Monthly Archives: August 2012

Waking From History, Episode Two

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Belittled

The hostile environment into which every infant monad arrives is one in which destiny for everyone is pre-determined by cultural forms. That is not to say that a particular destiny is pre-determined for every individual, but that personal destinies are conceived as fitting within cultural categories, within the social hierarchy of personal worth marked with accumulation of trophies or various tags of dignity or esteem. Whatever niche a person finds to occupy in the hierarchies, others take that niche as a license to stick a particular value to the person. Ordinary socially and culturally stipulated roles and assumptions limit individuals to categories each valued as more or less stupid, uneducated, culturally ignorant, petty, dull, slow, powerless, untalented, timid, uninteresting, confused, hopeless, and contemptible, all generally lined up with the categories of social class, racial and ethnic heritage, age, gender, property possession, and power level in the economic-institutional hierarchies. No matter what category a person falls into, it constricts, diminishes, writes off, and actually condemns every individual by assuming that they are contained and revealed by, and actually fit within, that category; but nobody does. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every cultural category.

The currently dominant reality-construct sanctions such grotesque distortions of reality in everyday discourse. The invisibility of the first-language-nurture faction as the foundation of civil society is another distortion, the glorification of war and war heroism is another. Behind all is a totalitarian ideology of the value of radical inequality. The very idea of political or corporate power is saturated with a grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, a crime family cultural tradition. That idea of power nearly excludes responsibility to others (nurture), and has far more in common with the idea of divine incorrigibility, as revealed in the leadership culture of secrecy and immunity from ordinary social norms.

How Can Freedom Be Possible in a Hostile Political Context?

The Olympic Games of London 2012 displayed perfectly the obsessive futility of lives based in the value system which celebrates inequality as such, measured with trophies. The consequence of the current obsession with destructive wars and other criminal activity demanded by alpha-trophy-looting cultural dominance is a state of being stuck as a civilization. That is echoed in the stuckness of ordinary adult mentality, the repetitive, obsessive monotony of aspirations and forms of life under this cultural regime.

A problem with the anti-war movement, in spite of its unquestionably legitimate and courageous aspirations, is that the ideological understanding of war and militarism that informs its operations is inadequate. If you want to come to terms with deep politics then it doesn’t get much deeper than the contradictory historical forces of alpha-trophy-looting culture against first-language-nurture culture. It doesn’t get any deeper than the contradiction between the profound equality of individually transcendent monads each worthy of nurture, and the top-down hierarchical constructs of alpha-trophy-looting ideology, truly fulfilled only in the march to war. The peace movement must face this question: how much middle-class self-admiration and assumed entitlement to privilege has to be given up along with the war industry?

The Comfort Zone

The crime family trophy-inequality culture is completely dominant, has always been dominant, and is currently advancing aggressively. In addition, the vast majority of educated, actively literate, people is deeply reluctant to leave the mental comfort zone of an orientation anchored to alpha-trophy-looting ideology, imitating reverence for a dictatorial father-God in some selection from: national patriotism, reliance on the legitimacy of institutional authority, and respecting meritocracy and the professional middle class as role models grounded in legitimizing mechanisms such as markets, money, and ultimately nature as depicted by scientific research and the system of education. (The adventure will be to leave all that behind forever. Does that stack up to a week in space?)

Prospects for adult mentality are stuck in those tired repetitious forms of self-blindness. It isn’t nature that interferes with our freedom, but the weight of culture. Educated skepticism and critical thinking are not enough in the current situation of overwhelming psychological manipulation by cultural messages. Freedom is possible only by undertaking a wholesale mental disengagement from the distortions of reality constructed throughout history, a releasing of all moorings to the standard reference points listed above, and a journey of re-orientation to a very different set. There is an ocean of creativity to be released when we shrug off the energy-sucking weight of leadership ideology in an adventure of personal transcendence.

