Fragment 222, Word count: 997.

Tags: spirituality, hive-minds, aristocracy, wealth, history, caring, metaphysics, creativity, Spinoza, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

In the contemporary culture of capitalism there is only wealth as the measure of a good life. However, it is profoundly not true that a life without wealth is a diminished or lesser one. The measure of life is a spiritual matter, of which wealth is no indicator, or possibly even a negative indicator, as suggested by the proliferation of fascist billionaires. No amount of arts-and-culture-washing, patronage, fandom, or aristocratic Romanticism can reconcile wealth with spirituality. It does have to be admitted that the idea of spirituality was gradually made unserious and distasteful by the long-established father-god religions which teach that spirituality requires ownership of inherent guilt, inescapable debt, and vast personal insufficiency under the all-determining Gaze of a cosmic caring super-power who might provide miraculous relief and rescue if properly appeased. An obsession with accountable assets provides at least some appearance of relief from that old nightmare. However, it just sets up a vicious duality, both sides of which still manifest the legacy of cultural delusions at the core of hive-minds that have shaped human history. Unburdened from that weight of revered but perverse tradition, spirituality is a matter of the metaphysical anomaly of caring inherent in any temporal ideality, the metaphysical anomaly that some things matter because someone cares, and the course of existence is decisively bent away from any simple fall-line, from any aspect of eternity (looking at you, Spinoza), by this quirky way in which things matter.

The Ecosystem of Caring

Subjectivity, temporal ideality, is an ecosystem of caring, a cloud of inter-related dramas shaped as curiosity, questioning, and desperately felt needs, specific emotionally-crucial self-declarations as well as a constructed orientation toward energy and gratification, all within a complex of attachments that subjective ideality-clouds feel and nurture with each other. There is a fundamental pattern of building up latent energy followed by pre-conceived projections of that energy beyond personal subjectivity in the effort to print personal intuitions of what is right morally and aesthetically onto an entirely suppositional, non-actual, future. It is entirely a construct of time, of suppositional expectations, intentions, vectors away from no-longer and tilting into not-yet, always probing the texture of unknowing in ever-present surroundings. Full innocent ownership of this metaphysical power has proven itself sufficient to eclipse the value of trophies, applause, imitations of lifestyle models, and symbols of competitive exceptionalism.

Luther through Fichte

This simple spirituality, which enables identification of the confining effects of culturally imposed hive-mind binding structures, was already implicit in the two key claims advanced by Martin Luther: first, justification by faith alone; but also, unmediated access of the individual to primordial existence, which Luther conceived as the primordial caring of God, but strictly, in the existence of ideality the primordial caring is every caring. Luther was asserting that individual caring-idealities have the inherent power to posit conceptions of reality (there is nothing to limit this power to acts of faith), as well as to encounter reality without any need for the intercession of culturally imposed collective ideologies such as that of Roman Christendom. Spirituality is not submission to authoritative doctrine, or to anything, but rather it is agency at the level of the embodied individual, self-declaration in the full awareness of an autonomous personal creativity.

Fragment 93, April 20, 2016, The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism (word count: 2,528)

The conception of spirituality fundamental to the Lutheran line of philosophical development has always been profoundly subversive of the dystopian actuality of hierarchical hive-mind societies that grew from the combination of aristocratic and father-god religious dominance in Christendom and the Old-Regime. As such, it has been unwelcome and shunted to the margins of culture, even of scholarly academic culture, which of course increasingly depends on gifted funding. Aristocracy has been the model culture-pool focused on the value of wealth as ultimately taken and protected by violence. By the end of the eighteenth century those historical foundations of European civilization had been seriously contested by upstart materialist science and by the effects of Protestantism including the French Revolution (without “justification by faith alone” there would be no “Cogito, ergo sum.”), but the old foundations always fought to maintain supremacy and were even given a fresh boost by nineteenth century Romanticism. The play of these cultural forces eventually produced our current extractive investor-supremacist bourgeois capitalism in which wealth is the universal aspiration driving consumption that is laying waste to our finite planet.

Existentialism

The accomplishment of Fichte’s work in the Lutheran tradition has been decisively misconstrued by interpreting it through the distorting glass of what Hegel and the Romantics did after. Fichte’s absolute “I” was not relocating personal ideality from the individual to the cosmos at large, to a world-scale teleology nudging human history according to an intentional caring plan. Rather, Fichte was uncovering the foundations of the self-positing existence-before-essence of existentialism. Fichte, standing on the shoulders of Kant’s development of Luther’s foundations, removed (if so awkwardly) some literary clutter to face the absolute self-positing, caring, “I”.

Nietzsche and the Human Herd

A main theme of Romanticism in the aftermath of Fichte’s work was, again, the glorification and sanctification of aristocracy, dedicated to unaccountable self-indulgence and ever-ready for violence, and that theme of Romanticism was embraced by Nietzsche, who enjoyed thinking of himself as a descendent of aristocracy. That regrettable Romanticism in Nietzsche’s thought shows itself in his uncritical acceptance that a kind of natural aristocracy results because only exceptional individuals can be creative. However, nothing supports that claim other than the culturally encouraged wishful thinking of a certain privileged social faction. Creativity and caring are inseparable in the existence of ideality. Nietzsche was sustained in his poverty and un-lonely isolation by the joy of his personal creativity. In the light of that experience of creativity Nietzsche declared the supreme importance of a Lutheran individualism, the necessity for individuals to cut themselves free of the cult mentality of any human herd (hive-mind) to liberate an innate agency, the power to self-declare in creative acts of re-shaping reality.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.