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Monthly Archives: January 2018

Ethics in the Philosophy Project

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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agency, ancient philosophy, divinity, eternity, ethics, freedom, imperturbability, knowledge, time, transcendence

Posting 122, word count: 1,483.

The historical thinking project of philosophy was the cultivation of an alignment between a personal spirituality (orientation, bearing, poise, or condition of mind) and the world at large in its most profound being, thought as a transcendence which confers meaning on the world. This relational duality of focus was fundamental, and defines the philosophical origin of ethics. Ancient Greek philosophers were so impressed by mathematical abstractions such as numbers and geometrical axioms that they conceived a transcendence of universal and timeless “truths”, eternal necessities which would be the source of absolute knowledge. They elevated the dignity of such abstractions very far above particular objects and common subjectivity, placing them at a commanding height atop a hierarchy clearly modelled on the patriarchal and military society of their time. Timeless abstractions at the top of the hierarchy set up an opposition with the ordinary landscape of changeable material objects at the bottom. In stark contrast to the supposedly incorruptible immateriality (and so eternity) of ideal abstractions, the material particulars of common experience were considered unstable, ephemeral, in an endless state of either growth or decay, always transforming into something else, and so useless as a source of knowledge. Philosophers were obsessed with rising above the turmoil of ephemerality in which crowds of the poorest and least educated humans construct eventful lives, and so time itself was relegated to the category of unreality, illusion, metaphysical nothingness, as distinct from ideal Being. Plato’s Ideal Forms illustrate the importance of eternity in ancient thinking. In that classical metaphysical scenario, certain features of concrete objects were cherry-picked and bundled with features of mental abstractions to construct what seemed the best of worlds, a world that would be transcendent over common things as a patriarchal ruler is transcendent over his people. Concrete objects supplied distinctness of image and outline, of form and quality, and abstraction supplied ideal universality and immateriality conceived as a transcendent purity of being, beyond corruption or extinction, a refined and magical state invoking the mysterious existence of ghosts and divinity, radiant with the glamour and mystique of power, status, and authority.

Since the mental efforts of an individual do not change the world at large in its most profound being, the mental effort of philosophy was to decide on and achieve the personal bearing that best expresses the most profound being of a person in relation to the world. Issues and questions of spiritual bearing were the elements of ethics: the best way to live. For a long time in the ancient world, the personal condition to be achieved was conceived as imperturbability. The charge is sometimes made against ethics in ancient philosophy that it is an expression of the self-absorption of the thinking person, apparently concerned only with personal happiness. However, context is crucial here. Stoics and Epicureans, for example, each in their way, considered events in the world to be predetermined by eternal necessities: Stoics by Logos (everything happens for a Logos), Epicureans by atoms falling in the void. The Epicurean conception of a “swerve” which enables human freedom is pretty much limited to an interior mental freedom, like the Stoic freedom to assent to fate, or not. In relation to an almost completely predetermined world, the diligently thoughtful poise to cultivate was identified as a kind of spiritual invulnerability.

In an ultimately predetermined world, change, and so time, is an illusion, a triviality when put against the perspective of eternity, which was thought of as what the consciousness of gods (or the providential Logos) would be. Philosophical thinking (love of wisdom) was a way to live a human life most like the life of gods by achieving that ethical poise at the core of the project. Seen in that light, an ethical life was cultivation of a personal alignment with transcendence as it was conceived in that era. The framework for transcendence was the inferior reality of change and time, as experienced in ordinary events and activities, and the ultimate reality of the perspective of eternity. Within that conception of the philosophical thinking project, metaphysics, understood as the identification of transcendence, was the indispensable guide for ethics. The personal aspiration to achieve imperturbability followed from what was identified as transcendent, namely eternity, or in other words, ethics emerged directly from metaphysics.

