Author Archives: Sandy MacDonald

Intelligence as a Creative Force

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The question presented in the comment to the posting Working, November 21, 2012, offers an opportunity to explore certain elements of a set of ideas I have been calling ‘transcendental humanism’, enough that an answer qualifies as a whole new posting. (Please read the entire comment attached to that posting.) The question is:

“Aren’t the “crime-family cultural values” you mention rooted somehow deep down in the fabric of human being?”

Answering the question can be approached with reference to a distinction made in ancient philosophy between nature and intelligence. Two vectors of ancient humanist philosophy were: 1) to remove gods, demons, and spirits (disembodied intelligences) from conceptions of nature, and 2) to understand and experience the ordinary intelligence of individual people as transcendent. There is no caring in nature, no reasons, no morals, no justice. Caring, reasons, morals, and justice are all peculiar to intelligences. Nature is not intelligent. The world of brute nature is not static, but its movement is only a continuous, pre-determined, kind of falling, just falling. Embodied intelligences, as bodies, are certainly falling with it, but by projecting outward from the subjective interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality, we can turn the falling, to some extent, into flight. Although there is no justice in nature, identifications of justice and injustice are important to many intelligences. Intelligences transcend nature and reshape parts of nature all the time, transforming parts of nature into culture, overwriting nature with culture. We cut natural tree trunks into timbers and build houses that are outward projections of intelligence, but which are not otherwise in or from nature. The individual creativity of intelligences makes nature fly instead of merely falling. Humans have created far more elaborated cultures than any other known species, which makes us more free of nature than the others. Human cultures have a history of restless transformation. Intelligences are among the forces that shape that transformation, and it is plausible that certain influences of brutish nature that have so far dominated cultures, such as crime family values, can be displaced by creations of more caring intelligences.

What Can Be Said

Explanations of things based on fundamental necessities sometimes include an unstated assumption that those necessities are the expression of a cosmic will and intelligence, a force that is dangerous and impious to question or resist. However, our clear and foundational acquaintance with intelligences is ordinary persons, embodied in very specific local structures. The analogy by which the cosmos as a whole is a person in a grander and more august form is so implausible as to be silly. All that can be said about the cosmos as a whole, other than strictly scientific measurements, is something like this: Inexplicably, there is something instead of nothing, and it seems that the various features and complexities of that something constitute a single whole in some sense. The anomalous feature is a discontinuity between the wholeness of beautiful but unintelligent nature, brute, predetermined actuality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the interiority of intelligences, each its own universe of non-actuality. In spite of that radical discontinuity, it is undeniable that actuality and those multitudes of non-actualities are profoundly entangled. The non-actuality of intelligences is routinely projected onto the shapes of actuality, and brute actuality contains materials that unreliably sustain and restrict the intelligences, who are otherwise discontinuous universes.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnecteness of intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendence of intelligence. This is one way in which it becomes possible to think that war and slavery in all its forms can be ended.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Machiavelli’s Prince

07 Friday Dec 2012

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Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) grew up in the hotbed of the dawning European Renaissance, the Italian city of Florence, and after an eventful career in the diplomatic service of that city, a career interrupted by an abrupt regime change in Florence, he composed a book of advice, The Prince, addressed to a member of the newly restored ruling family of Florence, the Medici, a person who was an ideal example of the Renaissance Italian prince. Machiavelli’s prince was an epitome of sophistication, born to wealth and high culture, a cultural model of nobility, and his nobility is never questioned. Machiavelli advises any such person who aspires to success as a prince to be prepared to use secrets, lies, violence, and grand deceptions, to be in effect a savage noble. To a modern evaluation Machiavelli’s prince is perhaps not noble in anything but title. He is a straightforward crime family boss.

In 1534 when the English King Henry VIII officially displaced the Pope and the Roman Church hierarchy as supreme supervisor of religion in Tudor realms, it was a natural consequence of the ideas put into circulation in 1513 by Machiavelli in The Prince, implicitly rejecting the senior supervisory authority of the Church and instead justifying and promoting the independent power of great aristocratic and royal families, crime families. Machiavelli’s The Prince made it thinkable for elder sons of such families to abandon the religious culture of chivalry and assert ultimate power without being subordinate to the mystique of religion. Machiavelli counselled princes to rule on their own authority without any supervision by the Church. Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority is a familiar example of that advice being actualized. It was the death-knell of the theocratic empire of Christendom. The central theocratic force of social control, exercised by the hierarchy of Catholic Christianity, was thus finally fractured, and afterward Christendom survived as an increasingly fictitious idea.

The Church did not disappear upon the self-assertion of the Tudors, but ‘household’ arrangements made by reigning families developed into administrative institutions of nation states. The supernatural authority of social supervision became more remote and tenuous. The collectivism of the Church was weakened, with the consequence that more individual enterprise was possible and even required. Crime family state institutions were collective-minded only when armies were required by the sovereign, which was often since military service was important training in subordination for the general population, and good sport for the ones on horses. Otherwise individuals were on their own and normally subject to the exploitation of a local turf-lord or capitalist. That self-assertion by great families was the formation of Europe’s Old Regime from many of the pre-existing institutions of Christendom. Machiavelli’s vision was not modernity but rather one step toward it from the initial condition of Medieval Christendom. Modernity was to be the era of the illusion that professional expertise based on science, rationality, and enlightened institutions could tranquilize the self-interested dominance and control of crime families and their religious cults, the illusion that their alpha-trophy-looting value system could be smoothed into a bearable basis for community life. Machiavelli’s thinking was a movement in that direction. Even though Machiavelli was not entirely modern in his vision of effective political power, he acted out a scenario of modernity by playing the part of a middle-class advisor who devised a partnership between himself, as a practitioner of the scribal or book-based arts, which clever people from any class can make their own, and the wealthy alphas of the horse-and-armour class, with the goal of engineering a sustainable institution of radical inequality.

It is characteristic of the middle class, represented well by Machiavelli, to take that sort of enabling attitude toward the class of ownership crime families. The middle class does not repudiate the controlling overclass but rather accepts it as pack leader, to use a canine metaphor, just as Machiavelli did with respect to the Medici family, offering special assistance based on cultivated skills, normally scribal, literary, legal, and scholarly in nature, consistent with fine clothing and other markers of rising dignity. It serves the interests, aspirations, and self-image of the middle class to promote a manic optimism, which relies on a set of comforting fictions deriving from a conviction that the predatory crime family class can be professionalized and integrated into a meritocracy, the rule of law, and due process, and in a later era even formal democracy. What keeps the whole system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, sometimes with straightforward variations, habits or traditions repeated unthinkingly, with many features kept unexamined by popular misconceptions such as “we’re all in this together”, “people reap what they sow”, “our political representatives have our best interests at heart”, or “there is a meritocracy of the most competent people in control”. Acceptance of institutional social inequality is inseparable from such constructs of orientation.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), and Martin Luther (1483-1546) were all central-European contemporaries in the development of post-medieval culture. Copernicus published the unsettling discovery that the Earth is not the centre of the universe but only one of the smaller satellites of the sun. After that group of bold thinkers, a generation went by before the next wave appeared in the persons of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), and Rene Descartes (1596-1650). By the time that later wave appeared, an aristocratic coup, just illustrated by Henry VIII’s part of it, had established a new regime in Europe: what Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) called, looking back, the Old Regime. That wave was followed closely by another in the persons of John Locke (1632-1704) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727).

Noble Lies: Forbidden Knowledge and The Noble Elect

There is a relationship between the “noble lie” from Plato’s Republic and the occult idea that only a small group of ‘the elect’ or worthy nobility, unlike the human masses, merit profound spiritual and metaphysical knowledge as well as special immunity and privilege (the essential crime family ethos). People who consider themselves to be among that elect minority feel entitled to promote Plato’s lie of inequality as justice. Machiavelli’s conception of appropriate behaviour for a prince highlights that there are two very different notions of justice, morality, and criminality. From the point of view of crime family ethos the moral problem and the essence of criminality is disobedience, insubordination, or disorder among the masses. From the point of view of the commonality of people the moral problem, the great injustice, is the imposition and institutional organization of inequality and other deceptions by a powerful faction.