Culture Consciousness and The Transcendence of Monads

Thinking through the distinction between nature and culture (as in posting 33, June 14, 2012, Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture) soon establishes a mental condition of culture-consciousness. In culture consciousness you have culture tagged in such a way that it can be bracketed to leave a remainder of innocence in pre-cultural embodiment experiences, metabolic measurement of nature, for example, the basics of orientation. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is your own transcendence, the transcendence of intelligence with respect to the brute actuality of nature. The transcendence of us monads is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within a monad’s own interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and away from others that are dreaded. The monadic entity that continuously re-orients itself is partly a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (stretch or reach) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of deliberate mutability, for example.

The freedom and creativity of monads is in being outside actuality in that way. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any monad constructs and continually refreshes its orientation or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both the interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences.

Surprise Horizons

People have an ongoing conversation about the objective world as a beautifully designed creation, inspiring wonder because we can’t experience the process of creation. We encounter actuality as a mystery (Why this instead of nothing?) and so as a horizon which blocks perception of creation. Whenever there is creativity there is a surprise horizon. The world of nature and culture is a surprise horizon for everyone, the centre of business and attention and yet crucially unpredictable to some extent, but there is another surprise horizon, namely an inward blind spot of subjective intelligence. Discovery of that inward horizon can be a vertiginous self-consciousness that has nothing to do with the way you appear to others, the social implications of your appearance or your accomplishments. That is why subjectivity is fundamental in spite of the great importance of social interconnectedness. Shaking loose from the self-presentation coaxed into a shape by social relationships, officially approved role models, and economic incentives and rewards is a crucial step toward taking possession of surprises from the personal horizon of non-actuality.

Creative Process

A truly remarkable part of writing almost anything is starting sentences and paragraphs without any distinct idea of what the ending will be, and then having something, something that makes sense and serves the purpose, arrive over some horizon of dreams. For example, the “language is sporting equipment” analogy wasn’t part of the original ideas for posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture, but it turned up when the sentence was launched, half written, and needed a sensible particular. Starting with nothing but a hunch about stages ahead is a way of prodding the inward surprise horizon and getting the creative fountain gushing a stream with a particular relevance. (Such a ‘leap of creativity’ looks like a general process of which Luther’s “leap of faith” is a particular instance.)

Divine Mind

What distinguishes the intelligence of persons from the imaginary mind of God is the quality of absolute power. The imaginary power of God is infinite and unlimited. Embodied persons do not have that power. We lack absolute power over nature in a couple of different senses. We do not have the power to suspend or change the laws of nature, including the law of conservation of matter/ energy. Additionally, we do not have the mental power to totally understand the patterns and dynamics of nature, even collectively after more than 5,000 years of continuous species literacy. The power-within-nature of an embodied individual is strictly local, anchored to what a particular body, and its voice, can perform. Persons cannot create a new nature to replace the nature already given, for example. However, creative power is not an all or nothing proposition. All the time human bodies project into nature unique patterning from their interior non-actuality.

The Richness of Non-Actuality

The richness of the non-actuality out of which, or within which, every individual intelligence encounters the actual world is important because, for one thing, not all of that non-actuality is an original creation of the individual intelligence, although much of it is. Any individual’s orientation of non-actuality can be manipulated culturally and politically to contain serious and avoidable distortions, as sketched in Episode One.

There are consequences, conclusions to be drawn, from the direct acquaintance with personal transcendence as described just above. One of those consequences is that, since individuals are not confined to actuality, or even to depictions of actuality taught them from cultural sources, each has a grounding to assess and critique the culture that surrounds them, from outside it, and the power to conceive something better.

The idea of individual innocence is meaningful and important.

Another consequence is that freedom is shown to have both inward and outward dimensions. Freedom requires some degree of options and mobility in the world of physics and economics, but that is not sufficient. Freedom also requires the inward nurture of personal questions, curiosities, impulses, and inspiration. The sufficiency of mobility, for example, has to be measured by that force from within. Closely involved with the experience of freedom, the self-awareness or sense of identity of the entity of personal individuality has both inward and outward dimensions. There is an unfathomable, “unplottable”, self-possession of every individual that makes cultural trophies irrelevant to the substance and creative force of any individual. Nobody can be assigned a value, because all are equal in creative transcendence, all are actively in the process of becoming something more.

