Monthly Archives: May 2012

Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular

17 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Transcendence

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It will be easier to make sense of this post in the context provided by these previous posts: post 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity
post 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky
post 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction
post 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence
post 23, March 8, 2012, The Brute Actuality of Nature

Since nature is brute actuality, there is no time in nature. In nature, the existence of this instant of actuality specifically and categorically excludes the actual existence of all other instants. Awareness of time, then, is the self-awareness of intelligence, and time is the presence of intelligence. The presence of intelligence is a particularity, an individuality, and not a universally distributed presence, not an omnipresent beholding, not cosmic sensitivity or cosmic consciousness. Its particularity is in its being in a particular life, in its placement, limitation, and ongoing dependence on an immediate environment for constructing an increasingly remote and increasingly improbable future. The particularity of intelligence is in its incomplete sensitivities and limited access to the cosmos. Its access to the cosmos is only a point located within the cosmos, but a point with some limited mobility and longevity. Because intelligence is such an extreme particularity, it must assert itself actively even to exist. That is how the agency of intelligence is inseparable from its particularity. Its power is limited to its particular point, located at a point, and is not universally uniform. It must continually draw energy from the local environment and re-direct that energy metabolically into first conceiving and then enacting a reshaping of the environment into something sheltering, nurturing, and sustaining, into a home. That process depletes its energy in strenuous effort, but in addition to constructing temporal longevity the effort also creates an expression or externalization of the elusive and fragile existence of that intelligence.

The idea of freedom is inseparable from the particularity of any intelligence and the existential necessity or impulse to overcome or go beyond immediate particularity. The construct of time-consciousness is a transcendence of the primordial particularity of any intelligence, because nothing could be more vanishingly particular, in spite of its universal distribution and uniformity, than the brute actuality of nature, where time is impossible. Nature cannot overcome its particularity because past and future can never be actual. Only an intelligence overcomes its particularity, and that is the transcendence of intelligence. Immutable particularity is unfreedom. Freedom is overcoming particularity. Intelligence overcomes its particularity because it is not limited to actuality. It creates for itself a variety of ‘pretend’ orientations or situations that are not actual and then depletes its metabolic energy making some of them actual. Time consciousness is consciousness of both personal particularity and the immediate overcoming of that particularity in an oriented or pointed exertion or assertion of agency in imposing a pretended situation on brute actuality. Orientation is that complex moment of deliberate, pointed, and effortful overcoming of particularity. We have no pre-deliberation in creating basic time-consciousness, so it is not entirely an artifact of intelligence, but with longevity time-consciousness increasingly becomes an artifact of deliberative intelligence.

The particularity of an intelligence cannot be separated from the overcoming of its particularity. That overcoming of particularity is the agency of intelligence. To survive is to overcome particularity, and it takes embodied effort in addition to the transcendent sensitivity and creative orientation powers of intelligence. Overcoming particularity is partly overcoming embodiment through consciousness of time and in pretending orientations and other transcendent acts of intelligence. However, embodiment cannot be abandoned because metabolic experiences of depletion and restoration, cost and benefit, are part of the personal sense of time.

There is freedom in mobility and in longevity because of time-consciousness. Time-consciousness contains the experience of freedom: you pretend another situation (another world) accessible by particular exertions through which you can push and pull the environment into becoming that foreseen situation, and at every stage of the actual creation you remember your personal agency creating the transfiguration. The arc of fatigue, depletion, and restoration of your metabolic-muscular condition is a crucial part of that memory. Such time-consciousness is a transcendence of particularity. So again, time consciousness is the presence of an intelligence.

Intelligence cannot be anything complete, bounded, or finalized because it is the creative power to overcome its own particularity. If nature is brute actuality, then intelligence is potential, the power and necessity of self-invention. Philosophical humanism is the recognition of individual self-invention. The engine of intelligent agency isn’t hiding anywhere because it is potential rather than actuality. Philosophers such as David Hume expressed surprise about the indeterminacy of an entity of intelligence, and yet achieving and maintaining indeterminacy is crucial to intelligence.

