Fragment 218, word count: 213.

Tags: metaphysics, caring, ideality, existence, creation, freedom, personality, empathy, expression, value, philosophy, spirituality, time.

The foundational distinction for metaphysics is between the world that doesn’t matter, (which is the vast material world of strict actuality, essentially complete but energetically rearranging in a sort of ceaseless falling) over against the existence of caring, shaped as the never-finished personal dramas of any embodied ideality sensing total and desperate vulnerability to a somewhat malleable and entirely suppositional future. The metaphysical presence is caring with its context of a future sensed as open for certain improvisations, for creative expression. Entities of caring-ideality matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Only caring is suppositional, orienting in terms of non-actualities of its own creation. The experience of embodiment grounds the emphatically monadic existence of beings of ideality as individuals. To identify and become acquainted with the metaphysical dimension of existence is to construct a sharp focus on the starkly anomalous existence of individual ideality, some indefinite number of distinct “I”s, vectoring future-ward in our effortful self-improvising, drama-clouds intervening at the coming-into-being edge of existence. Individual subjective existence is the experience of spiritual intervention, intentional freedom via creative ideation of personal and non-personal futurity-as-opening in the strictly subjective context of the particular importance of this expressive agency, without forgetting empathy and aesthetic appeal.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.