and risk-braving-adventure, not much different from capitalist elites. We see in ‘crime families’ of the mafia the identical cultural pattern still being re-created. Some families conceive extraordinary ambition and devote their energies to achieving ever more control of resources by whatever means they can get away with. In pre-modern times ambitious families controlled private armies to enforce their possession of lands. Armed violence was their source and refuge. Their focus was protecting and expanding their private property by organized and cultured violence. Their culture was built around organizing subordinated persons into gangs to carry out looting and destruction of other peoples property as well as assaults, murders, and enslavements for the purpose of exercising possession. Other humans were often simply a feature of geography to these families, to be used or removed as needed. Such military families named themselves aristocratic and noble. The use of the term “crime family” here is a means of balancing the usual academic tendency, derived from an art-history “golly-wow” approach, to admire and project positive value on whatever was dominant and powerful, the glorification of winning and wealth as such. That approach is not objective or value-neutral, and merely accepts without question that victors are privileged voices in the telling of history.

Crime Families

The narrative at the core of crime family culture is that the senior members of the family are natural and legitimate authorities and supervisors, and that no authority is superior except possibly supernatural power. All other authorities are merely rivals and threats to the family’s power. Your family is “us” and everyone else is “them”. The vast resources of the family are there to reward and assist those who dedicate themselves loyally to protection and advancement of the family as envisioned and declared by the patriarch. The prizes are high status and influence in the family hierarchy, conspicuous and intimidating wealth, gestures of subordination from everyone, power over others, and immunity from criticism.

Crime families or warrior-estate families were serious organizations who based collective ambition for wealth and power on a core of blood relations aided by carefully selected servants of various ranks and functions. These organizations recognized no outside supervisory authority. They were powers and a law unto themselves, competing with other families of a similar kind for the greatest possible control of people and resources. In ancient Rome the patrician family patriarch was the sovereign law within the bounds of his estates, with power of life and death over his family, servants, slaves, and tenants. The only help or protection possible for any individual was from one family or another. Royal families of Medieval Europe were later examples of this type of cultured family. Their willingness to make war is an illustration of the normalization of violent assault in their culture, and much of the war and business they practiced was conducted covertly by spies, assassins, and agents provocateur. These were the families for whom Machiavelli’s The Prince was written. Another modern version is the capitalist or investor family, hoarding important capital wealth. The hoard is the central value, and the need to protect the hoard inclines such families to distrust whatever they do not control. The origin and continuing main support of the political right-wing is that crime family.

Two Groups

In the anarchy after the Romans abandoned the western regions of their empire, two groups wanted control of resources on a vast scale, including control of populations. The first was the collection of warrior-estate families, and the other was the organization of Christianity. Both were alpha-male culture pods, still carrying the alpha-glorifying cult of looting. Since the personnel of the Church were nominally celibate males without children, the upper offices of the hierarchy were recruited from warrior-estate families, and so the two cultures had a lot in common. Radical inequality was the focus of the former and collective belonging was the focus of the latter. Crime families and religious cults will always be the winners from anarchy, and both will be leader-centric, animated by the alpha-male legacy of looting culture, rallying people to devote their efforts for the ultimate benefit of the looters.

Warrior-estate families formed a league that combined brutal rivalry with the cultivation of inter-marriages and mutual support. In the middle ages the families who would eventually make a reality of sovereign power were working out their techniques. They were social fetuses which would grow into modern government. The focus of the collective based on this narrative is capital concentration and control, private property and a security apparatus for protecting the privately concentrated capital. Behind it all was still the culture of alpha-type males proceeding with continual war against all other alpha-type males, principally for the fun of it. Their families carried the culture of war and there was no limit to their cruelty in pursuit of supremacy. The general practice in medieval warfare was for armies to break into small units to carry out a widespread looting and burning of villages and crops in a deliberate creation of famine and disease. Sovereignty was focused on private property and securing its ownership by force.