Another consequence is to discredit any account of human nature as an emptiness that can only be made into something, or fulfilled, by consuming and internalizing substances originally external to it. Personal transcendence discredits the economic conception of human nature as a bundle of deficiencies and compulsive drives such as egoistic diminishment of others.

Creative people are ordinary people.

Any sustainable interconnectedness or political order must recognize the rich originality and peculiarity (or monadality) of each individual as an asset, a source, a value, instead of as a problem requiring cultural categories such as heresy and treason. Individuals are contributors to culture and interconnectedness, and strengthened as such by appropriate nurture.

The currently dominant reality-construct of the alpha-trophy-looting cultural faction is a form of insanity, far more lethal than any kind of skeptical philosophy or existential uncertainty.

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

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking

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Culture Consciousness

In the science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye, from 1974, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the imagined system of space travel involves something like ‘worm holes’ which are shortcuts between fixed points at widely distant areas of galactic space. One especially important worm hole has an opening so close to the surface of a star that any ship emerging from the hole without appropriate shielding is immediately destroyed. Considering this as an analogy, individual intelligences arrive into cultural interconnectedness in a similar way, and almost literally soak up with their mother’s milk a culture shaped by a hostile ideology of alpha-trophy-looting design.

Given the enormous joys, pleasures, and advantages for us monads in sharing intelligence by forming attachments (as described in posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture and in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness), it is inevitable that structures of artifacts, imitated gestures, and ways of living are going to accumulate rapidly in clusters of people. Soon every infant arrives into a situation of vital support already richly elaborated by a culture made from the creative projections of past generations, most of those projections now alienated from their ad hoc, accidental, and personally inventive origins, and consequently now stipulated as sacred traditions divinely pre-ordained or as necessities of nature.

Every child monad (that is, an original locus of creativity and freedom) is engulfed on arrival by brute nature through embodiment, but every child is also engulfed by the culture carried in the bearings of the caregiving individuals who nurture and share awareness with him or her and who depict “the way we live” by carrying on their lives within the child’s sensitivities. The long hours of first-language-nurture face and voice time with mother, the bonding and shared awareness from that gesture-imitation play, accumulate for an eternity (the passing of time speeds up dramatically with increasing age) before the child begins to use his or her own body to move about and explore the cost-benefit shape of nature. So interconnectedness and some culture come before the full-bodied encounter with nature.

(The Mote in God’s Eye, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Published by: Pocket Books, Mass Market Paperback: 592 pages, ISBN-10: 0671741926, ISBN-13: 978-0671741921.)

Law as a Microcosm of Culture and History

Sovereign law is connected by history to two deeply suspect social phenomena, namely religious cults, especially those with written teachings of a prophet or divine avatar, and crime families which exercise control by force over the population of a certain turf or territory. (By far most human societies prior to modern democracies have been brutal dictatorial empires controlled by some variant of a crime family in partnership with religious cults.) Both religious cults and crime families are parasitic on self-subsistent groups of families carrying within themselves a cultural heritage of surviving and raising children within the indifferent environment on the surface of planet Earth. So, religious cults, crime families, and self-subsistent first-language-nurture collectives are three fundamental engines of culture and history.

A religious focus on divinely inspired writings tends to interpret those writings as containing divine commands (super-parental commands), an original paradigm of law. The three Abrahamic religions all exemplify how cultures, organizations, and traditions of scholarly study, writing, and ongoing interpretation of holy books grow into a bridge between refined religious orthodoxy and the control of general communal behaviour by pervasively applicable laws. Related to that, law historically exemplifies the mystique of written language. Words were once widely thought to be the mechanism of divine creation and of divine action in general (Logos). The rule of law is the rule of words engraved in a medium which points toward eternity, a work of cultured craft achieving a sublime unification of ethereal words with an elemental and enduring material. Such engraved figures or characters were suspected of sharing in the power of charms and talismans.