Another facet of the “noble lie” is the boosting of “home team spirit”, declarations that this is the best community, the most expressive of justice, the bravest and cleverest and most worthy to survive and shine. For example, in the case of European culture, there is the claim that, at the “fall” of the Roman Empire, civilization was saved by the Irish, instead of by the ancient eastern cities and communities, by Muslims and the people of Iran, India, and China. It is an example of the old crime family fear of Copernican revolution, a fear that people will stop accepting authority and institutions of control if their legitimacy does not derive from being the centre of the cosmos, favoured by nature. (Forbidden knowledge alert.) Of course no collective is the centre of the cosmos, but the interiority of intelligence makes each and every person his or her own universe of orientation and that is where the elemental centre really exists.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Working

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Leadership, Political Power

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In ancient Sumer the grandest monuments were temples on high platforms, called ziggurats. Like pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, ziggurats have a mountainous and sacred quality. Each is a monumental elaboration of its piece of ground, too much to be taken in from any single view. A considerable organization over a long time was required for these structures to be created and this level of organization is possible only in special circumstances. One looks at old ziggurats, castles, and pyramids and sees their beauty or functional design, but not the work required to bring them into being. When the work was finished, the scaffolding and the construction organization vanished and left the visible structure in mysterious isolation. It might be a surface feature of the local geology except for something about the shape, and perhaps an inscription cut into hard stone in the structure. The buildings appear miraculous because the work that built them is not part of their appearance. Work tends to go unidentified in many situations.

Bricks were the main building material of the most ancient civilizations, Egypt as well as Sumer. Their bricks were made of mud mixed with straw, moulded and dried in the sun. In the hot, dry climate of those places mud bricks are durable. Bricks are heavy and hard, good material for walls and support columns. The clay or mud for a brick has to be lifted into a mould and dried or baked in an oven to transform it into stone. The thought of using mud out of its natural place, made into a new solid form and subjected to the vision of a builder, is invention and imagination and involves initiation into cultural secrets. A brick is a piece of borrowed ground, placed in a new relationship to the firmament of ground, in a wall or column of a house, temple, or castle. Walls of brick are cultural elaborations of ground, and we find their essential qualities first in the hardness and heaviness of ground itself. The ground, planet Earth, keeps pulling the brick back toward its centre. The worker must exert effort against that. The cost in effort required to raise a single brick is not very great. As the size of construction increases, the effort becomes more and more difficult and reaches a point of tedium and fatigue that goes far beyond what anyone would choose. The worker feels his vital energies go out of him into the shape of the rising wall. After a day at the job, the strength of the worker is gone, he or she is empty and sucked dry. This is the bargain, a day’s strength for another day’s subsistence.

Effort on that scale is normally demanded by somebody’s project of making a gigantic mark on the environment. The worker takes on some relation to that mark in the process of spending his vitality on it. The intimate contribution he makes to its realization justifies and maybe demands that he feel some ownership. Yet there are a number of circumstances that conflict with his sense of ownership. The design and inspiration are not from him, but are foreign. Between his shifts and when his work is finished he is required to leave the thing he has made. The shape of his relationship to it in space and time is controlled by others. The wall he builds shuts him out. Credits for the construction, maybe inscribed somewhere on the structure to be witnessed by the world at large, do not include his name or an account of his part in authorship. So the worker’s attachment to his product is both inescapable and unacknowledged, stipulated by his investment in the job and then severed, alienated, stolen.

Property-possession and labour have been rival claimants to society’s rewards and honours. Like work in one way, property such as land and money is often a source of income. “Let your money work for you.” Income from property, investment, and speculation always depends on and derives from the actual work of someone. Lack of productive property forces some to submit to the dominance of people who control such things as land and money. Labour has always been the under-dog. Deprivation of property forces people into a physical dependence on resources controlled by property owners, a sort of slavery. To some it has seemed the plainest injustice that inheritors of property should be rewarded more than those working daily to produce necessities of community life. Work is a life-warping burden. It would seem that the bearers of the burden of producing what the community requires should earn most benefits.

That is all common knowledge and the injustice is plain to see. However, the injustice is not often identified, is not prohibited by law, for example, because of the pervasive dominance of crime-family cultural values in the conceptual structure of sovereign power, executive privilege, and wealth as a trophy. The injustice of that relationship of labour to monumental architecture, as well as to all forms of high culture dependent on the tastes and pleasures of those able to afford luxury goods and services such as decorative, performance, and plastic arts, undermines any claims to a legitimacy of command through contributions to civilization. Those forms of high culture are merely another crime family technology for exercising radical inequality.

This is still on the way to Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Shapes of Projected Intelligence

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Embodiment

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There is a human need for markers of our presence. Individually we are vulnerable to bewilderment in the face of the hazards and mysteries of the world. Our physical presence and energy is small and fragile. The presence of our bodies among other objects in the landscape is not our best nature. Yet, among objects, we are not sure what we might be and should be. Everyone feels some insecurity about knowledge and understanding, about whether the best experiences and all the dangers have been noticed and considered. We look for opportunities to make a mark distinctive enough to represent what we might be and should be. Each looks to others for a comparison. An interconnected human collective charms individuals by demonstrating a power to be present brilliantly in the teeth of the material world.

Imagine a desert nomad in ancient times seeing the pyramids at Giza in their new perfection with facets of polished white rising out of the rock and sand. The sight might inspire terror or ecstasy but, no matter which, there would be a recognition that this represents both a material power to shape the world and the power of invention to conceive an original presence for intelligence, mountains with an absolute perfection of form. Egyptian pyramids were not simply amazing monuments but tombs conceived to insure the survival after death of the Pharaoh. Death is at the core of the human sense of having a tenuous presence in the world. It inspires creation of marks meant to be eternal, in contrast to our individual ephemerality. The Egyptian pyramids are an extreme example but such projects are characteristic of human communities. We have individual and collective ways of crafting things that look like nothing in nature. We polish surfaces and make edges heroically regular, uniform, purposeful, and simple or ideal. Arrangements for producing the human mark can be powerful charmers.

Kinaesthetic/ Metabolic Shock, Sweat, Dirt, and Repetitious Tedium

However, accepting heroic art and architecture as the legitimizing force for crime families requires a strictly selective editing of historical knowledge and of the personal awareness of physical work. It has been customary, culturally structured, for people to unload tedium, fatigue, discomfort, and filth onto others when they can. Based on this, tedium, fatigue, and filth, ordered onto you by someone in a more powerful position, are defining qualities of the experience of work. The individual’s ability to work has been brutally expropriated for this purpose through slavery, serfdom, corvée, military conscription, the press-gang, and the job. Civilization is an arrangement for expropriating the work of most people so a few dominants can be relieved of work in order to have the leisure to decide and control what work is done. It is also an arrangement to perpetuate rewards to the heirs of the culture of domination. Crime-family alphas, trying to shape the world without working, have contributed various forms of coercion and violation to the organizational structures of social entities. These structures take on a life of their own by being accepted as ‘the way we live in our group’ by children brought up in that environment.

For the whole of history people have hated spending time and vitality working under command. This applies to people in industrial societies who take jobs for a living just as much as to people in agricultural societies who work the landlord’s land. So much of the work commits the worker to metabolic shocks as well as sweat, dirt, and tedious repetition.

Sweat is a result of being hot, muscles heated from high effort lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, or moving quickly; from overcoming or at least straining against heavy resistance. The feeling of that strain, as well as the feeling of depletion that is part of it, has something like the shock of a personal loss. Enough repetition of the strain adds actual pain to the experience. To work is to get tired and continue to get more and more tired. Dirt is uncomfortable, irritating, and disrupts a person’s appearance by seeming to break down the difference between a human and the local geology or compost. We humans attempt to distinguish ourselves from the ground that continuously pulls us against and into itself. This is a feature of our dignity and we lose that strand of dignity when we have to endure dirt. Prolonged repetition is mind numbing and soul numbing. It requires the denial of mental inclinations to keep watch, to include a variety of sensations and observations in a process of orientation, to reflect on memories, to imagine, plan, invent, and play. The impulsive self rebels against repetitious tedium and so does a higher thinking self.

Elimination of those burdens of work would be a drastic improvement in human life. We long to live in a practical state of Grace. Nevertheless, being adult normally means you work. You take care of the shop, the garden,the house, the children. Most of the time an adult in our culture is at a job, working for pay, or at a domestic chore: cooking, cleaning up after meals, shopping, tinkering with household maintenance, doing laundry, going from place to place on errands; struggling to keep fed, housed, healthy, and socially attached.

More work on the way …

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche: Class Conflict and Modernity

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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We of Modernity

We of Modernity are different from people of Christendom, and from people of all previous societies. We have a far less spooky, less enchanted world. The gods and demons are more distant worries. We are less rooted at a piece of land among the family dead and local gods. Urban life, the anonymous urban crowd, is available and normal. We enjoy our urban detachment from fertile ground, replaced by attachment to a market system. In modernity mobility may be the reigning narrative. Class consciousness is less oppressive and less definitive (another aspect of mobility), leaving us less rooted within social hierarchies. Although we still live within a nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. These mobilities have realized a certain kind of freedom at the price of greater dependence on markets (money) and impersonal institutions. Our individuality looms much larger in our personal experience and we are more often adrift from collective narratives, more often in doubt, feeling the absence of certainty in institutional patterns of meaning.