We people of modernity no longer find eternity convincing as a transcendence that confers meaning on the world. Except for Epicureans (whose transcendence was arguably individual rationality), the ancients thought that the high eternal abstractions were alive, sensitive and teleological in some important sense, mothership senior intelligences. For Aristotle, it was nested heavenly spheres in motion around the Earth that were such intelligences. It was specifically the aliveness of those remote intelligences that seemed to confer meaning on the world and the lives of individuals. It gave the remote transcendence creative purpose and power, and aligning a personal bearing with that transcendence expressed the sense of a kinship or commonality between the spirituality of the individual and a sovereign aliveness. The gradual accumulation of a more scientific view of the world has made those ways of thinking seem bizarre. Since we no longer accept the idea of a cosmos that is personified as a whole or on a grand scale, it strikes us that in the perspective of eternity there is just nothing but frozen rigidity, nothing happening, no life and so no fountain of meaning. However, just as in the ancient conceptual systems, it still is life which confers meaning on the world: sensitivity, consciousness, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity, for inventive construction, for freedom. It’s the creative freedom of intelligence that is transcendent, now as then. There is no freedom in eternity because there is no time in eternity, and so the ancient idea of a sovereign aliveness at the far cosmic horizons, the consciousness of gods, doesn’t make sense. The idea of freedom arises from a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which novelty can be projected deliberately. Since we no longer accept the plausibility of disembodied consciousness and caring, what confers meaning on the world now is the agency and creative freedom of ordinary embodied individuals.

Identification of transcendence has been largely banished from respectability by scientific materialism, but ethics makes no sense without freedom, and freedom is transcendent in relation to an inertial and entropic nature. Ethics is a framework of orientation for free agents acting through time. If we have not been convinced that identification of transcendence is illegitimate, or that transcendence is properly identified in a patriarchal father God or some other personification of the cosmos at large, nor yet in the eternal Being that some have conceived at the far horizons of things, then we might find life yet in the conception of philosophy as an alignment of personal bearing, way of life, with a more modest transcendence. The obvious approach is to change the direction of the gaze, and so to stop gazing outward for transcendence. The focus instead is on looking itself, not on what is seen but on seeing. There is no consciousness, looking or seeing, without a transcendent personal spirituality, a specific questioning representing the interpretive sum of a personal no-longer, poised as a context through which to read what the body senses in making what is not-yet. Seeing is the application of such context, a context-mediated moment of interpretation. Time in which there is past and future is clearly spiritual, pure ideality, because past and future are perfectly non-actual. Only consciousness in its temporal, teleological flight, is transcendent, and occurs plausibly only at the level of the embodied individual.

Ethics will always be an alignment of personal action with transcendence as it is currently understood. With transcendence conceived as non-capricious, non-personal eternal necessities, ethics calls for an act of will to love your fate, cultivating personal imperturbability, sometimes understood as complete selflessness. With transcendence as the will of a capricious and all powerful deity, then the point of orientation is commands of the patriarchal deity, and ethical action is obeying the god’s list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. If we recognize that transcendence is the freedom created by the spiritual projection of time in the form of futurity and a personal questioning applied as context to the sensible world, there isn’t any cosmically senior intelligence for our personal spirituality to align with, no sovereign transcendence. Ethical agency then requires aligning with a world in which transcendence takes the form of multiple embodied individuals scattered horizontally in local clusters over the face of the planet. If an ethical life is alignment with the transcendence of intelligent aliveness, then it would be aligning my freedom with the freedom of everyone around me, mutual respect for and empathy with all the other sensitive and teleological beings here within nature.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Welcome to Metaphysics

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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creativity, freedom, idealism, Immanuel Kant, materialism, monotheism, philosophy, Plato, politics, spirituality, teleology, time, transcendence

Posting 121, word count: 1,312.

Metaphysics is part of the framework of orientation within which any individual operates. Everybody has some metaphysical framework or other, typically learned from ambient culture at an early age without recognizing that it might be questionable, thinkable. The way in which a person’s framework of orientation deals with the incongruity between subjectivity and objectivity is its metaphysics, as both subjectivity and objectivity have been asserted as a revelation of what is uniquely and exclusively real in the cosmic whole, and they are starkly different from one another.

Subjectivity is remarkable due to its ideality, the personally interior experience of living a particular bearing of sensitive teleology in a life in the world. Ideality is the source and origin of the idea of transcendence since only ideality (spirituality, intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objectivity, and as such a clear transcendence of nature. This makes personal engagement in the passing of time, a tilting into and toward an openness of time to come, fundamental in subjectivity and in the transcendence of nature. With subjectivity there are no eternal necessities, no finality. Everything is a tentative construct for navigating into a non-actual futurity, a strict ideality guessed at but unknown, questing (desperately) for opportunities to construct shapes and works, interventions within lumpen actuality, along the way. The bearing-into-futurity of subjectivity is a questioning that changes continually with experience and learning. Its whole conceptual framework of reference markers can change from internal reconsideration. Since personal subjectivity is not publicly measurable it has been characterized as inward, and so inwardly we have an ever-questing orientation, a directionality of caring at some moment in an embodied life in the world, a directionality which is the spiritual construct, representing an increasingly remote personal no-longer or previousness, of an interpretive context (immediate expectation, readiness, and bearing of intervention) for present experience.

