Fragment 221, Word count: 2,971.

Tags: history, philosophy, theology, power, culture, aristocracy, dominance, violence, literacy, ideality, time, freedom, creativity, politics, metaphysics, humanism.

The spirit of two philosophical traditions runs through the Fragments of In The Blind-Spot. First is the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, a city on the south shore of the Black Sea into which Diogenes was born around 410 BCE. Diogenes was the original philosophical Cynic, elaborating the idea that social convention, culture, is an artificial lens of interpretation passing as elemental reality but effectively alienating individuals from the natural primordiality of their existence as human. Diogenes practiced a strict form of de-culturing in his shockingly unusual way of living, to be free of what he identified as false social reality. The Cynic tradition developed also in Epicureanism (“ignore the talk going around about gods”) and to some degree in Stoic self-possession, all exploring a distinct humanism in the ancient Greek cultural system.

Fragment 27, April 12, 2012, The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans (word count: 2,898)

Fragment 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (word count: 6,844)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is also in the vicinity of Diogenes but is partly disqualified by his devotion to the supremacy of “the general will”. Rousseau, proud citizen of Calvinist Geneva, did, on the other hand, present a critique of the mainstream culture of arts and sciences of his time, and generally wrote in opposition to the style of life supposedly envied and sought after by everyone and exemplified by Voltaire, a life of wealth, privilege, celebrity, high consumption, and patronage of the arts, inevitably accompanied by pride in social superiority and exclusive elite class membership.

The second tradition is clearly related, being arguably a development from ancient humanism, namely the modern Euro-American Enlightenment, but especially, within that broad cultural movement, the Lutheran spirit of Protestantism, which developed alongside a body of discoveries in mathematical science (building from strong accomplishments imported from the Islamic world and ancient India), all in the context of the Republic of Letters, a network of independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities, trained to be active in secular professions, it energized a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in the international language of scholarship, Latin, releasing an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of advanced literacy. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to get beyond and get free of the most dominating cultures and factions of Christendom: The Roman Church, aristocracy, and monarchy, a classic example of a tight working alliance between forces of dominance-by-violence and those of dominance-by-dread-of-the-supernatural, all grounded in a metaphysical ideology featuring a disembodied almighty will-to-power. Agents of the Church acted as indispensable mediators between the righteous wrath of God and helpless individual sinners. Within that entrenched dystopia a revival of ancient Epicurean metaphysics, notably in the effective materialism of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) enabled a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance and promoted a more strictly scientific world-view. Materialism undermined claims by the upper strata of society to be enforcing the will of the supernatural almighty.

Both science and Protestantism were intellectual revolts against the established religious edifice of knowledge guarded ferociously by the Roman Church hierarchy, although they expressed two starkly opposing metaphysical foundations. Lutheran protestantism rests on an identification of faith as a spiritual act of autonomous individual agency, eliminating any mediation between the individual and primordial reality. Any such external mediation, such as the Roman Church’s mediation between the individual and the Deity, is a portal for misinformation, illegitimate domination, and abusive exploitation. There has been a phenomenal philosophical evolution from Luther’s conception of the inherent spiritual autonomy of individual subjective ideality. The tendency of that evolution is to retain a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, first attributed to an almighty Deity, but increasingly to relocate that transcendence from the remote Deity to the individual intelligences of human personalities. We see this worked out by a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte. Fichte’s drift to a cosmic absolute self-positing “I” seems to flip the progression on its head, and that cosmic absolutism was taken in a nostalgic Aristotelian direction by Hegel, also Lutheran. The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – subjectivity is a monadic interiority; reviving aspects of Aristotle

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – moral agency is self-legislating, requires no sovereign commands, no externally sourced superego

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) – subjectivity has the form of a self-positing “I”, Existentialism’s dawning

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) – phenomenology of spirit, investigation of spirit in the shape of history, the Absolute connects Hegel to Fichte

Max Stirner (1806-56) – a version of self-possession universalizing Machiavelli

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) – “…an act of will in self-sufficient inwardness”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – God is dead. Ubermench is beyond the reach of cultural norms.

In the Enlightenment energy system of Protestantism, the Republic of Letters, and Science, following the celebrated humanism of the Renaissance in which Medieval Christendom searched out the intellectual accomplishments of alien cultures that it recognized as more advanced, Protestantism was an engine promoting the spread of literacy beyond the professional scribal classes to the population at large. John Wycliffe inspired a movement for popular vernacular literacy in the 1380’s, promoting Bible reading as essential personal piety, an early expression of the spirit of Protestantism that highlights its origins in the culture of literacy. Science especially enabled the accumulation of an even vaster edifice of new knowledge. However, science never managing to replace the old metaphysics of Christian theology because its rejection of the concept of human spirituality was never convincing. These antagonistic culture-pools settled into a truce with each other and with the legacy of the aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence.

