Metaphysics Matters

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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far horizons, human dignity, individual rights, pragmatic metaphysics, social pragmatism, spiritual life, thinking

Posting 101

Tags: spiritual life, thinking, pragmatic metaphysics, social pragmatism, far horizons, individual rights, human dignity

The mental condition of social pragmatism is devotion to personally fitting into the existing economic and social systems you find in the surroundings, choosing among the incentives and rewards to join arrangements that are already “just there”. It is a very concrete and practical focus. However, in the shadows all around such social pragmatism is a certain kind of metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Far Horizons. It is the tendency to scan the farthest horizons of thought for a universal caring with a cosmic plan such that things happen for a reason, including total moral ledger-keeping in preparation for justice in an ultimate reckoning, and the layering of all Being as a great hierarchical stack or food-chain with messages coded in by which the universal caring reveals itself to the most worthy. In the metaphysics of far horizons the universal caring is a supernatural-provider to fear, and yet be grateful to and for. The provider shares the spirituality of caring with human beings but in us the power is flawed, tainted, ineffectual, and so we are low on the food-chain of Being, and, in our awareness of being thus flawed and chained low, we accept being controlled by unremitting moral ledger-keeping for that ultimate day of reckoning.

Part of that package of ideas is a general reverence for, and the presumption of superiority and legitimacy in, high abstractions like sovereignty, tradition, culture, institutions of authority, and civilization, all supposed to be founded on the cosmic plan as recognized by geniuses of the past. However, this metaphysics of the human situation within socially pragmatic ideology is howlingly ill founded, and metaphysics matters. Immersion in a cult of misconceived metaphysics is not a charming, quaint, or harmless tradition or legacy, and our cultural traditions harbour within them denials and oppressions of individual creative power, expressed in a negative attitude about thinking itself. In supporting a presumption of legitimate superiority in sovereignty, tradition, culture, and civilization, and all the lesser authorities licensed by the high ones, the metaphysics of far horizons discourages and limits original thinking in the present and literally issues a license to kill to agents of violent sub-cultures that are very imperfectly understood by the pragmatic public. The expectation and presumption of agency at the level of far horizons specifically denigrates and obscures the spiritual power of personal agency and creativity in everyone, indeed placing it in a blind spot. It is doubtful that there ever was an appropriate appreciation of the individuality of spirituality, one that was institutionalized and supported by a community culture. Humanity is on a spiritual journey to somewhere entirely new, and philosophical thinking is a motor for that journey.

Social pragmatism places emphasis on the concrete and practical, but with a justification like this: since no one knows or can know the truth of metaphysical matters, since there is no way to discover a coherent alternative, the safest and rationally pragmatic thing to do is to accept some version of the traditional metaphysics of far horizons on faith, faith in the long enduring wisdom of tradition and collective genius. However, that claim is profoundly false. You don’t have to take anything on faith, or decode cryptic messages in events, because you can turn your curiosity, your questioning attention, to personally getting from one moment to the next to find the spirituality of your own thinking. Such phenomenological questioning is precisely philosophical. To live a spiritual life is to be aware of the thoroughness of spirituality in the temporal depth from which you perceive and conceive the world, out of which you live, and the embodied self-possession of that personal spirituality. Philosophical thinking is a way of being spiritual and of living a spiritual life without all the bogus metaphysics of far horizons. Transcendence and spirituality do not cease to exist without the far horizons, but they are very different: local, multiple, and horizontal as opposed to hierarchical. Political consequences arise from having negated the presumption of legitimacy in high abstractions like tradition, sovereignty, culture, and civilization.

The spirituality of thinking is not difficult to describe. The portal is time. Past and future simply do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. The only current existence of past and future is as non-actuality, spiritually interior to individual people as a personal force of bearing or directionality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are always some abstraction from the non-actuality of subjective orientation, of a person’s directionality in teleological time, and so essentially an abstraction from the immateriality of time as a subjective construct. Any removal from tangible materiality is some kind of invocation, projection, or allegory of the non-actuality of subjective interiority which is extraordinary in that it evades particularity without ceasing to exist! It exists precisely by remaining always unfinished, indefinite, in self-creative flight.

Consistent with the general tendency to scan far horizons for the cosmic plan, philosophy itself has left the impression of being speculations on some transcendence so remote that its only possible interest could be for mindful inactivity, passive contemplation or meditation, removing the personal bit of supposedly flawed human nature from its participation in the inevitable strife, anxiety, panic, and ephemerality of ordinary life, to rest for a while in ideality, the idea of eternity, and perhaps to ‘elevate’ your bit of human nature in doing so. Platonic and Hegelian metaphysics fit that impression very well, and the question of transcendence is certainly central to philosophizing from a broad historical sweep. The view that philosophy is mindful inactivity goes with a Platonic view of eternal forms, and it made sense in ancient times as a way of achieving a kind of freedom from the lower regions of human nature which were considered to be irredeemably bestial. However, such speculation on the most remote transcendence is a philosophical dead end, a false trail, although the question of transcendence as such is not. In that light, philosophy can be described as arranging acquaintance with transcendence in the most local and immediate personal activity.

