Fragment 217, word count: 1017.

Tags: sovereignty, violence, aristocracy, ideality, existence, literacy, religion, philosophy, evil, Francis Fukuyama, history, culture, hive-mind, politics.

“The day of the political philosopher is over.” *

A surprising but decisive theme of western history has been an intellectual or ideological contest over the moral legitimacy of systems of sovereignty. This contest is an artifact of a more fundamental cultural rivalry, namely, between the legacy of aristocratic violence, the matrix of all sovereignty, and, on the other side, the legacy of literacy, fostered for a long dark time within the theocratically inclined organizations of Christianity but finally launched independently via humanistic pursuits in universities. The use of violence, the core of aristocratic culture, requires a denial of empathy, a refusal or rejection of empathy toward all but a select group of people. The refusal of empathy is the precondition of acts of evil. Without the legacy of books and authorship the exercise of violence-and-superstition-based sovereignty would enforce a uniformity of dogma, but there would be no thoroughly elaborated ideology expressing ambitious thinking incorporating a variety of points of view. Without the literary legacy there would be no contest over the legitimacy of sovereign dominance through coercive power. In spite of having origins in thinking about morality, disputes over the legitimacy of particular assertions of sovereignty have often occasioned violence, the predictable defensive response of aristocratic culture.

Fukuyama and New Frontiers of Philosophy

Francis Fukuyama highlighted the contest over the moral legitimacy of sovereignty in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), when he famously interpreted the collapse of communism in The Soviet Union as the end of “… the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies … (Wikipedia)”. Fukuyama: “What we may be witnessing is … the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution …”. Fukuyama was considering political/ economic ideology specifically, but political ideology always expresses a more general ecosystem of philosophical ideas and so his assertion implies that all ideas foundational enough to have political consequences have already been elucidated and litigated, that there can be no more philosophical discoveries, no opening frontiers of philosophy. He has, like many others, declared the end of philosophy. That idea is profoundly attractive, a wish fulfillment, to the conservative mind and to the religious and the scientific mind. However, it is false, arrogant to the point of absurdity, as demonstrated by a few considerations. An obvious one would be a consideration of the vast lack of attention to and understanding of cultural and non-cultural variability in the clustering and un-clustering of human attachments (the foundation of polities and so of politics). This could be described as issues in the identification and investigation of culturally constructed hive-minds that seem to dominate human political attachments. Another crucial consideration is the hitherto relentlessly negative conceptions of human experience as a mode of existence. The easiest example is the Augustinian conception of human experience as compulsively determined by the legacy of “original sin”, irresistible needs to pridefully assert the exclusive importance of the individual self through competitive acquisition and other forms of personal gratification. The more modern conceptions of “economic man” and the Freudian id-ego-superego model are just light edits of the Christian idea, all plainly derogatory depictions of individual subjective existence. Negative conceptions of human existence as ideality have origins in common superstitious myths of a disembodied super-spirit, powerful, knowing, and emotionally volatile, unpredictably moved to interfere in human affairs. Such a being must always be appeased, and the first rule of appeasement is the necessity of general human humility before the super-spirit, the necessity of loudly declaring the vast inferiority and weakness of the human spirit. It follows that factions of the strongest, apparently favoured and chosen by the super-spirit, must do their best to stifle and control the generality of people within their reach. In this way, derogatory conceptions of individual existence have imprinted a punishing and malevolent quality on the societies built on them, making them dystopias claiming to be the best of possible worlds. To recognize this, it is necessary (and possible) to judge from outside the influence of the derogatory conceptions. A confrontation with this history of culturally distorted and intentionally humiliating conceptions of human existence must surely be an obvious unexplored frontier of philosophy.

Primordial Beings at the Edge of Creation

If we reject the superstitious legacy of myths of the disembodied super-spirit who must be appeased, it is easy to find a non-derogatory conception of human-ideality-as-a-mode-of-existence, and, following that, it will be possible to imagine non-dystopian clustering of human attachments. The humanistic legacy of literacy and authorship points the way. Ideality is always personality, all about inventing the personal drama of time, the sense of time passing in an embodied life. Drama is a caring anticipation of future conditions and events, an anticipation that includes personal stakes and uncertainty about harms and benefits. The experience of time springs from caring and involves active recollections, abstractions,  and suppositions, curiosity and questions, searches and constructions of a framework of directional orientation. We are active points and arcs of creation at the opening edge of unfinished existence, effective ideality with the dramatic structure of an embodied living “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s life in the world.

The Clustering and Un-Clustering of Human Attachments

Discarding the derogatory conceptions of human existence that pre-determined dystopian clustering of human attachments opens another frontier of philosophy: consideration of cultural and non-cultural variability in the foundation of polities and politics. Social attachments free from superstitions of past and current dystopias will not need the hierarchical stratification of personal value based on competitions for scarce honours and properties. They will not need hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a culture of violence. It has been a common sense assumption that this style of tightly controlled cultured clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment and pageantry typical of religion, is simply the inevitable working of flawed human nature, but that is false. We are not, fortunately, completely subject to the values, categories, and dramas of the ambient cultural system. It is possible to recognize the fundamental reality of autonomous individual spirituality. Release from collective identity follows from recognition of the preponderance of non-linguistic ideation in ordinary experience, personal experience outside what is controlled by culturally ambient hive-minds.

 * Len Deighton in Billion-Dollar Brain, published by Triad, Grafton Books (1987), ISBN 0-586-07395-7. See p. 322. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1966.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.