Since modernity is the cultural sea in which we all swim, there are challenges to finding a critical perspective on it and on our individual relationship to it. Modernity originated in the same region which was for so long a poor backwater on a remote and isolated peninsula of the world, Europe. Modernity is the organization style of those societies which developed after the popular abandonment of European Christendom. Modernity is not elemental in any way, any more than Christendom was, and so there is no essence of modernity, even though a central principle might be identified as the middle class idea of meritocracy, inseparable from mobility. No ultimate divine mind or plan is depicted in the shape of history. History is not sacred or monumental as a whole because it is a haphazard collection of more or less randomly organized experiments by ordinary fallible and desperate human persons, each exercising some creative freedom from their interior non-actuality, in projections into nature and culture. Modernity is a partly random co-existence of conditions and cultural bearings.

The fact that the modern west now dominates the planet as a whole, for better or worse, raises questions about the origins of its peculiar power. The standard answer is that science placed unlimited power into the hands of western industries and militaristic nation states. Historians of science and of the material mechanisms of economic and social change point to the magnetic compass, the printing press and paper, guns and gunpowder as revolutionary forces for change in the old world. However, the west owes all those mechanisms and many more to the Mongol world system (largely based in China), often through Italian traders crossing the Black Sea to meet their Mongol equivalents, and so there is the question of why it was the west rather than the senior cultures of the east which transfigured into this brave new world. A case can be made for the decisive influence of Hellenistic humanism with its focus on individual intelligence, and the way that played out in struggles over thinking within the culture of Christendom.

Modernity and Class Conflict

It is not possible to understand modernity without some consciousness of social class plate tectonics. The beginning of social class structure was the launching of violent appropriation operations by extended family units with a cultural system typical of crime families. Class conflict is, therefore, along with the conflict of gender cultures, central to the political situation of people in all societies. Machiavelli and Nietzsche, for example, were both very clearly conscious of the identity between crime families and ‘sovereign’ power. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche, along with pretty much everyone, accepted a claim to legitimacy by the crime family class founded on its sponsorship of art, music, and large-scale architecture, generally called high culture or even just culture. The concentration of wealth and capital accomplished by crime family looting and exploitation of others enabled (still does) construction of large scale cultural monuments to beauty, eternity, to the thrill of power, and to the power-class which commands the construction. It is generally accepted that an essence of some mysterious elevating force called civilization springs from those monuments. However, accepting the legitimizing force of such things requires a narrowly selective editing of historical knowledge and requires discounting awareness of living through the work that accomplishes the actuality of culture. Nietzsche recognized class friction as a consequence of crime families and their exploitative ethos of control and inequality, but he admired the will to power, the will to be superman, that has always been characteristic of crime families. Nietzsche is, therefore, a model of the politically right-wing even without being interested in the spooks the Nazis emphasized, such as racial blood and the metaphysical bond between a folk-nation and the soil that nurtures it. Nietzsche was influenced by Max Stirner (1806-56) in asserting that any individual should, as much as possible in personal circumstances, embrace an outlook very close to the crime-family ethos as described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. However, Nietzsche did not believe everyone is capable of being superman. He believed rather that only special persons are capable of that.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity

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In childhood the interiority of subjectivity is vastly more complex and immediate than impressions of stable external structures. It takes many years for a child to accumulate personal knowledge of a structured environment into which to project intentions. All the while the subjective interiority of each child is very rich and very active with invention. The process of maturation is a gradual but unrelenting increase in mental impressions of the external world of metabolic costs and benefits, and increasing complexity of orientation by reference to external place markers. Without the adult attachment to making a living and cycling through cost-benefit routines in the environment, the child retains a huge absorption in creative subjectivity. With age and experience the balance of richness between interiority and exteriority shifts as the child learns the structures of larger and larger swaths of the environment along with the expectations of social surroundings. The utilitarian narrowness of adult mentality which results from immersion in the external confines of actual nature and culture is not even possible for the child. For the child, thinking, the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, is and has to be its own reward. Sometimes knowledge is a form of power, but freedom is a consequence of the non-actuality of subjective interiority, striving in the way unique to intelligence to create a viable opening between the brute particularity of nature (embodiment) and the ethereal, impersonal universality of ideas. The experience of childhood seems to be the high point of the human experience of freedom of thought, and adults value conversation with children at least partly because it maintains direct contact with the freedom of ascendent interiority, at a peak in the mentality of children. So it is no wonder that adults keep re-creating childhood and childhood mentality, not as a gift to some future community of the faith or of the nation, but to help balance the lives of adults in the present.

Since the market economy draws the most energy and value from individuals if those individuals are exclusively devoted to and fixated on market production and consumption, the value rhetoric of market culture specifically diverts people from the power of non-actuality that each has in personal subjective interiority (monadic interiority). Thinking, creative interiority, is assigned a low value in market culture. Competitive sport has all kinds of incentives and rewards from the earliest stages of education, but creative thinking, not the same as remembering the answers to test questions, is rarely explored seriously and certainly never glorified as sport is. If thinking were not assigned such a low value then certain kinds of knowledge would be commonplace instead of being culturally marginalized. Knowledge of the foundations of equality is an example of that, and also historical knowledge that sovereign power and governments developed directly from crime families and religious cults. Philosophy itself, the craft of personally re-orienting to an elemental orientation grid, is also marginalized knowledge.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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An Analogy

Mythology about the power of astrological demons, specifically the sun, moon, planets, and constellations of the zodiac, is a fair allegory of the individual’s exposure to the cultural power of reality-distorting ideology and emotional control mechanisms. Proponents of astrology (Hermetism, Cabalism, and Gnosticism, for example) are completely wrong in ascribing supernatural personalities to astral phenomena (angelic or otherwise, mainly intent on controlling and toying with the lives of humans), but they are not wrong about humans being born into a controlling and oppressive system in which freedom involves finding an understanding of the situation that goes deeper than the commonly accepted construct of reality.

It doesn’t take very much reading of history to learn of the historical dominance of crime families and their alpha-trophy-looting bias. Crime family culture permeates the whole idea of merit-based inequality structured into social and economic hierarchies, and that is very popular culture. To go beyond the social and cultural dominance of crime families, to wake from that history, we have to out-think the oligarchy by finding ways of orienting ourselves independently of the propaganda and messaging from their media. Having a critical awareness of relevant thinking from the past helps establishes a framework for orientation, a thinking space for interpreting current messages delivered with the intent of manipulating our energies.

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

Every incumbent of power clings to the myth of the noble lie, originated in Plato’s Republic, the myth that everyone is better off accepting inequality, maintaining the stability of hierarchies, even though every hierarchy, every system of inequality, is founded on lies, usually some variation of the assertion that inequality is ordained by the God of creation, and ordained because it is best. However, that whole perspective and assessment of what is best is a cultural peculiarity of crime families who have no other purpose than to secure their own advantage over others. How can freedom still be possible? Freedom is possible by waking from history, specifically the history of cultural dominance by purveyors of the lie of inequality. Political and historical consciousness is the dawn of that waking.

Political consciousness is consciousness that all claims of radical or profound inequality are lies. Political consciousness is recognition that cultural influences which proclaim the “noble” lie, inequality, are deceivers, manipulators, and exploiters, and as such, enemies. Political consciousness is identification of that enemy as a particular faction with a particular history, carrying the ethos of inequality, the source of the hostility in the cultural context of any person. Culture is an historical accumulation. Without historical narratives a person’s experience of the world resets to elementality. Without history, cultural presences reset to non-natural shapes without any story other than, “this part of actuality was shaped by an intelligence, by an impulse to play and to create a sustainable life in hope of long duration”.

“I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

(Please see the brief introduction to Descartes in posting 22, March 1, 2012, Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom.)

There are parallels between the adventure of discovering the ground of equality and the method of progressive and systematic doubt by which Descartes found himself through questioning ordinary certainties, as described in Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Not much is more personal than doubt. Doubt is a marker of a personal intelligence, the entity with an original questioning voice, the existence of which is unquestionably asserted by every question and every doubt. Descartes’ process of systematic doubt in search of an elemental grounding in a situation possibly pervaded by unidentifiable manipulation and control, illusion and deception, is an algorithm built on a link between freedom and undistorted knowledge (truth). Freedom and undistorted knowledge are inextricably linked. The question is this: Is it possible to be free enough to discover, recognize, and live with the truth? Rather than “The truth will make you free,” we have “The accessibility of truth, the unquestionability or immediacy of some knowledge, is the test, the proof, and the measure of freedom.” Freedom is the power to live with undistorted knowledge.