Philosophy is not an endless or shapeless journey. The destination is a raw encounter with transcendent spirituality, the personal spirituality of thinking here and now, departing from the distortions of orientation and perception drilled into us in early life, all grounded in the Metaphysics of Far Horizons. The philosophical purpose of thinking, of a critique of orientation within a culturally provided conception of reality, is to experience the personal transcendence of spirituality directly, rather than the more typical academic plodding through intellectual puzzles looking for a theoretical “way forward” within social pragmatism. An academic life is focused on ideality without being a spiritual life because there is no recognition of the transcendent creativity of individual thinking. The purpose of philosophy as a gateway to spirituality is not to relieve the guilty or heal the sick, but to enable everyone to value personal spirituality appropriately, as the whole reality of spirituality, distinct from concepts of remote spirituality typical of cultural communities.

What is a Spiritual Life?

So, this philosophical thinking is off-grid by completely negating the tendency to scan the metaphysical horizon for a cosmic plan. Having made the raw encounter with transcendent spirituality at the most personal and immediate level, with bogus metaphysics all forgotten, including the human flaw and the cosmic chain, the task of thinking changes. You have left behind a world that was fundamentally formed and furnished with (Lego blocks) particular instances of ideal forms, and entered one that is incomplete and still being created at every moment, locally by your creative interventions. Here, time is the incompleteness of the world as well as of embodied intelligences, both being created, or self-creating, at every moment. Such is the setting of a spiritual life. In doing that, you have opened up a space of disjunction, of discordance, between your state of orientation and that of anyone still immersed in the far horizons and concrete grid-ways of economic incentives and rewards. So, one immediate project becomes to devise communications to clarify that disjunction and enable a broader sharing of the new orientation. A great deal of philosophical writing falls into that category, which accounts for some of the frequent difficulties of making sense of it. Language is a public transit system. The orientation of spirituality goes far beyond language, as geography goes beyond the streetcar tracks. You are now beyond the tracks and so in a position to help construct a public portal from there to here. Reading and interpreting the archive of recognized philosophical writing is one way to approach that project.

Empathy

Withdrawing from the conceptual system of social pragmatism includes negating the tags of individual identity derived from ambient culture. When you strip away from all personal definition everything except bedrock creative spirituality (and you can), you escape the prejudicial tags used within cultures to mark out the pageantry of superiority and inferiority, tags such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, abled-ness, body-shape, size, strength, wealth, extroversion, and so on. Those tags are cultivated specifically to obstruct universal empathy derived from recognition of profound spiritual equality. This is another iteration of the Enlightenment assertion of universal human dignity at the level of the individual, sometimes expressed formally as individual rights.

What’s Spiritual about Thinking?

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Enlightenment, Equality, humanism, philosophy, religion, science, social pragmatism, spirituality, thinking, time metaphysics, transcendence

Posting 100

Tags: philosophy, humanism, spirituality, transcendence, thinking, time metaphysics, social pragmatism, religion, science, equality, enlightenment

An Unheralded Rivalry

There is a long history of rivalry between alternative conceptions of human spirituality, which may come as a surprise to anyone who takes for granted that religion owns the patents on spirituality. From ancient times philosophy was an alternative discourse of spirituality that tended toward emphasizing the primacy of the embodied individual, the thinker of questions. Humanist rationalism was (and can be) a guide to transcendent spirituality in startling contrast to religious conceptions. Perhaps especially as conceived by Epicureans, it was a personal, and so bottom-up spirituality, recognizing spirituality as an individual power.

In this age of science, spirituality is an elephant in the room. Most scientists as individuals have to put up with a certain discourse of spirituality because it is deeply entangled with conceptions of respectability, of morality and conventional respect for law and the social order, involving a degree of peer pressure to practice some antique religion as a personal declaration of social orthodoxy, of pragmatic support for the social contract. Spirituality is supposed to be the heart of the antique religions, but any discourse of spirituality is strictly incompatible with science. (There are large cash prizes on offer for people who help reduce this awkwardness by making plausible suggestions for reconciling science and religion.) Personal spirituality is identified as a sense of wonder and connection with the awesome scale of the cosmos, somehow connected to moral debt, guilt, and moral sentiment, and is commonly thought of as a portal to acquaintance with higher reality, deity, the awesomely sacred, first and divine things, at least to the extent that such acquaintance is possible for us flawed and meagre humans. Perhaps it is surprising that the discourse of spirituality can be separated from its entanglement with grand scale divinity, morality, law, and social order, without disappearing, but it can be, even though for both science and the great antique religions, such a metaphysics is inconceivable.

What is Thinking?