The kind of overcoming-of-particularity that intelligence does still carries its particularity with it. It does not annihilate its particularity but merely prevents it from being perfect or complete particularity. It is not all or nothing, nor is it once for all. The effort of overcoming is ongoing. Intelligence keeps opening its particularity enough to prevent its complete finality, to prevent its being quite determinate, to prevent it becoming the abyss of unfreedom. The overcoming is elaborating, interpolating, cultivating, or enlarging its particularity rather than annihilating it. So intelligent agency is not ultimately transferrable or alienable from its particularity. It is not imported from an external source somewhere such as a separate deity, demon, or human collective. Agency (freedom) cannot ultimately belong to or derive from the polis or the village or the common language and culture, or “the people”, or a committee; but rather it expresses each, every, and any particular embodied intelligence.

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

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Gender culture, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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As an individual subjective intelligence, you wake up in innocence and look around to get your bearings. You concentrate on discovering your situation, where you are and what’s going on around you that bears on your welfare and prospects. In that process you discover culture and politics, and you discover that you are in the middle of a raging war that is, in effect, a great secret because hardly anyone notices it. It is a psychological war, a war of incompatible visions, and it looks like the bad guys have the upper hand.

This blog, In the Blind Spot, generally explores the history and current state of that war, the rivalry and combat between two visions of the human situation, two very old enemies. On one side is the philosophical vision of people as individually transcendent intelligences, the tradition of humanist rationalism and Stoicism, for example. My attempts at interpreting and extending that tradition are typically in aid of clarifying the overall situation of individual subjectivity: in aid of self-discovery, self-possession, personal empowerment, and voice. Postings of that kind include:
Encountering subjectivity
Existential non-appearance
What is being called thinking?
The transcendence of intelligence
The brute actuality of nature

If we can characterize modernity roughly as the era of state sovereignty, science, money, human rights, and proletarian literacy, then the presence of the last two items means the vision of individual transcendence has not been utterly defeated. In humanism, the legacy of classical heroism is manifested in a narrative of the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, classical heroism turned inward and made universal. That has been an influence against the legitimacy of slavery and abuse. We could not call any society modern that accepts slavery. The ownership class claims the freedom to enslave workers (value them less so to achieve and depict radical inequality in material displays), but in modernity the freedom to enslave confronts humanist individual dignity. Literacy also has been crucial because voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence. Authorship engraves and extends a voice beyond the ephemerality of conversation and speech. The literary voice is both public and private, internal and external, straddling the distinction. Reading and writing, literacy, has been a technology of honouring individual voices. Having a voice is godlike, that is, transcendent. Holy books have been thought to carry the divine voice.

The opposing vision in this great war is the religious vision of monotheistic divine dictatorship and the radical inequality that follows from it. That vision of divine dictatorship is cultural malware which infects and infests the great human interconnectedness. With the spread and dominance of the monotheistic religious traditions over the homelands of Hellenistic humanism, there descended a philosophical dark age that began under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I (347-395 A.D.). The dark age extended roughly from 380, when Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity the only legitimate religion of the Roman Empire, until well after Martin Luther (1483-1546) began a revival of something like Stoic humanism. That long age was dark because there were insane punishments for thinking unorthodox thoughts. The thirteenth century struggle in which the Roman Church exterminated the Cathars of Languedoc was a defining moment in which the Church revealed its mission of death-grip social control. In the case of the Cathars, the Church first applied its old technique, launching a crusade (1209-29), and then followed up with a special invention for the purpose: the Inquisition (1233). The murder of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), executed by burning alive by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, is a late example of that same vicious repression. Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as such did not burn anyone, no matter how much disagreement there might be. Burning people was a Christian speciality.