Another, closely related, paradigm of compulsory (parental) command is the decree of the effective local warlord, chief of the most powerful crime family. Such organizations reach a point of wanting to regularize, institutionalize, and legitimize their control over a population by supplementing the personal whims of the alpha-chief with enduring public lists of decrees to form an orderly and predictable framework of expectation and performance in the relationship between parasitic crime family and host population, and even impose their ideas of order within the primordial subsistence collective which is the effective grounding of the whole social arrangement.

Such is the origin of law. The organizations of the religious source and the crime family source tend to co-operate and form a partnership to mutually strengthen one another and share in enjoying the “surplus” produced by the primordial collectives under their mutual control. All along the primordial collectives carry on with their focus on raising children.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by: Anchor (October 11, 1977), Paperback: 340 pages, ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. (Plagues and Peoples specifically identifies aristocracies as parasitic plagues. See pp. 7-13.)

Infant Monads

That brief overview of the origins of law in human culture is a portrait in miniature of the universal history of culture. From time immemorial, we monads arrive as infants into a culture in which the most extreme and grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, in the form of crime family ideology, has over-asserted itself to the detriment of the whole system but especially to the detriment of the first-language-nurture segment of the social system. The fundamental parental duality, alpha-trophy-looting father versus first-language-nurture mother, projects itself onto the universal politics of human cultures. Human culture is so dominated by the crime-family caricature of masculinity that the natural influence and cultural expression of the common feminine focuses is disastrously suppressed. There is almost a sense of biological determinism to this problem as an obstacle to be encountered by any interconnectedness of monads which is embodied and gendered on the human model. Societies which have the sense to re-balance to give the feminine first-language-nurture segment equal recognition and cultural expression get to survive and advance. Societies that get stuck in masculine over-assertion reach a point of effective self-destruction.

Energy Control and Hard-Boy Gangs

Freedom in the world of physics is largely a matter of controlling the movement and application of energy, from sources as various as (but not limited to) food, the muscles of animals, flowing water, coal, and oil. Disputes and rivalries over control of energy on a large scale have been dominated by gangs of hard boys. The ordinary individual has little-to-no leverage against those gangs, and no one should have their day-to-day happiness depend on fixing the hard-boy problem. People equipped to tackle that problem directly become the next dynasty of gang-boys. Strategically, that is why revolutions don’t work, but reformations sometimes do. Significant progressive change in economics, politics, and culture was accomplished from small beginnings around the arrival of text printing technology in the middle of the fifteenth century, culminating during the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven by ideas of individual dignity and empowerment from literacy and philosophical ideas of human rationality. Some, but not all, of that has been blunted or rolled back, and the hard-boy regressive forces are still operating.

To this day, even in the most modern and scientifically advanced nations, the ethos and ideology of the class of people which owns and controls capital, the leadership or control class, is a tweaked version of crime family ideology. The core ethos of the crime-family faction is monopoly, full-spectrum dominance by violence and the elimination of potential competition and alternative visions, the alpha-trophy-looting ethos. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than suppress alternative and dissident voices, especially the values expressed in the segment of society devoted to nurturing children and engaging children in the learning of their first language. The result of the dominance of the hard-boy faction is a narrow-spectrum conception of what is possible, resulting in futile political discourse within nominally advanced and democratic political entities, all due to factional control by an ethos dedicated to celebrating inequality as such, to celebrating the dominant faction’s omnipotence and transcendent immunity (a mockery of authentic transcendence).

Transition to Modernity, the Schematic Version

Cast of characters: 1) rural-military crime families, 2) urban-commercial-financial crime families. The post-Roman hegemony of 1) in Europe was eventually followed by the rise and hegemony of 2), but 2) continued to use the mechanisms of social control employed by 1), which were mainly the strict organization of war and religion. In addition, 2) added some of their own techniques such as alienation from land and total dependence on markets, debt, employment for wages, and new commercial narratives delivered outside churches via novel mechanisms of communication.