In that aspect of his work, Descartes represents a stream of practicing philosophy as the craft of waking from history by encountering an immediate and elemental orientation grid. Starting from an encounter with the entity of your personal intelligence (elaborated by, for example, posting 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction). The perspective of such philosophy is an alternative to the perspectives of any socioeconomic class or ethnic “identity”. It is possible to find and know the ground of equality by re-orienting to that philosophical perspective.

The philosophical journey departs from the middle class comfort zone (or any class comfort zone) and finds a way to abide in the elements: nature, culture, monadic interiority (subjectivity), and the deliberate interconnectedness of intelligences. What is gained by casting off from standard cultural moorings is a mature innocence which is a revaluation of elemental reality, a new appreciation of monadic interiority, of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, of other intelligences with their own creative and unfathomable interiority, of the efforts and strategies required to build interconnectedness with other intelligences, the limitations of interconnectedness, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness.

To recapitulate and proceed from Descartes, the basic “I am thinking, therefor I exist” corresponds to monadic interiority: doubt, questions, curiosities are blossoms of a coherent entity of creative power. There is authentic personal identity in the unique non-actuality of each monadic interiority. Creative process is more than interiority, but not in the sense dear to American consumerism. When the economic atoms (persons) of capitalist theory think about creative dreams, of “dreaming big” they think the American dream: winning a new car, selecting property or distinctions to covet or desire, acquisition of external property or some other conspicuous symbol of being better than others. That’s a crime family perversion of the creative process. The creative process, understood in its transcendence, is its own reward. Creative process is more than interiority, without ignoring the intrinsic rewards of interiority. Monadic interiority is projected onto the forms of nature in a creation of culture, a transformation of nature into culture via the force of monadic interiority. Personally doubting everything possible, we still have the agency of a creative process guessing at and projecting a sustainable life among the elements, into increasingly remote and improbable futures, deriving meaning and grounding from the inner horizon, the force of creativity.

Equality and Monadic Interiority

With creative interiority there is no ground for hierarchy, and so the universe of monadic interiority is the font of equality. The genius of the non-actuality of interiority is its own reward, and equally so for everyone, establishing everyone’s justification by creative projection. (Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55): Subjectivity is truth.) To embrace your peculiar universe of elemental non-actuality is to make your creative process your new best friend, and not your only friend. Elemental reference experiences include the riches of embodiment and the creative process of intelligence, personal bearings and reorientation processes, an internal fountain of re-orientation possibilities (questions) building a bearing and expressing its voice. Practice a creative process, a voice-expressive process, and celebrate it in others.

Identity

You don’t lose identity in casting off from an ethnic cultural setting because identity is intelligence, the spiritual entity of monadic individuality, the entity holding and building your quests, vigils, and bearings. Intelligence is an embodied particular, an entity of individual agency. You don’t lose identity but instead you reclaim an identity which was previously hijacked by a hostile cultural setting. When you cast off from the moorings of control-faction motivational manipulation you aren’t left with nothing, but rather with a launch pad of political consciousness in a grid of elemental orientation. To have political consciousness is to be aware of yourself and every transcendent monad (person) as elemental in the political situation. Political consciousness is also awareness of the ideological force obstructing that vision of equality, awareness of the pervasive ideology which rationalizes the worldview of crime-families, the worldview of inequality, of the display, celebration, and enforcement of inequality, of factional control and motivational manipulation. The journey of political consciousness brings you away from culturally prescribed moorings and off on the quest for elemental moorings. When your motives are not being manipulated by promotors of the ideology of crime-families, you have a chance to develop your personal voice.

Descartes moved quickly from the brilliance of his self-discovery, impossible to doubt, to the dubious deduction of a benevolent God. He then used that finding as the basis for other comforting platitudes. Since Descartes went off the rails so quickly, it remains necessary to re-think the re-orientation he was attempting. From the encounter with monadic interiority, you can remodel a broader orientation from the other elements, resistances which draw us out from, or stand as a setting for, our own universe of non-actuality. (See posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture.)

Philosophy is the search for an elemental re-orientation grid that enables disengagement from cultural myths and narratives that depict a reality that is specifically distorted to serve the interests of particular factions such as the partnership of crime families and religious cults. That is the sense in which philosophy is a search for truth. Freedom is possible by undertaking the transcendental adventure, the philosophic journey to touchstones of reality beyond the distorting force-field of alpha-trophy-looting culture, to elemental experiences enabling a reorientation to a more reality-based sense of the situation, abandoning grids anchored to the dictator-alpha-god and his institutional avatars.

In an elemental re-orientation you have cultural-reality as a severely biased political construct, social hierarchies as mountains of counterfeit transcendence. Release that tainted grid by disengaging emotionally from the cultural matrix of inequality and personifications of non-embodied persons. With respect to those, freedom is disorganization. What you gain by casting off from the moorings of conventional ideals is your own monadic spiritual entity. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every social/cultural/economic category. That is a very substantial gain. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is all other human beings as transcendent, as monads of non-actuality, freedom and creativity, able to project original visions into nature and culture. That is a considerable promotion compared with their being cashed out as inmates of boxes on the economic hierarchy. What is gained is sensitivity to the transcendence of everyone around you, all universes of creative non-actuality. What makes sense in that reality is a nurturing attitude to people and honour for those devoted to nurturing.

As explored in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness, we retain our elemental engagements with other people, built from innate intelligent embodiment alone. Any two people can re-invent language from scratch, (language is inapplicable to a solitary intelligence) and since we always do some degree of that re-invention, society is not monolithic. Every family, friendship, partnership, and personal association is a separate cultural unit to some degree. Such units turn inward and motivate themselves. Human motivation doesn’t come mainly from above, from leadership, the civilization, or the nation. Those factions manipulate and prey on motivation that originally comes from individuals, partnerships, groups of people personally devoted to one another, and groups of mothers and children who collect and depend on each other for support in nurturing, for example. Withdrawing from the moorings of tainted political influences does not harm the basic engagements of interconnectedness and especially the conversation with children. As a force for social stability, the most vastly undervalued asset is children. Couples often reach a point of wanting to part company, but it is very rare for anyone to want to separate from their children until they reach the natural independence of maturity. Even parents who become alienated from adult children reach out again when grandchildren appear. The bond with children seems to be the strongest in human experience. (Children also keep re-inventing language instead of just passively learning it.) As a social foundation, then, we retain a focus on arrangements around the conversation with our children and the innocent love and playfulness they offer. That includes the reality and force of first-language-nurture culture, authentic attachment, elemental bonding, and sharing awareness. (Please see posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations.)

Also crucial among assets gained by elemental re-orientation is a newly innocent appreciation of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness. We have the calculus of work-costs and the need to construct a sustainable life with our powers of thinking, building a bearing, bearing into building a bearing. As explored in posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky, we have our embodied engagement with nature and a work-based cost-sense of reality as a particular, personal, situation. That mature innocence of intelligent embodiment is an intense appreciation of what it is to be alive.

Being Political

Elemental re-orientation brings a certain cultural and political mission, a re-conception and revaluation of freedom and equality. There is widening awareness of vicious intent in addition to incompetence and conceptual bankruptcy on display in the multitude of failures of the controlling faction. Since elemental re-orientation is based in intelligence, we have strategic thinking in our collection of assets: recognizing the enemy, and the enemy’s blind spots. From political consciousness there arises a clear vision of progress: cultivating and asserting the perspective of philosophic elementality, and bringing the orientation of first-language-nurture operations into balance with the lethal alpha-trophy-looting orientation. The problem is to think how it is possible to divert energy from the omnipotence of the ruling crime-family faction when it has projected its ideology so deeply into universal culture. The first strategic advance has to be withdrawing consent from the leadership of control factions, and assuming personal responsibility to re-orient to a realistic assessment of the political situation. The category of assets retained and re-valued also includes cultural elements, literacy and the free market in books and ideas, freebooting reading and writing, especially within the currently open blogosphere.

At the same time as freedom must be projected into the world of physics and politics, an individual’s happiness cannot depend on saving the world, on objective incentives and rewards, or on some possible future evolutionary development. Happiness must derive from expressive agency, bringing good things into the outward situation from the gusher of inward impulses, curiosities, and ideas. Everybody needs some stuff from markets but you can channel creative energy from within with relatively little of the stuff controlled by the hard-boy alpha-structure. It is possible to think of ways to work around the game being run by that structure.

The System of Reality

When we talk about freedom, we don’t mean anything involving separation from human interconnectedness and shared awareness. Rather, we want certain re-valuations, as outlined above, within that sharing of awareness. The system of reality is the political situation of intelligence: Multiple universes of freedom and creativity (monads) projecting into a common world of pre-determined nature and historically accumulated culture, the cultural elements of which generally prevent awareness of being one among multiple universes of freedom and creativity.