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

John Wycliffe (1328-1384) – popular vernacular literacy, the Bible in vernacular languages

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) – the Earth is not the centre of the universe

Martin Luther (1483-1546) – individual justification by faith alone

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – the Earth moves

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – Cogito, ergo sum. anti-Aristotelian physics, mathematics, metaphysics

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – mass, distance, & the universal law of gravitational attraction

The French Revolution (1789-99) – sovereignty of the National Assembly

Culture Pools in the Historical Narrative

Already from this sketch of philosophical influences, it is apparent that a historical narrative, especially of the Euro-American cultural system, but with forays beyond, is a core interest in the Fragments, in which narrative the focus becomes the profound confrontation between an aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence (still dominant, still dystopian) and certain counter-cultures inherently antagonistic to it and partly stifled under its dominance. 

Aristocratic Dystopia: The Culture of Dominance by Violence

Because of the ongoing ascendance of the aristocratic-violence culture focused on competitive masculine strength-testing with strictly limited empathy, current and previous ‘civilized’ societies have all been dystopian systems of top-down parasitism derived originally from the culture of animal herding on the Great Eurasian Steppe. For techniques of herd parasitism to be applied to human communities after violent conquest, effective stabilization of extractive practices required construction of a haze of popular illusions in which hierarchy is created by setting up commanding authority in certain persons who are credible as cultural icons of dominance, and as such become internalized by individuals as cultural elements of a superego. The human receptivity to authoritative superego figures is a spiritual vulnerability trained through the long childhood years of dependence on parents. Dominance culture consistently constructs an enduring type of culture-bound collective, effectively a human hive-mind, bound together by a set of culturally embedded illusions of the primal and ultimate supremacy of certain forces: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, and trophy supremacy, all reinforcing the hierarchical pattern of the dominant faction. Aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture first created the illusion of masculine supremacy in which rights belong to the strongest. Masculine supremacy sets up the most successfully violent persons as superego icons in aid of enforcing obedience and loyalty in a hierarchical social order: an all-inclusive food-chain of top-down command and value extraction, promoted as the primal and ultimate Great Chain of Being.

Disembodied supremacy culture developed into an edifice of authoritative knowledge of primal and ultimate things, largely non-evident or hidden things, claimed to be selectively revealed to the rare chosen prophet. (theology) Disembodied supremacy involves an imagined contrast and conflict between ordinary human embodied ideality and an ideality that is cosmically primordial and as such prior to all embodiment, unrestricted by embodiment, all-creative. Disembodied supremacy sets up certain charismatic persons as superego icons, persons asserting their special knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits, based on a claim of being divinely chosen to receive revelations of the otherwise hidden ultimate Truth. Behind those visible persons looms the imagined Deity within its cloud of unknowing. Disembodied supremacy culture exploits the human tendency to personify everything, an overuse of the ability of embodied ideality to recognize in external phenomena the alien dramas of separate emotionally engaged wills, to recognize evidence of external ideality expressing its personal caring, knowing, and intending. This ability is the portal to all-important sociability and empathy, but inappropriate recognition of this kind results in fear of powerful disembodied aristocrats (lords) in the sky and in nature, violently coercive forces of willful self-assertion with strong excitable intentions. Their having power implies strictly limited empathy, as is typical of supremacist masculinity, and their disembodiment implies power beyond the predictably physical. Such invisible power inspires a pervasive inescapable dread.

In the precarious life of human individuals within nature and among other humans, the illusion of collective supremacy is easily sold as a necessary condition for safety in numbers. Collective supremacy sets up certain authoritative/ powerful persons as superego icons, persons asserting their uniquely authentic expression of the collective as the transcendent home for its people.

A culture of trophy supremacy is acted out and projected by the life of looting aristocrats or oligarchs. As apparently the most delicious form of gratification, chosen by the strongest, it tends to be imitated universally, derived from masculine supremacy and culturally accepted as the universal measure of personal value. Trophy supremacy sets up envied celebrities with the most property or the best property as superego icons, role models.

Collective Drama

This set of supremacist illusions, sometimes with still others (such as family supremacy or language supremacy), tend to form a mutually supportive structure, such that masculine supremacy is supported by the assertion that divine will determines everything including social hierarchy and individual power. The aristocratic obsession with trophies tends to convince everyone that competing for celebrity status is inherent in human nature. Collective supremacy is proclaimed by the authorities of both disembodied and masculine supremacy to help bind their flocks of subordinates in an illusion of shard collective welfare. Effective hive-mind construction does not, however, require the whole set. Any one of them can bind a collection of people together by training all to share the same orientation up to a supreme guide declaring the direction of the collective drama.