The other cultural entity with aspirations toward total ownership of populations was the Christian Church, based most powerfully at Rome. The main focus of that theocratic engine of sovereignty was control of individual religious belief and obedience to dictates of the Church. Organizational unity over vast expanses, in addition to a grip on fundamental and universal fears, enabled the Church to attempt a theocracy in Medieval Europe. However, the Church was not strong enough to exercise sovereignty on its own. It required alliances with particular crime families and generally with the collective of crime families, the class of aristocrats. That combination developed, especially during the crusades, a military-Christian culture known as Chivalry, which provided great advantages to both groups. Patriarchs of religious ceremonies were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still carried the developing culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable, keeping records of costs, products, properties, distributions, and consumption. That uneasy alliance between religious and military cultures in the exercise of sovereignty is very ancient.

Historical Arc of Crime Families

The historical arc of crime families began with control of productive land by brute force, terrorism, and extortion. The power exercised by crime families went through a process of sanctification in the post-Roman history of Europe. Even before the full elaboration of chivalry, the Roman Church had a policy of placing bishops in the households of crime families to organize and advise, and enforce recruitment to the Church of everyone under the family’s power. That supernatural association had a legitimizing effect for the chosen families. The bond between Roman Christianity and power-families became deeply fused by the Crusades. The looting aristocracy of Europe created a new brutality in holy wars against the Islamic middle-east. That brutality was brought back to Europe fused with an outward enamel of religious ritual and pageantry.

This is not fable but history. The power vacuum, created by first bloating and then abandoning the Roman empire in western Europe, was filled by two groups: confederacies of crime families and the organization of Christianity, headquartered at Rome. In the course of the crusades those groups formed a partnership under the title Chivalry, superimposing symbols and pageants of divinity on the mechanisms and practices of lethal brutality, thus hatching the military-spiritual engine of sovereignty, gradually downloading the mechanisms of power to increasingly independent regional dynasties. Hierarchies of crime families and Christianity wanted populations to be devoted entirely to the systems which generated wealth, power, and a sense of superiority concentrated in the hierarchies. Crime families needed people to work the land and the mines, and the Church needed sinners to threaten and punish into begging for divine intervention, tweaking their odds by donating from the little they had. Each had their pageantry of superiority. Because the medieval alpha structure wanted populations to be totally devoted to serving the wealth and grandeur of the alpha-structure they did not want the commonality of individuals to be inwardly self-possessed through the creativity of their own subjectivity. Such a condition would distract from devotion to the very outward work of the hierarchies and possibly hatch rival organizations of effort and discourse, diverting energy, grandeur, and celebrity from the established order.

Such is the value nexus that established the culture of sovereign power and social control which we still take for granted as government. The two medieval groups supplying incumbents in power were replaced, in the course of the nineteenth century, by captains of business, finance, and industry as the economic organization of wealth came to base itself on energy from combustible minerals instead of on muscle-force from animals. The new captains remodeled sovereign culture slightly into the modern military-spiritual-industrial state. Captains of industry are much the same as their medieval counterparts, maintaining and elaborating systems of pageantry depicting their special importance and superiority. However, industrial captains could not claim divine appointment, and so had to arrange some fig-leaves of legitimacy through gestures of being accountable to the governed and being constrained by law. The ideology of sovereign control remained much as it was in medieval times. The notion of institutional hierarchy as the primary organizing principle of life is still a staple of market-society, and originates by direct lines of imitation from the ancient crime family.

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funneled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves economic and political control and the fruits of control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Employment is structured as a systematic psychological confinement. The reality-distorting demands of the alpha-stratum superstructure (detailed in blog posting 10, Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality) suppresses self-possession as a psychological and cultural commonplace. It isn’t that the alpha-structure knows anything about the creative freedom of subjective intelligence. It does not intend its strategic agenda specifically to deny that experience. Subjective intelligence is the blind spot of the alpha-stratum. The alpha-stratum acts as it does because it is immersed in the age-old culture of masculine pride and the value alpha-male trophy culture assigns to public displays of adulation. The history of leadership is in the refinement of a caricature of masculinity, pageantry of divine immunity proved by bravado displays of risk-defying, daredevil feats and victories, acting out sufficient contempt for personal danger to call up gasps and cheers of adoration from the crowd.

Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, there were beginnings of what promised to be real cultural change. However, whenever there was a life-style experiment which began to broaden the orientation grid of the commonality of people, such as the French Revolution of 1789 or the Baby-Boom Revolt of 1963-74, there has been a mighty backlash mounted to roll back the advances, so that wars can still be fought and transferrable wealth concentrated upward. There is nothing authentically transcendent in that masterly style-of-life. It has nothing to teach the commonality. It just needs to interfere in order to cling to its own sense of specialness. That alpha-structure sense of superiority is the only thing threatened by general self-possession. A luxurious and opulent style-of-life for a few is certainly not the problem. The problem is that the stratum which celebrates wealth addiction imposes an agenda of strategic control and interference with the discourse of the commonality of people.

By contrast, the history of nurture culture is in the chain of generations joining linguistic communities and getting on with life. To break the death-grip of war and refined forms of looting, to remove the disincentives and barriers to basic self-awareness, a way has to be found to limit the legacy of looting culture and greatly enlarge the influence of the nurture culture practiced by women. It will be necessary to devise a civil society and government based on nurture instead of on looting.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

The mission drift from escaping misery to escaping determinism for a profound experience of freedom developed with the gradual success of the project to remove disembodied personalities and intelligences, spirits, from descriptions of nature. The project eventually extended to human nature. The strength of the process became irresistible when combined with the modern reiteration of determinism by Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza attempted a thorough ‘disenchantment’ of nature. In his philosophy the world was completely pre-determined and unitary. All was one “God or Nature” and all features and events were considered logically necessary, like steps of a proof in geometry. There is some irony in the fact that Spinoza’s philosophy generally looks like a re-statement of Stoicism in terms of seventeenth century mathematical reasoning and emerging science, but it muted the Stoic emphasis on an individual spark of freedom.

The answer to scientific determinism was created by philosophers still working with the Stoic tradition of humanist rationalism. Stoic double-aspect theory, emphasizing a discontinuity between outward experience and inward experience, is crucial in their account of how freedom can be possible. The answer to this version of “How can freedom be possible?” is substantially this: Since the evidence for determinism is deliberately cherry-picked from a narrow range of experience, freedom still can be encountered directly as both possible and actual on the basis of an enlarged survey of experience.

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a providential Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. A realm within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated. A link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on inwardness is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity was continued in the work of Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but it runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

The evidence for determinism is entirely outward, and selectively disregards, without convincing justification, the inward experience of immediate freedom. Spinoza did not demonstrate how inward freedom is reducible to the determinism of objective nature, but only declared his preference for pre-determination, in the spirit of Calvinism which was “going around” at the time.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Revival of Freedom

Kant was responding to Spinoza’s vision of total determinism, which still loomed as the central philosophical challenge a century after Spinoza’s death. Influenced by the rationalist tradition also via Leibniz, as well as by Rousseau and Hume, Kant argued that individuals are nearly trapped within our own psychology and our own creativity, and consequently have no perception of objective things-in-themselves. Leibniz and Hume had presented versions of that same isolation from nature, and in a sense Kant was trying to get the genie back into the bottle, trying to justify philosophical thinking and a life of duty and virtue within an orderly society even when ultimate Truth and Knowledge were not achievable. Kant was responding to Hume by following Hume’s own investigative procedure, which might be called reflexive self-consciousness, an intentional consciousness of the ordinary course of subjective activity and experience, with a special interest in distinguishing subjective contributions from those imposed on experience from outside subjectivity. The mental activity encountered by Kant in that process was far richer than what Hume had reported. For Kant, the apparently outer world of appearances or phenomena is not the be-all and end-all it appears to be, since the structure of phenomena is largely supplied by a perceiving subject, by requirements of any possible consciousness, such as a requirement to identify substances, space and time, cause and effect.