The debate or war between the monotheistic worldview of divine dictatorship and the philosophical tradition of individual transcendence is a clash of cultures within western civilization itself. That culture clash is as lethal as any between different civilizations. It is also asymmetrical warfare, since the divine dictatorship fable was, from the beginning, and continues to support, a projection of the archaic alpha-trophy-looting model of predatory masculinity. The war is not a contest for power, but rather a lust for and possession of power on one side against an urge for self-possession and freedom on the other. Capitalist alpha-trophy-looting culture (ATL) is the modern face of the ancient malware that is divine dictatorship, reinforced in post-Roman Europe with a glorification of looting by nomadic invaders from the north-east. Capitalist sovereignty draws its brutality, energy, and orientation from that tradition, and has been extending its dominance. Nothing is gained through stopping the vision-war by giving up, but only by defeating the oppression. Blog postings that map out that historical drama are:
The Two Traditions
Reality as a Construct for Concealing Class War
Gender Culture in the Political Situation
Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom
Theological Black Holes

The war of visions is not a closed system, however. A third cultural force and tradition was identified in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations, and then elaborated in posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation, namely the female-carried culture of first language acquisition and nurture (FLN – first-language-nurture). First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it continuously day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. That third force carries far more antiquity, energy, and potential than the philosophical tradition, and it would be hopeful if those forces could be allies in creating alternatives excluding the common enemy.

The raging of the vision-war came into focus in the original attempt to find bearings as a subjective intelligence, waking up in innocence and concerned about the prospects for a satisfying life. The vision-war is of crucial importance but is not the whole story in the problematic situation of any subjectivity. There is something like an innate subjective imperative to discover itself, arising from the fact that subjectivity seems to have a blind spot and in fact itself resides in that blind spot. The elusiveness of self-identification highlights the fact that both inward and outward investigations are crucial in the effort to establish personal bearings. A special sort of mirror is needed to show a blind spot containing a force with no face, but the project of inward investigation has been marginal among commonly respected human efforts. There is a cultural history in that as well, the same history that features the war of the two visions. A primordial failure to reflect on subjectivity, inwardness, maroons us on a kind of surface of subjectivity, stranded within external surroundings. Lacking the grounding of self-awareness, we are enabled to feel and grasp our own being only by accomplishing overt gestures and representations, often shaped by the needs of simple survival, and often grandiose demonstrations supposed to defy any hints of uncertainty, to express contemptuous rejection of elusive inwardness. That orientation became a shell, comfortable, habitual, and culturally normal. Within that orientation of strident outwardness the heroes and exemplars of confident human power would always be the alpha trophy accumulators, who then project their own version of personification onto the cosmos as the father-god, the ultimate dictator and war-god. The counterweight to that can be only the assertion of inwardness, and so we are brought back again to that first set of postings on interpreting and extending the tradition of individual transcendence.

This narrative is a small catalog of reference points for an alternative, elemental, orientation.

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

The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Narrative, Subjectivity

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The situation of any person is far more complicated than location in a material environment (being-there), although placement in a material environment is elemental. Every person is also situated within a human environment and the human environment is always in an historical drift. It is useful to pick out ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ aspects of that human environment, but political aspects are just particular features of the cultural situation. Considering both the human and material features of the environment, what any individual encounters outwardly is material determinism and cultural and political control. That is the context in which the question “How can freedom be possible?” has to be answered.

The Social Life of Intelligence

In general, any person seeks to maximize the experience of intelligence or personality through creating mutual reflections or resonances with other intelligent entities. Although questioning is peculiarly individual, we all have questioning, voice, and existence-in-time in common as intelligent entities. Culture is poorly understood, but builds from this: imitation communicates intelligence; rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is a declaration of intelligence, an odd sort of self-declaration: “I can re-create from myself all that is external. As intelligence, I contain everything.” It is the beginning of the human social-nature. Imitation has such power just because rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is an intelligent act, a communication of deliberative intelligence. That is the whole basis of culture. Conversation is an intelligence game, acts of clear repetition, but each with a relevant novelty thrown in as a personal contribution and as an invitation for a further collective movement. Music may focus the natural rhythms of the body, but it takes them into a game of abstract expectation and surprise, a conversation of pure intelligence. The experience of intelligence is a subjective value, that is, we keep wanting more.