Because of the reality distortions essential to the cultural and political dominance of alpha-trophy-looting culture, there is some knowledge (truth) which is subversive. You don’t have a serious theory of knowledge without accounting for that, without including a political philosophy which traces the effects of the dominant factional ideology. Since politics is the dynamics of power and control over people and resources, including over what people are permitted to know, knowledge cannot be separated from politics. Fundamental questions of knowledge (including self-knowledge) cannot be separated from questions of the freedom enabled by individually innate power to elude cultural conditioning and find a grounding in personal innocence.

Individualism and Government

One proposal for individual action to reclaim self-possession in the face of the superstructure of control in modern societies is libertarian individualism. The libertarian individual is very much an alpha-trophy-looting type male, with a few surface modifications. This individualist is a self-sufficient, gun-toting, trigger happy, homesteading separatist, hoarding supplies for the fervently desired collapse of civilization. The only moral advantage of this figure over Genghis Khan, exemplar of the ideal alpha-trophy-looting type of cowboy, is that the libertarian’s declared ambition is self-reliance and self-sufficiency, harming no one unless they trespass on his hoarded property, of which he claims absolute possession, and which he is anxious to defend with his beloved guns. However, that moral advantage is fragile and mutable, since it contains enough self-absorption, self-admiration, and contempt for others to justify looting a few trophies and controlling other persons he considers unworthy of liberty, which is most other people.

As described in the sketch of sovereign law in Episode One, it is true that government as such has thoroughly questionable historical roots. However, efforts to sublimate the predatory impulses at the core of government have had some praiseworthy effects. If the sovereignty of law, the rule of law, could be based on a truly democratic foundation and (cautious) refresh mechanism, then the enforcement of sovereign law looks like the best way of constraining the predatory hostility of hard-boy crime families and religious cults. Those predators are never going away. Unfortunately, current mechanisms of representative democracy have been subverted and brought under the stealthy control of crime family capital, and so innovation in the mechanisms of democracy is necessary. For example, legislatures and parliaments should be conceived as juries and picked the way juries are picked, a random sampling made by lottery of the people governed. That would at least do away with financial and ideological control over hegemonic political parties and bring everybody into the political process. History has now demonstrated that elections do not produce democracy. Participation is more effective than representation.

Transcendental humanism forms the strongest foundation for democracy. If you want to assert bottom-up politics, as opposed to crime family politics, then you have to come from the equal transcendence of every individual as the most thoroughly authentic justification. Current models of democracy are compromises between the ruling crime families and people who perceive benefits from bargaining with them. The point here is that the total rejection of government that is fundamental to libertarian individualism is based on an assessment of government that is fatally over-simple, and on an assessment of individual human value that is inherently hierarchical. It seems likely that libertarians are a movement of nostalgia for feudalism, who reject government exactly because it might be a little democratic, and so contemptible on their view due to representing “everyman”, to whom the libertarian feels vastly superior. Libertarians insist on eliminating the nurturing functions of government but not so much the manly war-making functions.

The rugged libertarian is not the only alternative to Genghis Khan as an individualist. Transcendental humanism conceives individuals as transcendent, each a creative source of futurity, for example, but immeasurably enhanced by interconnectedness with a social arrangement prepared to nurture children and adults, and by contributing to a cultural accumulation over generations. The overall arc of transcendental humanism is a switch from the modern orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from absorbing everything from the outside environment (everything from consumer goods, to life agendas, and even personal identity and visions of reality) to an opposing orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from fountaining out creations from within. The term “self-possession” in transcendental humanism is meant to point at the latter orientation. That emphasis on universal ‘justification’ from within, as distinct from an emphasis on eliminating government, transforms the notion of individualism.

You can stay with the Dursleys if you want, or you can come to Hogwarts.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Waking From History, Episode Two

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Belittled

The hostile environment into which every infant monad arrives is one in which destiny for everyone is pre-determined by cultural forms. That is not to say that a particular destiny is pre-determined for every individual, but that personal destinies are conceived as fitting within cultural categories, within the social hierarchy of personal worth marked with accumulation of trophies or various tags of dignity or esteem. Whatever niche a person finds to occupy in the hierarchies, others take that niche as a license to stick a particular value to the person. Ordinary socially and culturally stipulated roles and assumptions limit individuals to categories each valued as more or less stupid, uneducated, culturally ignorant, petty, dull, slow, powerless, untalented, timid, uninteresting, confused, hopeless, and contemptible, all generally lined up with the categories of social class, racial and ethnic heritage, age, gender, property possession, and power level in the economic-institutional hierarchies. No matter what category a person falls into, it constricts, diminishes, writes off, and actually condemns every individual by assuming that they are contained and revealed by, and actually fit within, that category; but nobody does. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every cultural category.

The currently dominant reality-construct sanctions such grotesque distortions of reality in everyday discourse. The invisibility of the first-language-nurture faction as the foundation of civil society is another distortion, the glorification of war and war heroism is another. Behind all is a totalitarian ideology of the value of radical inequality. The very idea of political or corporate power is saturated with a grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, a crime family cultural tradition. That idea of power nearly excludes responsibility to others (nurture), and has far more in common with the idea of divine incorrigibility, as revealed in the leadership culture of secrecy and immunity from ordinary social norms.

How Can Freedom Be Possible in a Hostile Political Context?

The Olympic Games of London 2012 displayed perfectly the obsessive futility of lives based in the value system which celebrates inequality as such, measured with trophies. The consequence of the current obsession with destructive wars and other criminal activity demanded by alpha-trophy-looting cultural dominance is a state of being stuck as a civilization. That is echoed in the stuckness of ordinary adult mentality, the repetitive, obsessive monotony of aspirations and forms of life under this cultural regime.

A problem with the anti-war movement, in spite of its unquestionably legitimate and courageous aspirations, is that the ideological understanding of war and militarism that informs its operations is inadequate. If you want to come to terms with deep politics then it doesn’t get much deeper than the contradictory historical forces of alpha-trophy-looting culture against first-language-nurture culture. It doesn’t get any deeper than the contradiction between the profound equality of individually transcendent monads each worthy of nurture, and the top-down hierarchical constructs of alpha-trophy-looting ideology, truly fulfilled only in the march to war. The peace movement must face this question: how much middle-class self-admiration and assumed entitlement to privilege has to be given up along with the war industry?

The Comfort Zone

The crime family trophy-inequality culture is completely dominant, has always been dominant, and is currently advancing aggressively. In addition, the vast majority of educated, actively literate, people is deeply reluctant to leave the mental comfort zone of an orientation anchored to alpha-trophy-looting ideology, imitating reverence for a dictatorial father-God in some selection from: national patriotism, reliance on the legitimacy of institutional authority, and respecting meritocracy and the professional middle class as role models grounded in legitimizing mechanisms such as markets, money, and ultimately nature as depicted by scientific research and the system of education. (The adventure will be to leave all that behind forever. Does that stack up to a week in space?)

Prospects for adult mentality are stuck in those tired repetitious forms of self-blindness. It isn’t nature that interferes with our freedom, but the weight of culture. Educated skepticism and critical thinking are not enough in the current situation of overwhelming psychological manipulation by cultural messages. Freedom is possible only by undertaking a wholesale mental disengagement from the distortions of reality constructed throughout history, a releasing of all moorings to the standard reference points listed above, and a journey of re-orientation to a very different set. There is an ocean of creativity to be released when we shrug off the energy-sucking weight of leadership ideology in an adventure of personal transcendence.

Culture Consciousness and The Transcendence of Monads

Thinking through the distinction between nature and culture (as in posting 33, June 14, 2012, Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture) soon establishes a mental condition of culture-consciousness. In culture consciousness you have culture tagged in such a way that it can be bracketed to leave a remainder of innocence in pre-cultural embodiment experiences, metabolic measurement of nature, for example, the basics of orientation. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is your own transcendence, the transcendence of intelligence with respect to the brute actuality of nature. The transcendence of us monads is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within a monad’s own interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and away from others that are dreaded. The monadic entity that continuously re-orients itself is partly a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (stretch or reach) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of deliberate mutability, for example.

The freedom and creativity of monads is in being outside actuality in that way. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any monad constructs and continually refreshes its orientation or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both the interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences.

Surprise Horizons

People have an ongoing conversation about the objective world as a beautifully designed creation, inspiring wonder because we can’t experience the process of creation. We encounter actuality as a mystery (Why this instead of nothing?) and so as a horizon which blocks perception of creation. Whenever there is creativity there is a surprise horizon. The world of nature and culture is a surprise horizon for everyone, the centre of business and attention and yet crucially unpredictable to some extent, but there is another surprise horizon, namely an inward blind spot of subjective intelligence. Discovery of that inward horizon can be a vertiginous self-consciousness that has nothing to do with the way you appear to others, the social implications of your appearance or your accomplishments. That is why subjectivity is fundamental in spite of the great importance of social interconnectedness. Shaking loose from the self-presentation coaxed into a shape by social relationships, officially approved role models, and economic incentives and rewards is a crucial step toward taking possession of surprises from the personal horizon of non-actuality.