On the other side of metaphysics is a universalizing of objectivity (on the model of “medium sized dry goods”), a conception of hard-structure forms, enduring, definite, final (“real”), determinate, self-subsisting concrete material objects in configuration, energy field structures gliding in an eternally pre-determined fall shaped by mathematical necessities such as inertia and entropy, categorically excluding the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality. Overall, it is the timelessness of objectivity, the finality of objects and their entirely predetermined arc of changes, manifesting eternal mathematical necessities, that stands out in claims placing objectivity as exclusively and uniquely real.

Subjectivity, and so transcendent ideality, is multiple rather than unitary, occurring in separate embodied and mortal persons clustered and scattered over the surface of planet Earth (that we know of). The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary subjectivity, has been considered such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism (metaphysical claims placing ideality in some form as primary in reality as a whole) have just evaded admitting the identity of ideality and subjectivity! Plato’s Ideal Forms, for example, are a mythological mashup of materiality and ideality, taking ideas of types of objects as essentially united with the objects. Existing separately from any person’s life in the world is a feature of objects that Plato ascribed to Ideas. Abstraction is entirely an operation of individual intelligences, but in Platonism the abstract categories of things are ultimately causal in the existence of every ephemeral particular of objective actuality. This announces one of the jaw-dropping surprises in the history of formal metaphysics, that what seems the most obvious and common sense occurrence of transcendent ideality in ordinary embodied individuals has gone conspicuously undocumented.

Creationist monotheism is a metaphysical dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (intelligence) who created the objective material world in a unique episode of exuberant divine caprice. It is normally considered that, within this created material world, humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created as images of the creator, fundamentally similar to the divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality. In that version of dualism the divine principle of creation, and so ideality more generally, is, as it is in Plato, primary and dominant, making it idealist even though not a declared idealism. Again, however, it is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of transcendent temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It was always the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of a senior transcendence at far cosmic horizons. There is no other direct experience of ideality.

Given the dramatic differences between subjectivity and objectivity, anyone’s metaphysical framework of orientation will be a conception of reality as a whole that either includes or excludes the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality (spirituality) with its freedom and transcendence of nature. A strict metaphysical objectivism (materialism) can remain coherent only by denying transcendence completely. (One problem with that is the implausibility of deriving ethically sensitive intelligences from insensitive lumps.) A metaphysics of transcendent ideality can remain coherent without denying the existence of objects by accepting a dualism of multiple embodied subjectivities each living a particular life as spirituality intervening in brute actuality.

Can the World be an Idea?

Contrary to Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, for example, the world can’t be only and entirely an idea because ideas are features of a personal orientation of some embodied individual in a particular life in the world. It has been claimed that the world is an idea in the mind of God, but the idea of God goes far beyond a particular embodied life in the world, and so is not strictly coherent. The way in which the world is an idea is that what is known of the world is always the construct of personal experiences of the world. The world is an idea for any and every individual, and individuals have been sharing ideas about the world with one another and have constructed various cultural ideas of the world. In any individual’s life, the world is an idea, largely learned from some such ambient culture. However, to use Kantian terminology, the world “in itself” can’t be only and entirely an idea.

We can say two things about a world with transcendent spirituality. First, it is not entirely pre-determined by anything. Its fate in detail is mutable, strictly indeterminate, with possibilities for novelty at any moment. Second, anyone’s ideas of the world, and any culturally transmitted ideas of the world, are also mutable, not etched into the blueprints of the cosmos, not final or essential elements of reality, but rather tentative abstractions, subject to revision or abandonment with the assimilation of more experience. Ideas of the world are typically cultural constructs originating from multiple contributions from various individuals’ experience and creative thinking.

The effective activity of creative transcendence at the level of the individual has important political consequences, especially in support of egalitarian and mutually nurturing systems of sociability, the opposite of patriarchy. It means that social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas. Ideas are openings into a mutable future. An authentic idealist metaphysics is a metaphysics in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of novelty created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics in which there is active transcendence with effects in brute actuality, a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come. Political conservatives either just deny transcendence completely and interpret the world as mere physics, entirely fated or random, or adhere to something like the Platonic or monotheistic idea of transcendence, a unique supernatural expression at some far horizon which determined how things will be forever.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

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