In addition to forms of subjectivity such as curiosity, appetites, and expressive impulses, there is that force of mutual attachment which is neither gravitational, electro-magnetic, nor nuclear, but a force peculiar to intelligences. The force of mutual attachment has different aspects, including an orientation toward sources of attention, kisses, help, food, and the reflection of intelligence. We experience our nature best, in some ways, in resonance with other time-conscious entities, and so we come to absorb ourselves in relationships with and imitations of other people. An enlargement of the sense of intelligence is accomplished by imitating socially modeled activities: the way we live in our group, and that situates the imitating person as the medium needed by cultural forms to propagate through yet another generation. Mutual stimulation is natural to time-conscious entities, but the resulting attachments take forms which are imitated unconsciously, and take on an importance which is more enduring and more apparent than individuals.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, postures, gestures, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Although we might be born free, we have no choice about social participation. We need a caring social group to ferry us across infancy and childhood. That caring group itself needs others for mutual support in dealing with the indifferent environment. Both the immediate group and the larger one assign us objective categories such as boy or girl, good looking or not, strong or sickly, good or bad reader, good or bad athlete, good or bad singer, good or bad. Quite early these groups assign us tentative economic roles such as tinker, taylor, soldier, sailor, clergyman, teacher, driver, cook, cleaner. Those roles and categories have fixed characteristics. They have the face of objectivity and eternal validity as varieties of human nature. So individuals are objectified by social participation.

The Great Interconnectedness

Social interconnectedness is essential for humans, and in many ways the greatness of humanity resides in the web of our conscious interconnectedness as a collective creation. As isolated energies we are dramatically more restricted to a locality, less powerful, less expressed, less happy, and in many ways less free. We look at the world out of interconnectedness. The feat of visiting the moon was accomplished by a human interconnectedness, and not by a few individuals. The foundation of that interconnectedness is language. Learning a first language, accomplished in infancy, sets up habits of conversation, conversational skill, pleasure, and readiness to converse which enable a lifetime of personal connections and bring a vast collective sophistication to the individual. Culture generally is both product and mechanism of interconnectedness.

The interconnectedness of consciousness across multitudes of individuals is different from culture, and separately important. Every individual’s orientation toward news, gossip, stories, textbook presentations, or popular culture, in the family or village, at work, in the nation or the world, is part of the great interconnectedness. That orientation connects each single intelligence to all others with attention on the same range of information, as well as to the persons and themes about whom the stories and presentations report. It also connects each individual to the arc of information that has gone before and which is expected to go on being renewed and enlarged, and so watched routinely, refreshed routinely.

Isolated lives participate in producing the great interconnectedness of intelligences. For that, intelligence needs deliberation but also cooperative attachments with other lives. An individual’s knowledge is enabled to go beyond strictly personal acquaintance to include what an untold number of others have discovered, thought, doubted, and imagined, the projection of possibilities and probabilities, and it enables the integration of an unlimited number of points of view on the world and the prospects of a life. Individuals receive many gifts from the social interconnectedness that surrounds and nurtures us through infancy. In return, families, religions, communities, and states make claims on the energies, talents, ways of thinking, and emotional allegiance of individuals. In addition, there are disorders of the grand structures within the interconnectedness of people, and there are injuries from too great a submission of individual energy to the web of interconnection.

The Ego-Avatar Constructed for Social Attachment

There are very few times or activities which do not involve social supervision. Childhood and formal education are almost entirely training in dependence on a supervised system of incentives and rewards. Any work for pay is supervised. Any act for spiritual salvation is supervised. Any society with a focus on religion or on work for pay is a supervising cultural matrix. Supervision normally involves an incentive and reward system, even if the reward is only praise or approval from an authority figure such as a teacher.

Organizations and informal groups exert influence on any individual in sight, sound, and touch of them in a number of ways. 1) There are norms, customs, feuds and fashions, ways of standing, walking, talking, playing, getting food, dressing, topics of conversation, menus of attitudes to express in conversations, menus of moves in the current conversation game. 2) Collectives have organized structures of productive work or effort into which individuals can fit and earn a place as well as vital rewards. 3) A big group ‘personality’ is a safe and powerful collective intelligence to meld with. The myriad social micro-patterns relate us to macro-entities: playing a category such as man or woman, for example, is training for belonging within the economic and political arrangements of a nation, city, family, or religion. Customs and norms are imitated more or less unconsciously, for intelligent invisibility within the herd-system, but when ignored they are enforced. We choose ‘the way we live in our group’ rather than exile into a wilderness of isolation and uncertainty.