Creative Process

A truly remarkable part of writing almost anything is starting sentences and paragraphs without any distinct idea of what the ending will be, and then having something, something that makes sense and serves the purpose, arrive over some horizon of dreams. For example, the “language is sporting equipment” analogy wasn’t part of the original ideas for posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture, but it turned up when the sentence was launched, half written, and needed a sensible particular. Starting with nothing but a hunch about stages ahead is a way of prodding the inward surprise horizon and getting the creative fountain gushing a stream with a particular relevance. (Such a ‘leap of creativity’ looks like a general process of which Luther’s “leap of faith” is a particular instance.)

Divine Mind

What distinguishes the intelligence of persons from the imaginary mind of God is the quality of absolute power. The imaginary power of God is infinite and unlimited. Embodied persons do not have that power. We lack absolute power over nature in a couple of different senses. We do not have the power to suspend or change the laws of nature, including the law of conservation of matter/ energy. Additionally, we do not have the mental power to totally understand the patterns and dynamics of nature, even collectively after more than 5,000 years of continuous species literacy. The power-within-nature of an embodied individual is strictly local, anchored to what a particular body, and its voice, can perform. Persons cannot create a new nature to replace the nature already given, for example. However, creative power is not an all or nothing proposition. All the time human bodies project into nature unique patterning from their interior non-actuality.

The Richness of Non-Actuality

The richness of the non-actuality out of which, or within which, every individual intelligence encounters the actual world is important because, for one thing, not all of that non-actuality is an original creation of the individual intelligence, although much of it is. Any individual’s orientation of non-actuality can be manipulated culturally and politically to contain serious and avoidable distortions, as sketched in Episode One.

There are consequences, conclusions to be drawn, from the direct acquaintance with personal transcendence as described just above. One of those consequences is that, since individuals are not confined to actuality, or even to depictions of actuality taught them from cultural sources, each has a grounding to assess and critique the culture that surrounds them, from outside it, and the power to conceive something better.

The idea of individual innocence is meaningful and important.

Another consequence is that freedom is shown to have both inward and outward dimensions. Freedom requires some degree of options and mobility in the world of physics and economics, but that is not sufficient. Freedom also requires the inward nurture of personal questions, curiosities, impulses, and inspiration. The sufficiency of mobility, for example, has to be measured by that force from within. Closely involved with the experience of freedom, the self-awareness or sense of identity of the entity of personal individuality has both inward and outward dimensions. There is an unfathomable, “unplottable”, self-possession of every individual that makes cultural trophies irrelevant to the substance and creative force of any individual. Nobody can be assigned a value, because all are equal in creative transcendence, all are actively in the process of becoming something more.

Another consequence is to discredit any account of human nature as an emptiness that can only be made into something, or fulfilled, by consuming and internalizing substances originally external to it. Personal transcendence discredits the economic conception of human nature as a bundle of deficiencies and compulsive drives such as egoistic diminishment of others.

Creative people are ordinary people.

Any sustainable interconnectedness or political order must recognize the rich originality and peculiarity (or monadality) of each individual as an asset, a source, a value, instead of as a problem requiring cultural categories such as heresy and treason. Individuals are contributors to culture and interconnectedness, and strengthened as such by appropriate nurture.

The currently dominant reality-construct of the alpha-trophy-looting cultural faction is a form of insanity, far more lethal than any kind of skeptical philosophy or existential uncertainty.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking

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Culture Consciousness

In the science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye, from 1974, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the imagined system of space travel involves something like ‘worm holes’ which are shortcuts between fixed points at widely distant areas of galactic space. One especially important worm hole has an opening so close to the surface of a star that any ship emerging from the hole without appropriate shielding is immediately destroyed. Considering this as an analogy, individual intelligences arrive into cultural interconnectedness in a similar way, and almost literally soak up with their mother’s milk a culture shaped by a hostile ideology of alpha-trophy-looting design.

Given the enormous joys, pleasures, and advantages for us monads in sharing intelligence by forming attachments (as described in posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture and in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness), it is inevitable that structures of artifacts, imitated gestures, and ways of living are going to accumulate rapidly in clusters of people. Soon every infant arrives into a situation of vital support already richly elaborated by a culture made from the creative projections of past generations, most of those projections now alienated from their ad hoc, accidental, and personally inventive origins, and consequently now stipulated as sacred traditions divinely pre-ordained or as necessities of nature.

Every child monad (that is, an original locus of creativity and freedom) is engulfed on arrival by brute nature through embodiment, but every child is also engulfed by the culture carried in the bearings of the caregiving individuals who nurture and share awareness with him or her and who depict “the way we live” by carrying on their lives within the child’s sensitivities. The long hours of first-language-nurture face and voice time with mother, the bonding and shared awareness from that gesture-imitation play, accumulate for an eternity (the passing of time speeds up dramatically with increasing age) before the child begins to use his or her own body to move about and explore the cost-benefit shape of nature. So interconnectedness and some culture come before the full-bodied encounter with nature.

(The Mote in God’s Eye, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Published by: Pocket Books, Mass Market Paperback: 592 pages, ISBN-10: 0671741926, ISBN-13: 978-0671741921.)

Law as a Microcosm of Culture and History

Sovereign law is connected by history to two deeply suspect social phenomena, namely religious cults, especially those with written teachings of a prophet or divine avatar, and crime families which exercise control by force over the population of a certain turf or territory. (By far most human societies prior to modern democracies have been brutal dictatorial empires controlled by some variant of a crime family in partnership with religious cults.) Both religious cults and crime families are parasitic on self-subsistent groups of families carrying within themselves a cultural heritage of surviving and raising children within the indifferent environment on the surface of planet Earth. So, religious cults, crime families, and self-subsistent first-language-nurture collectives are three fundamental engines of culture and history.

A religious focus on divinely inspired writings tends to interpret those writings as containing divine commands (super-parental commands), an original paradigm of law. The three Abrahamic religions all exemplify how cultures, organizations, and traditions of scholarly study, writing, and ongoing interpretation of holy books grow into a bridge between refined religious orthodoxy and the control of general communal behaviour by pervasively applicable laws. Related to that, law historically exemplifies the mystique of written language. Words were once widely thought to be the mechanism of divine creation and of divine action in general (Logos). The rule of law is the rule of words engraved in a medium which points toward eternity, a work of cultured craft achieving a sublime unification of ethereal words with an elemental and enduring material. Such engraved figures or characters were suspected of sharing in the power of charms and talismans.

Another, closely related, paradigm of compulsory (parental) command is the decree of the effective local warlord, chief of the most powerful crime family. Such organizations reach a point of wanting to regularize, institutionalize, and legitimize their control over a population by supplementing the personal whims of the alpha-chief with enduring public lists of decrees to form an orderly and predictable framework of expectation and performance in the relationship between parasitic crime family and host population, and even impose their ideas of order within the primordial subsistence collective which is the effective grounding of the whole social arrangement.

Such is the origin of law. The organizations of the religious source and the crime family source tend to co-operate and form a partnership to mutually strengthen one another and share in enjoying the “surplus” produced by the primordial collectives under their mutual control. All along the primordial collectives carry on with their focus on raising children.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by: Anchor (October 11, 1977), Paperback: 340 pages, ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. (Plagues and Peoples specifically identifies aristocracies as parasitic plagues. See pp. 7-13.)

Infant Monads

That brief overview of the origins of law in human culture is a portrait in miniature of the universal history of culture. From time immemorial, we monads arrive as infants into a culture in which the most extreme and grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, in the form of crime family ideology, has over-asserted itself to the detriment of the whole system but especially to the detriment of the first-language-nurture segment of the social system. The fundamental parental duality, alpha-trophy-looting father versus first-language-nurture mother, projects itself onto the universal politics of human cultures. Human culture is so dominated by the crime-family caricature of masculinity that the natural influence and cultural expression of the common feminine focuses is disastrously suppressed. There is almost a sense of biological determinism to this problem as an obstacle to be encountered by any interconnectedness of monads which is embodied and gendered on the human model. Societies which have the sense to re-balance to give the feminine first-language-nurture segment equal recognition and cultural expression get to survive and advance. Societies that get stuck in masculine over-assertion reach a point of effective self-destruction.