The controlling faction is more stealthy now than in historical periods when the sovereignty of the most powerful crime families, aristocracy and monarchy, was overt. The new crime family oligarchy is far less open in its economic and political control, masked by the trappings of democracy. Also, a more elaborate legitimizing ideology has penetrated the worldview of all classes through the agency of mass media, commercial advertising, glorification of the Olympic Games and professional sport, and the vilification and dehumanization of dissident or alternative political visions. Mass media have become incomparably more penetrating into individual consciousness, and the predominance of messages carried, not only in explicit sales promotion, is controlled by concentrated media ownership. The educational and research systems are similarly controlled by the necessity of direct funding from private or investor/ donor controlled organizations, which also arrange behind the scenes for restrictions on public funding of education.

Leadership Incompetence

The current twin crises in global economy and in geopolitical conflict clearly establish the incompetence of the control faction. The economic/ financial crisis blossomed in 2007-08 after decades of incompetent public policy, and the geopolitical conflict might be said to have blossomed after 2001, but really goes to the core of American ambitions boosted in the wake of WWII and again after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Keep in mind that, in accordance with the theory proclaimed by the leadership class, the leadership structure is a meritocracy, so those with the most power, influence, and effect are the most talented leaders, the best of the best. It cannot be contested, then, that the ongoing crises just mentioned reveal the incompetence of the best of the leadership class.

Neither the economic crisis nor the geopolitical crisis have been brought into being by the desires and efforts of the common majority of people in any country or from any ethnic cultural tradition. Both the economic crisis and the geopolitical crises are manifestations of a general cultural problem, namely the excessive power and influence of groups expressing a particular ethos, an ethos hatched in the history of crime families, and now faced with a global situation beyond its competence.

The incompetence of the leadership class is firmly rooted in the basic value system they champion and express, namely the crime-family derived alpha-trophy-looting worldview. The heart of that worldview is revealed in academic economic theory and social philosophy, in which self-interest and egoism are advanced as the universal human motivating forces. The point that is proved by the philosophical emphasis on egoism and atomic self-interest, in combination with the common experience of mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that academic emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is regarded with contempt and so largely unknown by the egoist/ self-interest faction. The incompetence of the leadership class is an inevitable expression of the narrowness of its competitive egoistic culture.

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

Monadology

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Idea of Monads from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was ended by a set of treaties, collectively called The Peace of Westphalia, achieved when Leibniz was two years old. In the course of that war, Leibniz’ native Germany had been devastated and significantly reduced in population by the presence, passage, and battles of numerous marauding field armies. Leibniz, like Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in France a generation earlier, was spotted as gifted as a child. Both were educated to be lawyers, but left enduring legacies as geniuses in mathematics and philosophy. Like Descartes, Leibniz was (just as Spinoza, and Kant) a lifelong bachelor. Leibniz was employed as an administrator, researcher, diplomat, and advisor by aristocratic ruling families in Germany. Although Leibniz was brought up in a Lutheran culture, he experienced scholastic/ Aristotelian (Catholic) influences at university and also shows distinctly Calvinist tendencies of thought. Leibniz dreamed of reconciling science with Christian orthodoxy, and even of arranging the reunification of Protestant sects with the organization of Catholicism to heal the schisms fragmenting Christendom, schisms which had been used as justifications for the officially commanded mass murder, pillage, and sexual assault called the Thirty Years War.

Mathematics and Philosophy

Mathematics has been one of the most powerful inspirations for philosophy, and especially for idealism and rationalism. Mathematics suggests an ideal world of perfect and eternal objects: geometric figures, numbers, axiomatic principles, functions, and operators. Mathematics belongs in a category of apparently ideal objects, but is special in supporting a set of rules, axioms, and procedures by which reasoning, calculation, and deduction can generate conclusions which must be true when the initial premises are true. The discovery of mathematics, to the ancient Greeks a realm of eternal truths somehow structured just “behind” the visible world, provided an invitation to remove the rowdy personalities of gods and spirits from the invisible transcendent world at the same time as recreating the transcendent as the proper object of rigorous thought. Mathematics suggests control of the inwardness of mental processes that forms a firm foundation for special knowledge of the objective environment.