Literacy and a Life of the Mind

The alternative culture-pool that has been most impressively confrontational against the standard supremacist configuration has been literacy/ scribal culture, scholarship, the graphic recording of voices in language, by which it is made possible to choose to either distribute the record of an individual’s thinking to an audience, small or large, or to preserve it privately as a personal reminder of an accomplishment from which to advance and build. Since literacy is the craft and skills of preserving and cultivating knowledge in the mode of language, it has often been treasured within organizations focused on the illusion of disembodied supremacy in their frantic speculations concerning primal and ultimate things. Literacy has thrived in such institutions and inspired many generations to create astonishing feats of research, imagination, and reasoning. The super-powers of scribal ideality, such as enabling development of a unique reading/ writing persona, a personal literary voice, along with easing the effort of prolonged mental activity, eventually became a force sufficient, as a non-property based source of value, to oppose and rival the culture of violence (war and other looting) in terms of personal gratification from beauty and beneficial effect, importance of accomplishment, and a socially recognized foundation of respect and dignity. The experience of having a rich and powerful personal interiority through literacy is the foundation of humanism, an original map of values re-defining the adventure of existence as human ideality.

Fragment 128, June 8, 2018, Politics is More than Nature (word Count: 867).

It must be recognized that the fact of human existence, generation after generation, establishes that the under-acknowledged but really dominant source of gratification for most humans is the focus of the mainly female culture of first-language-nurture, the mutual support and caring most often found in the protection and nurturing of children. This most essential counter-culture pool has persisted eternally in the closest and most difficult proximity to the trophy/ looting/ dominance culture. Feminism has become an important challenge to supremacist hive-minds.

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700). A survey of some main culture-pools

The Linchpin is always Metaphysics

The linchpin of the whole thing is that all the supremacist illusions divert attention from, and so hide and alienate, what is really supreme in the life of a human: personal ideality constructing suppositional time as the portal to expressive freedom. The literary gaze is inward, to the voices and conversations of personal ideality, the immediate experience of a private creative fountain of caring curiosity, ideas, and questions. Ideality is a fabric of suppositional non-actuality, which distinguishes it decisively from the brute actuality and determinism of nature. Personal ideality is metaphysically anomalous as a power creating freedom through the supposition of time structured as an opening for the personal expression of caring. The sense of the passing of time has two vectors. One consists of leavings and losses: things given up, slipping by, falling away into increasingly distant priority. The other vector is a dramatic leap into a suppositional future expected to have both grounding familiarity and surprising novelty. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjective spirituality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are abstractions from the non-actuality of time as a dramatic construct, the indispensable grounding of not-yet and no-longer, the non-actuality of purposive caring in the shape of orientation. Above all, it is only the metaphysically anomalous caring in creative personal dramas that makes anything matter. Caring is always a drama, unfinished in the dual instability of suppositional time. An ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating wave-in-time, living in and through passing and arriving in time. Freedom must always be unfinished. The genius of ideality is turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to enduring existence in freedom made possible by constant flight through a personally suppositional time.

The Politics of Left and Right

Beginning from the Enlightenment era, and especially from the French Revolution of 1789-99, the political Left has been the effort to critique and oppose the entrenched legacy of aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture, with its standard structure of supremacist illusions. As such it must identify the crippling errors of that legacy at the same time as envisioning and promoting a preferable alternative, a political vision that represents the full scope and power of existence as a human and facilitates the general expression of that existence. This has made the left the party of bottom-up philosophies, of care and expression for the many instead of just the exceptional few. Historically, mistakes have been made in identifying such a political vision, for example in claims that the left is for bargaining within capitalism for a better deal for precarious wage earners, for the subordinated, proletarian labouring and serving class. Such efforts are crucial certainly but the political left must not limit its vision by accepting societies as permanent and inevitable structures of unequal classes, conceding the inevitability of the peculiar type of hive-mind polities forged by aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture. The left is hindered by an inability, so far, to replace the metaphysical foundation of hive-mind polities. The materialism of the Enlightenment, and of Marx, has proven insufficient to accomplish that essential task.

The Meaning of War

Of course the cultural system of the current world-order is stuck. Even after the whole drama of the history of literacy, it is still dominated by patriarchal veil-of-illusions hive-minds, ever ready for the vast killing and destruction of war. Its ancient and traditional metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, the guilt-ridden fear of some capricious external invisible almighty father-force has been challenged and partly replaced by the determinist nihilism of mathematical-materialist science. (Will-to-power is Nietzsche’s idea of the pure essence of personal existence, so also the mind of God.) Science is a straightforward refusal of metaphysics, so the choices left are the childhood terror of judgment from the cloud of unknowing that must be appeased in all things, or the despair of utter inevitability. In this ridiculous state it is only war that gives life meaning for far too many people.

What Matters and Why

A way beyond the increasingly fragile dystopias of the current world-order is conceivable, but it requires enough overcoming of the old metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, and also of determinist science, to find grounding in a humanist metaphysics that recognizes improvisational freedom at the level of embodied individuals, a freedom expressing deeply personal dramas of caring and attachment, the dramas that make some things truly and profoundly matter within the uncaring actuality of nature.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.