Energy Control and Hard-Boy Gangs

Freedom in the world of physics is largely a matter of controlling the movement and application of energy, from sources as various as (but not limited to) food, the muscles of animals, flowing water, coal, and oil. Disputes and rivalries over control of energy on a large scale have been dominated by gangs of hard boys. The ordinary individual has little-to-no leverage against those gangs, and no one should have their day-to-day happiness depend on fixing the hard-boy problem. People equipped to tackle that problem directly become the next dynasty of gang-boys. Strategically, that is why revolutions don’t work, but reformations sometimes do. Significant progressive change in economics, politics, and culture was accomplished from small beginnings around the arrival of text printing technology in the middle of the fifteenth century, culminating during the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven by ideas of individual dignity and empowerment from literacy and philosophical ideas of human rationality. Some, but not all, of that has been blunted or rolled back, and the hard-boy regressive forces are still operating.

To this day, even in the most modern and scientifically advanced nations, the ethos and ideology of the class of people which owns and controls capital, the leadership or control class, is a tweaked version of crime family ideology. The core ethos of the crime-family faction is monopoly, full-spectrum dominance by violence and the elimination of potential competition and alternative visions, the alpha-trophy-looting ethos. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than suppress alternative and dissident voices, especially the values expressed in the segment of society devoted to nurturing children and engaging children in the learning of their first language. The result of the dominance of the hard-boy faction is a narrow-spectrum conception of what is possible, resulting in futile political discourse within nominally advanced and democratic political entities, all due to factional control by an ethos dedicated to celebrating inequality as such, to celebrating the dominant faction’s omnipotence and transcendent immunity (a mockery of authentic transcendence).

Transition to Modernity, the Schematic Version

Cast of characters: 1) rural-military crime families, 2) urban-commercial-financial crime families. The post-Roman hegemony of 1) in Europe was eventually followed by the rise and hegemony of 2), but 2) continued to use the mechanisms of social control employed by 1), which were mainly the strict organization of war and religion. In addition, 2) added some of their own techniques such as alienation from land and total dependence on markets, debt, employment for wages, and new commercial narratives delivered outside churches via novel mechanisms of communication.

The controlling faction is more stealthy now than in historical periods when the sovereignty of the most powerful crime families, aristocracy and monarchy, was overt. The new crime family oligarchy is far less open in its economic and political control, masked by the trappings of democracy. Also, a more elaborate legitimizing ideology has penetrated the worldview of all classes through the agency of mass media, commercial advertising, glorification of the Olympic Games and professional sport, and the vilification and dehumanization of dissident or alternative political visions. Mass media have become incomparably more penetrating into individual consciousness, and the predominance of messages carried, not only in explicit sales promotion, is controlled by concentrated media ownership. The educational and research systems are similarly controlled by the necessity of direct funding from private or investor/ donor controlled organizations, which also arrange behind the scenes for restrictions on public funding of education.

Leadership Incompetence

The current twin crises in global economy and in geopolitical conflict clearly establish the incompetence of the control faction. The economic/ financial crisis blossomed in 2007-08 after decades of incompetent public policy, and the geopolitical conflict might be said to have blossomed after 2001, but really goes to the core of American ambitions boosted in the wake of WWII and again after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Keep in mind that, in accordance with the theory proclaimed by the leadership class, the leadership structure is a meritocracy, so those with the most power, influence, and effect are the most talented leaders, the best of the best. It cannot be contested, then, that the ongoing crises just mentioned reveal the incompetence of the best of the leadership class.

Neither the economic crisis nor the geopolitical crisis have been brought into being by the desires and efforts of the common majority of people in any country or from any ethnic cultural tradition. Both the economic crisis and the geopolitical crises are manifestations of a general cultural problem, namely the excessive power and influence of groups expressing a particular ethos, an ethos hatched in the history of crime families, and now faced with a global situation beyond its competence.

The incompetence of the leadership class is firmly rooted in the basic value system they champion and express, namely the crime-family derived alpha-trophy-looting worldview. The heart of that worldview is revealed in academic economic theory and social philosophy, in which self-interest and egoism are advanced as the universal human motivating forces. The point that is proved by the philosophical emphasis on egoism and atomic self-interest, in combination with the common experience of mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that academic emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is regarded with contempt and so largely unknown by the egoist/ self-interest faction. The incompetence of the leadership class is an inevitable expression of the narrowness of its competitive egoistic culture.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Monadology

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Idea of Monads from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was ended by a set of treaties, collectively called The Peace of Westphalia, achieved when Leibniz was two years old. In the course of that war, Leibniz’ native Germany had been devastated and significantly reduced in population by the presence, passage, and battles of numerous marauding field armies. Leibniz, like Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in France a generation earlier, was spotted as gifted as a child. Both were educated to be lawyers, but left enduring legacies as geniuses in mathematics and philosophy. Like Descartes, Leibniz was (just as Spinoza, and Kant) a lifelong bachelor. Leibniz was employed as an administrator, researcher, diplomat, and advisor by aristocratic ruling families in Germany. Although Leibniz was brought up in a Lutheran culture, he experienced scholastic/ Aristotelian (Catholic) influences at university and also shows distinctly Calvinist tendencies of thought. Leibniz dreamed of reconciling science with Christian orthodoxy, and even of arranging the reunification of Protestant sects with the organization of Catholicism to heal the schisms fragmenting Christendom, schisms which had been used as justifications for the officially commanded mass murder, pillage, and sexual assault called the Thirty Years War.

Mathematics and Philosophy

Mathematics has been one of the most powerful inspirations for philosophy, and especially for idealism and rationalism. Mathematics suggests an ideal world of perfect and eternal objects: geometric figures, numbers, axiomatic principles, functions, and operators. Mathematics belongs in a category of apparently ideal objects, but is special in supporting a set of rules, axioms, and procedures by which reasoning, calculation, and deduction can generate conclusions which must be true when the initial premises are true. The discovery of mathematics, to the ancient Greeks a realm of eternal truths somehow structured just “behind” the visible world, provided an invitation to remove the rowdy personalities of gods and spirits from the invisible transcendent world at the same time as recreating the transcendent as the proper object of rigorous thought. Mathematics suggests control of the inwardness of mental processes that forms a firm foundation for special knowledge of the objective environment.

The contribution of mathematics as an inspiration for philosophy has included serving as a model of transcendence or of transcendent reality. Mathematical systems of ideas have a certain kind of transcendence with respect to the work-a-day world. The mathematical type of transcendence does not have much to do with freedom or creativity as long as the mathematical ideas are understood as existing independently of the person thinking them, although Stoics might see such ideas as a refuge in which the rationality of personal intelligence could find a grounding from which to assert itself against disruptive episodes of emotion. Mathematical systems have the transcendence of incorporeality, perfection, and eternity, rather than the transcendence of freedom and creativity. (The transcendence of incorporeality turns up also in the meaning of “sacrifice”. To sacrifice something is to make it sacred (transcendent) by translating it from its corporeal existence into incorporeality, by burning it, for example.) The transcendence of mathematical systems is inseparable from ideality but only the passive aspect of ideality, whereas the more important transcendence is in the active agency of ideality, namely subjective intelligence.

Mathematicians, such as Leibniz, seem to hold special mathematical patterns and systems in their minds so vividly and elaborately that, within their experience, those systems have the reality of alternate worlds or even as worlds with a reality superior to the one normally perceived. When people with those experiences turn to questions about the relationship between ordinary impressions of the world and the kind of knowledge that can be justified by the strictest rationality, they often envision startling discontinuities between apparent reality and ultimate reality, as exemplified just below. That peculiarity of experience, probably shared by computer programmers and computer game architects, should not be disregarded or explained away too confidently. Although the examples of philosophical mathematicians tend to be privileged and pampered adult males, there is a certain kind of childlike innocence to their distracted engagement with the world of ordinary impressions, an innocence that has some common ground with everyone’s experience.

Monadology

Consider Leibniz’s idea of ‘monads’ as a way of conceiving individual subjectivities as separate universes, presented on this blog as the system of reality ‘transcendental humanism’. Leibniz’ idea of a ‘monad’ incorporates three previously familiar ideas: 1) Aristotle’s idea of particular substances, in which qualities inhere, 2) the grammatical (logical) subject, in which predicates inhere, and 3) everyone’s experience of personal subjectivity. The result is the monad, the ‘spiritual’ entity which is an individual person, a self-contained mind, an atomic theatre of experience. For Leibniz, monads are the entities created by God, the fundamental substances that make up the world. However, monads are not like the atoms of modern science that move about and transform, by electromagnetic bonding, into compounds with different characteristics. The Leibnizian monad cannot be said to move or to combine with others. It occupies a place without taking up space, in a way possibly similar to Platonic Ideas, whatever that may be. On the model of Aristotelian substances, each monad is unique, separate, and independent; but also, as “windowless”, completely closed to anything beyond itself. Each monad is a sort of absolute atom or separate universe, completely self-sufficient and independent of every other, and yet “mirroring” every other monad internally. For Leibniz, monads are reality, the metaphysical Being behind ordinary appearances of things in the world, and yet monads have no role in causing the appearances of our familiar world. All experiences of any monad (including your experiences and my experiences) are completely internal to the monad and completely pre-programmed by God, but programmed in such a way that the experiences are a “mirroring” of what is going on with the other monads.