The contribution of mathematics as an inspiration for philosophy has included serving as a model of transcendence or of transcendent reality. Mathematical systems of ideas have a certain kind of transcendence with respect to the work-a-day world. The mathematical type of transcendence does not have much to do with freedom or creativity as long as the mathematical ideas are understood as existing independently of the person thinking them, although Stoics might see such ideas as a refuge in which the rationality of personal intelligence could find a grounding from which to assert itself against disruptive episodes of emotion. Mathematical systems have the transcendence of incorporeality, perfection, and eternity, rather than the transcendence of freedom and creativity. (The transcendence of incorporeality turns up also in the meaning of “sacrifice”. To sacrifice something is to make it sacred (transcendent) by translating it from its corporeal existence into incorporeality, by burning it, for example.) The transcendence of mathematical systems is inseparable from ideality but only the passive aspect of ideality, whereas the more important transcendence is in the active agency of ideality, namely subjective intelligence.

Mathematicians, such as Leibniz, seem to hold special mathematical patterns and systems in their minds so vividly and elaborately that, within their experience, those systems have the reality of alternate worlds or even as worlds with a reality superior to the one normally perceived. When people with those experiences turn to questions about the relationship between ordinary impressions of the world and the kind of knowledge that can be justified by the strictest rationality, they often envision startling discontinuities between apparent reality and ultimate reality, as exemplified just below. That peculiarity of experience, probably shared by computer programmers and computer game architects, should not be disregarded or explained away too confidently. Although the examples of philosophical mathematicians tend to be privileged and pampered adult males, there is a certain kind of childlike innocence to their distracted engagement with the world of ordinary impressions, an innocence that has some common ground with everyone’s experience.

Monadology

Consider Leibniz’s idea of ‘monads’ as a way of conceiving individual subjectivities as separate universes, presented on this blog as the system of reality ‘transcendental humanism’. Leibniz’ idea of a ‘monad’ incorporates three previously familiar ideas: 1) Aristotle’s idea of particular substances, in which qualities inhere, 2) the grammatical (logical) subject, in which predicates inhere, and 3) everyone’s experience of personal subjectivity. The result is the monad, the ‘spiritual’ entity which is an individual person, a self-contained mind, an atomic theatre of experience. For Leibniz, monads are the entities created by God, the fundamental substances that make up the world. However, monads are not like the atoms of modern science that move about and transform, by electromagnetic bonding, into compounds with different characteristics. The Leibnizian monad cannot be said to move or to combine with others. It occupies a place without taking up space, in a way possibly similar to Platonic Ideas, whatever that may be. On the model of Aristotelian substances, each monad is unique, separate, and independent; but also, as “windowless”, completely closed to anything beyond itself. Each monad is a sort of absolute atom or separate universe, completely self-sufficient and independent of every other, and yet “mirroring” every other monad internally. For Leibniz, monads are reality, the metaphysical Being behind ordinary appearances of things in the world, and yet monads have no role in causing the appearances of our familiar world. All experiences of any monad (including your experiences and my experiences) are completely internal to the monad and completely pre-programmed by God, but programmed in such a way that the experiences are a “mirroring” of what is going on with the other monads.