The fundamental question of the relevant philosophy here is “What is thinking?” from an intuition that personal thinking operations are the whole reality of spirituality. Such philosophy is an exploration of the spirituality of thinking, both in getting from moment to moment in life and in questioning assumptions that pave the familiar thought-paths of socially pragmatic life and expectation. The most ordinary orientation or bearing from this moment to the next is a thinking operation. It is a spiritual creation of freedom through the personal construction of a temporal path into a mutable future of possibilities and increasingly remote probabilities that have no actual existence as such. Past and future do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. They exist only, but emphatically, within the orientation of individual persons. There is an ongoing accumulation of complexity in a person’s bearing or vector of orientation, as curiosity, questioning, and inspiration engage and grapple with nature, culture, and other intelligences. There is always the inward quest to sustain a life, holding and modifying a bearing of flight in building that life. Re-orienting toward the next moment is done, therefore, with reference to the whole past of an embodied life, which does not exist in the actuality of nature, and so with reference to much more than outward markers.

The way-of-being of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself (evading thingness), to project self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and creative freedom. What time as a personal past and future shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of the spiritual is precisely the same as the immateriality of time in lessons learned, aspirations, and anticipations. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with, intervening in, brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images or symbols somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

So what is Spiritual about Thinking? Is it Transcendent enough?

The essential identity of everyone as an individual is an active process of creative orientation, a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality, as just described, intervening continuously in brute actuality as a particular embodiment. The non-actuality of the particular temporal depth in which any individual is oriented, what has often been called inwardness or interiority, grounds the meaning of spirituality here, but there is much more. The crucial spiritual reality is the freedom-within-an-unfinished-world which is created by that play of non-actuality, and the personally fulfilling creative power it manifests. So, these features, non-actuality, creative power creating a life, freedom, and mutability within an otherwise determined and determinate nature, cash out as transcendent spirituality. Even though this spirituality is separated from entanglements with grand scale divinity, and divinely dictated morality, law, guilt, and social order, the transcendence does not disappear.

Elemental Embodiment and Spirituality

In our spirituality we have: the subjective non-actualities of anticipation, aspiration, and evaluation, modelling futurity as an openness; a personal force of aspirational directionality, bearing, or ever-rebuilding orientation; the freedom of newness and incompleteness; empathic recognition of separate spiritual beings and a resulting sociability. We have the gusher of questions, curiosity, impulses to mark the environment and construct interconnections with others.

In the sociability of spirituality we have: empathy, recognition of the opportunity to multiply the openness of spirituality by co-operative bonding, community, conversation, the comfort of companionship and sharing.

In our experience of elemental embodiment we have: the personal identity of individual shape and placement; mobility, mobilization and shaping of other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effortful and effective work.

Thinking Off-Grid: Leaving the Metaphysics of Social Pragmatism

What normally stands in the way of discovering this reality of spirituality in personal thinking operations is a certain culturally supplied roadmap of thinking, a trained orientation into social pragmatism, which effectively prevents us from questioning much of anything. Social pragmatism, into which every child is trained in school, is a roadmap of thinking, packaged in a judgment from crypto-metaphysics that you, as an individual, are incapable of thinking critically about the justifications or origins of social authority because you are flawed by unworthy intentions, and also low on nature’s food chain due to inherently limited competence. (“Who do you think you are?”) At the boundary of the socially pragmatic roadmap of thinking is the warning: “Here be Dragons”. The message is that questioning the framework of social authority is pure futility because there is no coherent alternative to arrangements as you find them, so that nothing can come of such thinking but an abyss of nihilism and despair. Part of social pragmatism is the assertion that “the good” is conferred entirely by the social arrangements of the status quo: you merit the amount of goods (including freedom) you win in competitions within the economic system, and so no good can come of thinking critically about the justifications of social and cultural authority. With that context, social pragmatism is not only a roadmap of thinking, but also a restricting conception of thinking itself as pragmatic logic, collecting data for solving the menu of problems intrinsic to the place you occupy on the economic food chain. However, from the initial condition of social pragmatism, there are experiences which occasion the discovery of the creative thinking involved with re-conceptualization, questioning fundamental assumptions, a kind of thinking more often identified as philosophical. A person goes from ordinary thinking within a socially pragmatic framework, designing and executing interventions into social actuality, to questioning the fundamental metaphysics of the framework itself. Somehow a line is crossed, the line formed by assumptions of not being competent to think and of belonging at a certain place on the hierarchical food chain. Somehow the metaphysics of inherent human flaw and inevitable cosmic chain becomes questionable and inoperative. This metaphysics of being flawed and chained is left behind and there is a crossing out into a condition of thinking which is not even supposed to be there, where the metaphysics of flaw and chain is completely absent, but where discovering creative freedom in the personal spirituality of thinking refutes entirely the prediction of nihilism and incoherence. The whole reality of spirituality and metaphysics is in this thinking. There is a fountain of good here, the spontaneous creation from within of curiosity, questioning, and inspiration, the gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others.

Oddly then, the only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of subjective embodiment. The non-particularity of the thinking self is the non-particularity of freedom. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body.

Notes

Thinking as creative re-conceptualization was described in two previous postings:

97, July 19, 2016, What is Thinking?

98, August 17, 2016, Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Monthly Archives: December 2016