For Leibniz, God, in his work of creation, calculated an exquisite balance between the principle of plenitude and the principle of simplicity to derive the best of all possible worlds, completely determined in every detail from the instant of creation. Inspired by the theory of ‘occasionalism’ proposed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), Leibniz accepted that physical cause-effect was a false impression from taking appearances too uncritically at face value. (David Hume (1711-76) was later to repeat that familiar denial of efficacy in cause-effect interactions, merely altering outright denial into skepticism.) On Leibniz’ view, every particle (Aristotelian substance) of the extended world was individually pre-programmed with all changes and movements it would ever have, and the whole set of those particles were coordinated in advance so as to appear as if chains of cause and effect were running their course. For Leibniz, “thought” in some sense is a fundamental feature of every particle or monad. Thought has no causal force, but rather is “reflective” of the ambient universe. That reflection of the world in the thought of every monad does not derive from contact or mutual sensitivity between particles. Leibniz’s monads must be entirely inward because they are windowless. The reflection of the world in thought is just pre-established in each mind by God the creator. The rest of the world cannot penetrate monads in any way. The only condition that prevents them from being truly separate universes or separate worlds is that they are each part of God’s work of creation, and in that sense all are coordinated in a higher-order universal Being.

Individuals are distinct, on Leibniz’s view, as isolated monads, but they have no power or freedom since their whole course of specific experiences is pre-ordained by God. The crucial dualism in the thought of Leibniz is between God and His distinctly lower creation. Leibniz’ vision did preserve the rationalist unity of language, thought, and (non-human) nature as co-ordinated features of God’s creation. Hume later presented, without appealing to the agency of God, another version of that same Calvinistic picture of the powerless isolation of every individual.

The discontinuity between Leibniz’ vision of metaphysical reality (the monads) and ordinary appearances was one of the most important inspirations for the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant was convinced by Leibniz and Hume on the point of individuals being very nearly “windowless monads”, but he could not accept the predetermined experience and the predetermined harmony imagined by Leibniz, nor could he accept Hume’s global skepticism. Kant’s transcendental idealism was an effort to transport individual freedom (transcendence) from the legacy of Stoicism (revived by Luther) into the mental scheme of modernity, to preserve the sense of transcendence and in doing so save modernity from descent into abject bourgeois philistinism. In that he was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). Kant followed up Leibniz by concluding that the real world (noumena) was so different from the apparent world (phenomena) that 1) most of what we experience as “appearances” is contributed by our own nature as entities of intelligence, and 2) it is simply impossible to say anything meaningful about the noumenal Being behind appearances.

The metaphysical system of monads conceived by Leibniz relies on the foundation of the Christian God, exercising an absolute power of absolute rationality, and that has to be recognized as an untenable fantasy. Reasons for rejecting any idea of disembodied intelligence have been presented in previous postings, such as posting 32, May 17, 2012, Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular, and posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism. However, what Leibniz got right was the internal uniqueness of each subjectivity, along with a high degree of internal self-sufficiency to the entity of an individual intelligence. Leibniz’ monads illustrate the extreme discontinuity between the internality of experience and anything beyond itself, the discontinuity between a sensed placement or situation, as experienced internally (subjectively) by a person, and the actuality of nature. Recall that each intelligence is a self-constructed orientation (a bearing) within a grid of non-actuality consisting of accumulated and integrated memories, more or less desperate hopes and fears, mutually exclusive imagined possibilities, judgments of probabilities, and intentions, for example, none of which exists in the brute actuality of ambient nature. The internality of any particular intelligence has very little immediate congruity or continuity with any actuality beyond itself.

Major renovations are required to make Leibniz’ monads suitable for transcendental humanism. First, the idea of complete pre-determination by a personified and disembodied super-parent has to be removed. However, if God is not the source of an individual’s experiences, then some other account must be provided for those experiences. In other words, without God’s (or some other source’s) total pre-programming, the monads can’t be windowless and still have anything like ordinary experience. Kant removed a need for God’s agency in supplying experience by finding two replacement sources, an internal subjective source which he called “concepts” (a manifestation of personal intelligence), and an external source which he called “intuitions” (of phenomena). Departing from the particulars of Kant’s replacements, another way of describing that would be as an inward force of questioning intelligence encountering and making sense of the hard ground of nature. In spite of the discontinuity between their sense of the world and the brute actuality of the world, monads have, from their embodied activities, some accumulated familiarity with, or knowledge of, a world around them. In transcendental humanism the monads are not windowless, but rather have the elaborate windows of active and sensitive embodiment through which to accumulate experience of opening within a single world of nature and cultures, which multitudes of monads all share, a world within which each monad finds himself or herself, finds other monads, and constructs interactions and interconnections with them. Monads have both windows and effective force in creating their own experience.

Homage

The impressions of historical persons and ideas presented in this posting were informed at various stages of their development by the following works, which I salute and celebrate as inspirations, as well as sources of pleasure and excitement. Nobody could share my experience of reading these books and then agree with the proposition that all life is suffering. Faults in any of these postings are entirely my own.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason, written by: Steven Nadler, Published by: Princeton University Press (Mar 15 2010), Paperback: 320 pages, ISBN-10: 0691145318, ISBN-13: 978-0691145310.
(This is an engagingly written and wonderfully clear presentation of philosophical issues in Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Spinoza. It places these persons and issues very vividly in Paris during the 1670’s along with following developments.)

The Courtier And The Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, written by Matthew Stewart, Published by: WW Norton (Dec 27 2005), Hardcover: 320 pages, ISBN: 0393058980.
(The pleasure of reading this re-excited my interest in the history of philosophy after a lull. Stewart accomplishes the difficult feat of placing philosophical thinking within its cultural and historical setting in such a way as to recreate its drama and excitement for specific individuals and for the course of history, and making it a really good read. It inspired me to read the book listed next.)

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by: Oxford University Press (July 2002), Paperback: 832 pages, ISBN: 0199254567.
(I read this during the spring of 2006, and found it deeply absorbing. It was packed with information I did not know and it remained readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things. It covers a fascinating period that has been a cultural blind spot for a long time.)

My impressions of Kant have benefited from my reading these:

Introduction to German Philosophy : From Kant to Habermas, written by Andrew Bowie, Published by: Polity Press (Oct 1, 2003), Paperback: 304 pages, ISBN: 0745625711.
(This is another one of those accessible presentations of vast research and insight. It shows modern philosophy as entirely bound up with the social transfiguration from Christendom/Old Regime to Modernity.)

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (April 1, 2001); Paperback: 192 pages, ISBN-10: 0691086621, ( ISBN-13: 978-0691086620).

German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, written by Terry Pinkard, Published by: Cambridge University Press (September 16, 2002), Paperback: 392 pages, ISBN-10: 0521663814, ISBN-13: 978-0521663816.

The following books informed my overview of the history of philosophy.

A History of Philosophy (Book One: Vol. I – Greece & Rome; Vol. II – Augustine to Scotus; Vol. III -Ockham to Suarez), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 479 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230311, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230315).

A History of Philosophy (Book Two: Volume IV – Descartes to Leibniz; Volume V – Hobbes to Hume; Volume VI – Wolff to Kant), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 509 pages, ISBN-10: 038523032X, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230322).

A History of Philosophy: Book Three (Volume VII, Fichte to Nietzsche, Volume VIII, Bentham to Russell, Volume IX, Maine De Biran to Sartre), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 480 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230338, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230339).

History of Philosophy (Historia de la Filosofia), written by Julian Marias, translated from Spanish to English by Stanley Appelbaum and Clarence C. Strowbridge, Published by: Dover Publications; 22nd edition (June 1, 1967), Paperback: 505 pages, ISBN-10: 0486217396, ISBN-13: 978-0486217390.

A History of Western Philosophy, written by Bertrand Russell, Published by Routledge; New edition (2000), Paperback: 848 pages, ISBN-10: 0415228549, ISBN-13: 978-0415228541. (Russell claims special expertise on Leibniz.)

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), Paperback: 824 pages, ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

As a thoughtful overview of the history of philosophy set within a beautifully atmospheric story of mystery and discovery, there is this gift from Norway:

Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, written by Jostein Gaarder, translated from Norwegian to English by Paulette Moller (copyright 1994), Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (ISBN-10: 0374530718, ISBN-13: 978-0374530716).
(Gaarder credits the Roman author Cicero (106-43 B.C.) with forming the concept “humanism”, “a view of life that has the individual as its central focus.”)

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.