For Leibniz, God, in his work of creation, calculated an exquisite balance between the principle of plenitude and the principle of simplicity to derive the best of all possible worlds, completely determined in every detail from the instant of creation. Inspired by the theory of ‘occasionalism’ proposed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), Leibniz accepted that physical cause-effect was a false impression from taking appearances too uncritically at face value. (David Hume (1711-76) was later to repeat that familiar denial of efficacy in cause-effect interactions, merely altering outright denial into skepticism.) On Leibniz’ view, every particle (Aristotelian substance) of the extended world was individually pre-programmed with all changes and movements it would ever have, and the whole set of those particles were coordinated in advance so as to appear as if chains of cause and effect were running their course. For Leibniz, “thought” in some sense is a fundamental feature of every particle or monad. Thought has no causal force, but rather is “reflective” of the ambient universe. That reflection of the world in the thought of every monad does not derive from contact or mutual sensitivity between particles. Leibniz’s monads must be entirely inward because they are windowless. The reflection of the world in thought is just pre-established in each mind by God the creator. The rest of the world cannot penetrate monads in any way. The only condition that prevents them from being truly separate universes or separate worlds is that they are each part of God’s work of creation, and in that sense all are coordinated in a higher-order universal Being.

Individuals are distinct, on Leibniz’s view, as isolated monads, but they have no power or freedom since their whole course of specific experiences is pre-ordained by God. The crucial dualism in the thought of Leibniz is between God and His distinctly lower creation. Leibniz’ vision did preserve the rationalist unity of language, thought, and (non-human) nature as co-ordinated features of God’s creation. Hume later presented, without appealing to the agency of God, another version of that same Calvinistic picture of the powerless isolation of every individual.

The discontinuity between Leibniz’ vision of metaphysical reality (the monads) and ordinary appearances was one of the most important inspirations for the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant was convinced by Leibniz and Hume on the point of individuals being very nearly “windowless monads”, but he could not accept the predetermined experience and the predetermined harmony imagined by Leibniz, nor could he accept Hume’s global skepticism. Kant’s transcendental idealism was an effort to transport individual freedom (transcendence) from the legacy of Stoicism (revived by Luther) into the mental scheme of modernity, to preserve the sense of transcendence and in doing so save modernity from descent into abject bourgeois philistinism. In that he was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). Kant followed up Leibniz by concluding that the real world (noumena) was so different from the apparent world (phenomena) that 1) most of what we experience as “appearances” is contributed by our own nature as entities of intelligence, and 2) it is simply impossible to say anything meaningful about the noumenal Being behind appearances.

The metaphysical system of monads conceived by Leibniz relies on the foundation of the Christian God, exercising an absolute power of absolute rationality, and that has to be recognized as an untenable fantasy. Reasons for rejecting any idea of disembodied intelligence have been presented in previous postings, such as posting 32, May 17, 2012, Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular, and posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism. However, what Leibniz got right was the internal uniqueness of each subjectivity, along with a high degree of internal self-sufficiency to the entity of an individual intelligence. Leibniz’ monads illustrate the extreme discontinuity between the internality of experience and anything beyond itself, the discontinuity between a sensed placement or situation, as experienced internally (subjectively) by a person, and the actuality of nature. Recall that each intelligence is a self-constructed orientation (a bearing) within a grid of non-actuality consisting of accumulated and integrated memories, more or less desperate hopes and fears, mutually exclusive imagined possibilities, judgments of probabilities, and intentions, for example, none of which exists in the brute actuality of ambient nature. The internality of any particular intelligence has very little immediate congruity or continuity with any actuality beyond itself.

Major renovations are required to make Leibniz’ monads suitable for transcendental humanism. First, the idea of complete pre-determination by a personified and disembodied super-parent has to be removed. However, if God is not the source of an individual’s experiences, then some other account must be provided for those experiences. In other words, without God’s (or some other source’s) total pre-programming, the monads can’t be windowless and still have anything like ordinary experience. Kant removed a need for God’s agency in supplying experience by finding two replacement sources, an internal subjective source which he called “concepts” (a manifestation of personal intelligence), and an external source which he called “intuitions” (of phenomena). Departing from the particulars of Kant’s replacements, another way of describing that would be as an inward force of questioning intelligence encountering and making sense of the hard ground of nature. In spite of the discontinuity between their sense of the world and the brute actuality of the world, monads have, from their embodied activities, some accumulated familiarity with, or knowledge of, a world around them. In transcendental humanism the monads are not windowless, but rather have the elaborate windows of active and sensitive embodiment through which to accumulate experience of opening within a single world of nature and cultures, which multitudes of monads all share, a world within which each monad finds himself or herself, finds other monads, and constructs interactions and interconnections with them. Monads have both windows and effective force in creating their own experience.