Freedom, and the Genie of Lower Human Nature

Kant’s work focused on freedom, very much following issues raised by Lutheran Protestantism. Kant’s identification of freedom used the subjective experience of moral choice as its occasion. There are moments when a person can be aware of the freedom to act either according to a principle that could be willed as a universal rule or entirely from immediate self-interest. In those moments a person can be aware of freedom to take the leap one way or the other. That moment of moral decision is direct acquaintance with freedom. On Kant’s view, exactly that freedom is the thing-in-itself as experienced inwardly. The ultimate principle is one thing-in-itself, freedom, as experienced directly by individuals in the subjectivity of their moral decisions. It is in stark contrast to the world of outward phenomena, the world of objects present in perception. In that outward world of measurement and science all is found to be determined by the principle of cause and effect. For Kant, phenomena (outward appearances) display a complete scientific determinism, but the moment of moral choice, the choice between acting from a universal principle of justice instead of from a self-gratifying impulse, can be experienced undeniably as freedom. The main duality in this vision seems to be between ‘inward’ experience of freedom and ‘outward’ experience of determinism, but the higher vs lower conflict is still present within inward experience. It is present in the alternatives the free chooser must consider: the moral rule or simple self-gratification. Of course in Kant a choice of the moral rule manifests the higher human nature, and self-interest a lower humanity. Since the exercise of moral freedom is transcendent for Kant, it is a vision of transcendence on the level of the individual.

Kant’s idealism, with freedom as thing-in-itself or metaphysical nature, reduced “body” or “substance” to a misunderstanding or a mistaken impression. Fundamental reality became spiritual or subjective, what it is that can exercise freedom. In Kant, the direct personal experience of freedom is immediate awareness of identity with the ultimate thing-in-itself. For a person facing a moral choice to be truly free, the leap one way and not another must be created in the instant of decision. The assertion of rationality was not dependent on cultural norms but on individual creativity. The free agency of subjectivity is identified with strategic rationality creating a balancing force against animal impulse. Acting on the principle was always the actuality of freedom, the higher power, in Kant, but it is especially discernible when noticed against a contrasting self-interested impulse. Acting on the principle would never happen on impulse, because a mental process of inventing a rule had to be accomplished first. So acting on the principle is always deliberate. Freedom requires creativity. The individual is the author of moral choices and actions. Creativity for Kant was not very colourful but it was fundamental and crucial, and his idealism rests on it.

Even though the impression human perceivers have of the objective world is pervaded with psychological contributions on Kant’s view, he remained convinced that the impression still bears some unidentifiable relation to a thing-in-itself which exists externally prior to being experienced. Consequently, even though there is inward experience of freedom in intelligence and outward determinism in nature, it is not legitimate to impose the system or principles of one side on the other to declare a tidy monism. You can’t justify an exclusive preference for inner experience or outer experience as the grounding of everything, since there is such a stark discontinuity between them. Embracing that irreducible discontinuity for the broader understanding it enables is exemplified also by the Stoic treatment of Logos, Luther and the inward leap of faith, and Schopenhaur’s explicit double-aspect reality.

Kant’s response to Spinoza and Hume, both of the latter ‘philosophizing’ aspects of Calvinism, inspired a great pulse of philosophical creativity, especially in Germany. Kant’s identification of a subjective experience of freedom inspired subsequent German idealism, Romanticism, and Existentialism all the way to Sartre at the middle of the twentieth century. In answering scientific determinism, romantic philosophers, originating with Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) tried imposing the inner subjective side of experience onto everything, in a mirror-image of Spinoza’s declaration of his preference for outward determinism. Fichte declared preference for the subjective aspect of experience as a revelation of fundamental cosmic nature. The claim is that it is less denying of important dimensions of experience, more inclusive of the richness of experience, to give preference to the inward side, subjective intelligence, than to declare an objectivist monism. In romanticism, whimsy and creative spontaneity were the portal to the individual’s freedom over stark scientific determinism. On the question of the relative merits of rationality as compared to bestial lusts and impulses, romantics departed from the mainstream of humanist rationalism by expressing a certain contempt for strict rationality and an admiration for nature, unrestrained energy, and boldly quirky individualism.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.