Fragment 200, word count: 391.

tags: time, spirit, ideality, physics, Big Bang, play, freedom, nature.

When you get right down to spirit and physics, spirit is primary in yet another sense. Spirit plays in a way inconceivable for physics. Spirit plays at the ragged new edge of nature-unfinished, as a busy principle of world organization that organizes a world in the form of an unfinished person in an unfinished world. It personifies this edge of existence as itself, localized but stretched in time by its ideality, by its memory-based knowing, by caring and anticipating, and by an active intent to shape a personal future. This time-stretch of ideality introduces locally a degree of freedom for spontaneous creativity, for improvisation. Spirit (ideality) occurs as a multitude of localizing and dramatizing principles of suppositional world organization, at the raw edge of time, a multitude that is scattered but clustered, each one organizing a sense of personal surroundings in which to carry on a life according to the principle of personal caring and agency as an animate biological body with certain sensitivities and kinaesthetic powers within the surroundings. Each fabricates a sensibility, a personal and complex vigilance in aid of its agency. Each one is busy extending its suppositional sense of surroundings as contextual readiness to make sense of whatever might be coming. Freedom is possible in an unsettled world still just bursting into its existence. If you think of the Big Bang not simply as a something blowing up but instead as the bursting forth of existence at the foundational cosmic level, then time is still the Big Bang, a breaking-open of existence, the ongoing bursting forth of existence-as-incomplete. The present is the raw edge of the breaking-open, the wave front of the burst-into-existence. Human time, the stretched time of ideality, has taken nature in this aspect of instability and made it into personalized and personally guided mutability. With intent to burst forth personally, spirit reads nature’s instability as futurity, the opening for intentional agency, using foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and power to overcome even its regularity of habits for the sake of making a distinctive personal mark on the world that doesn’t yet exist. Spirit differs from inertial actuality by suppositional planning ahead, making guesses and choices among alternative plausible futures, whereas the objects of ‘just there’ actuality remain un-playful, the media of immutable forces.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.