Homage

The impressions of historical persons and ideas presented in this posting were informed at various stages of their development by the following works, which I salute and celebrate as inspirations, as well as sources of pleasure and excitement. Nobody could share my experience of reading these books and then agree with the proposition that all life is suffering. Faults in any of these postings are entirely my own.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason, written by: Steven Nadler, Published by: Princeton University Press (Mar 15 2010), Paperback: 320 pages, ISBN-10: 0691145318, ISBN-13: 978-0691145310.
(This is an engagingly written and wonderfully clear presentation of philosophical issues in Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Spinoza. It places these persons and issues very vividly in Paris during the 1670’s along with following developments.)

The Courtier And The Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, written by Matthew Stewart, Published by: WW Norton (Dec 27 2005), Hardcover: 320 pages, ISBN: 0393058980.
(The pleasure of reading this re-excited my interest in the history of philosophy after a lull. Stewart accomplishes the difficult feat of placing philosophical thinking within its cultural and historical setting in such a way as to recreate its drama and excitement for specific individuals and for the course of history, and making it a really good read. It inspired me to read the book listed next.)

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by: Oxford University Press (July 2002), Paperback: 832 pages, ISBN: 0199254567.
(I read this during the spring of 2006, and found it deeply absorbing. It was packed with information I did not know and it remained readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things. It covers a fascinating period that has been a cultural blind spot for a long time.)

My impressions of Kant have benefited from my reading these:

Introduction to German Philosophy : From Kant to Habermas, written by Andrew Bowie, Published by: Polity Press (Oct 1, 2003), Paperback: 304 pages, ISBN: 0745625711.
(This is another one of those accessible presentations of vast research and insight. It shows modern philosophy as entirely bound up with the social transfiguration from Christendom/Old Regime to Modernity.)

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (April 1, 2001); Paperback: 192 pages, ISBN-10: 0691086621, ( ISBN-13: 978-0691086620).

German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, written by Terry Pinkard, Published by: Cambridge University Press (September 16, 2002), Paperback: 392 pages, ISBN-10: 0521663814, ISBN-13: 978-0521663816.

The following books informed my overview of the history of philosophy.

A History of Philosophy (Book One: Vol. I – Greece & Rome; Vol. II – Augustine to Scotus; Vol. III -Ockham to Suarez), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 479 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230311, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230315).

A History of Philosophy (Book Two: Volume IV – Descartes to Leibniz; Volume V – Hobbes to Hume; Volume VI – Wolff to Kant), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 509 pages, ISBN-10: 038523032X, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230322).

A History of Philosophy: Book Three (Volume VII, Fichte to Nietzsche, Volume VIII, Bentham to Russell, Volume IX, Maine De Biran to Sartre), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 480 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230338, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230339).

History of Philosophy (Historia de la Filosofia), written by Julian Marias, translated from Spanish to English by Stanley Appelbaum and Clarence C. Strowbridge, Published by: Dover Publications; 22nd edition (June 1, 1967), Paperback: 505 pages, ISBN-10: 0486217396, ISBN-13: 978-0486217390.

A History of Western Philosophy, written by Bertrand Russell, Published by Routledge; New edition (2000), Paperback: 848 pages, ISBN-10: 0415228549, ISBN-13: 978-0415228541. (Russell claims special expertise on Leibniz.)

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), Paperback: 824 pages, ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

As a thoughtful overview of the history of philosophy set within a beautifully atmospheric story of mystery and discovery, there is this gift from Norway:

Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, written by Jostein Gaarder, translated from Norwegian to English by Paulette Moller (copyright 1994), Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (ISBN-10: 0374530718, ISBN-13: 978-0374530716).
(Gaarder credits the Roman author Cicero (106-43 B.C.) with forming the concept “humanism”, “a view of life that has the individual as its central focus.”)

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