There is a social construct, the ego-avatar, which is different from the subjective person. The ego is a display of tags of status and dignity, or lack of them, a schema to display a gravitas score, to display placement on a culturally defined scale of worth, the trophies of social competitions. This has much in common with Freud’s “superego”, a mental internalization of public authority figures or role models, which then act as a restraint on merely personal impulses. In the alpha dominated world of big brittle egos in pageants of competition, egoistic aggrandizement is a social and historical creation. Intelligence creates and builds ego-avatars but is not limited to avatars or to any particular avatar.

The force of mutual attachment is rewarding enough to challenge all other impulses and rewards, but cultural formations also manage to take on a force of their own by inspiring loyalty and personal identification in many people. From that emerges a custom of social control and enforcement based on intentional injury to people who do not conform. Basic inter-personal attachments shape an individual’s voice to what being-together with others will permit. It is easy to assume that a personal relationship is entirely the product of the participants, but not all bearings are direct from the pre-cultural self. The self also pretends, learns roles and avatars, and imitates. If anyone is bringing learned behaviour such as language to the ways in which being together is practiced, they are incorporating social pageantry and value assignments. We live in an environment of cultural value assignments, narratives, explanations, and rhetorical defenses of social collectives and the function-roles that structure them.

No individual has much control over the evolutionary momentum of big cultural entities such as states, cities, religions, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink. In that way they are similar to biological evolution. Our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for millions of years. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. The dead ‘momentum’ of social forms soon separates us from awareness of the originality of our personal intelligence.

It makes a crucial difference that innocent, pre-cultural, individual impulses are of the nature of curiosity and creative impulses to mark the world. The social nature of people brings with it a default cultural hegemony and a resulting alienation of innocent creativity. However, individual rationality in actual behaviour or practice does not require the social and cultural constraint, nor any occult congruence between knowledge, nature, and language. Nothing prevents even innocent individuals from appreciating the needs of others. In fact people do that easily and so are enabled to establish human attachments and learn spoken language in the first place. (Please see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.)

People have a natural, innate, or innocent gift for spontaneously creating social attachments. Acquisition of spoken language is part of that talent. It is a robust gift and a very early accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are not unnatural in any way and do not require leadership, supervision, religious revelations, visions of heaven or hell, gods or demons, codes of law, threats of insult, injury, or death, or any other special intervention or extraordinary circumstances. There is no social contract and no need for one because social attachment is a casual accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are based on deliberate acts of imitation as expressions of intelligence. Although imitative culture is not unnatural, it is not preordained or “hard-wired” either. Culture is largely accident and spur of the moment invention, ad hoc, and provisional. It is software, updating continuously in patches. The ways of life, language games, and ways-of-being practiced in any group have a strong force of attraction as models to be imitated as a way of attaching with a clear and distinct manifestation of intelligence. Since ‘objective reality’ is approached from within some such cultural narrative, it is edited, selected, and interpreted to serve that narrative. Experience is profoundly conditioned or qualified by cultural influences in ways which are easy to misidentify. Social attachments embed individuals in sets of imitative activities which constitute cultures. Adults generally are sufficiently embedded to be almost entirely determined by cultural influences. The menu of life narratives and scripts made available by a particular culture has a determining influence on how an individual understands and relates to his or her environment.

Beyond Groupthink: Innocence

All this being said, we do not need to experience intelligence only in collectives. Self as innocent questioning, voice, and existence-in-time is already self-subsisting intelligence. We are blocked from that experience by our early involvement in collective intelligence. The sweet kick we get from bouncing off the voices of other time-conscious entities, is compromised by the bitterness of having intelligence confined, blocked, and forced to repeat endlessly its least powerful functions. A stronger experience of intelligence is available in deliberative self-possession, in reclaimed innocence. The normal absorption of individual intelligence within cultural forms makes sense of a project to reclaim innocence, to recognize pre-cultural intelligence and to re-think personal orientation to include that recognition.

(Note: The three graces are: nature, subjective intelligence, and culture.)

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