Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular

17 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Transcendence

It will be easier to make sense of this post in the context provided by these previous posts: post 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity
post 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky
post 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction
post 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence
post 23, March 8, 2012, The Brute Actuality of Nature

Since nature is brute actuality, there is no time in nature. In nature, the existence of this instant of actuality specifically and categorically excludes the actual existence of all other instants. Awareness of time, then, is the self-awareness of intelligence, and time is the presence of intelligence. The presence of intelligence is a particularity, an individuality, and not a universally distributed presence, not an omnipresent beholding, not cosmic sensitivity or cosmic consciousness. Its particularity is in its being in a particular life, in its placement, limitation, and ongoing dependence on an immediate environment for constructing an increasingly remote and increasingly improbable future. The particularity of intelligence is in its incomplete sensitivities and limited access to the cosmos. Its access to the cosmos is only a point located within the cosmos, but a point with some limited mobility and longevity. Because intelligence is such an extreme particularity, it must assert itself actively even to exist. That is how the agency of intelligence is inseparable from its particularity. Its power is limited to its particular point, located at a point, and is not universally uniform. It must continually draw energy from the local environment and re-direct that energy metabolically into first conceiving and then enacting a reshaping of the environment into something sheltering, nurturing, and sustaining, into a home. That process depletes its energy in strenuous effort, but in addition to constructing temporal longevity the effort also creates an expression or externalization of the elusive and fragile existence of that intelligence.

The idea of freedom is inseparable from the particularity of any intelligence and the existential necessity or impulse to overcome or go beyond immediate particularity. The construct of time-consciousness is a transcendence of the primordial particularity of any intelligence, because nothing could be more vanishingly particular, in spite of its universal distribution and uniformity, than the brute actuality of nature, where time is impossible. Nature cannot overcome its particularity because past and future can never be actual. Only an intelligence overcomes its particularity, and that is the transcendence of intelligence. Immutable particularity is unfreedom. Freedom is overcoming particularity. Intelligence overcomes its particularity because it is not limited to actuality. It creates for itself a variety of ‘pretend’ orientations or situations that are not actual and then depletes its metabolic energy making some of them actual. Time consciousness is consciousness of both personal particularity and the immediate overcoming of that particularity in an oriented or pointed exertion or assertion of agency in imposing a pretended situation on brute actuality. Orientation is that complex moment of deliberate, pointed, and effortful overcoming of particularity. We have no pre-deliberation in creating basic time-consciousness, so it is not entirely an artifact of intelligence, but with longevity time-consciousness increasingly becomes an artifact of deliberative intelligence.

The particularity of an intelligence cannot be separated from the overcoming of its particularity. That overcoming of particularity is the agency of intelligence. To survive is to overcome particularity, and it takes embodied effort in addition to the transcendent sensitivity and creative orientation powers of intelligence. Overcoming particularity is partly overcoming embodiment through consciousness of time and in pretending orientations and other transcendent acts of intelligence. However, embodiment cannot be abandoned because metabolic experiences of depletion and restoration, cost and benefit, are part of the personal sense of time.

There is freedom in mobility and in longevity because of time-consciousness. Time-consciousness contains the experience of freedom: you pretend another situation (another world) accessible by particular exertions through which you can push and pull the environment into becoming that foreseen situation, and at every stage of the actual creation you remember your personal agency creating the transfiguration. The arc of fatigue, depletion, and restoration of your metabolic-muscular condition is a crucial part of that memory. Such time-consciousness is a transcendence of particularity. So again, time consciousness is the presence of an intelligence.

Intelligence cannot be anything complete, bounded, or finalized because it is the creative power to overcome its own particularity. If nature is brute actuality, then intelligence is potential, the power and necessity of self-invention. Philosophical humanism is the recognition of individual self-invention. The engine of intelligent agency isn’t hiding anywhere because it is potential rather than actuality. Philosophers such as David Hume expressed surprise about the indeterminacy of an entity of intelligence, and yet achieving and maintaining indeterminacy is crucial to intelligence.

The kind of overcoming-of-particularity that intelligence does still carries its particularity with it. It does not annihilate its particularity but merely prevents it from being perfect or complete particularity. It is not all or nothing, nor is it once for all. The effort of overcoming is ongoing. Intelligence keeps opening its particularity enough to prevent its complete finality, to prevent its being quite determinate, to prevent it becoming the abyss of unfreedom. The overcoming is elaborating, interpolating, cultivating, or enlarging its particularity rather than annihilating it. So intelligent agency is not ultimately transferrable or alienable from its particularity. It is not imported from an external source somewhere such as a separate deity, demon, or human collective. Agency (freedom) cannot ultimately belong to or derive from the polis or the village or the common language and culture, or “the people”, or a committee; but rather it expresses each, every, and any particular embodied intelligence.

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Gender culture, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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As an individual subjective intelligence, you wake up in innocence and look around to get your bearings. You concentrate on discovering your situation, where you are and what’s going on around you that bears on your welfare and prospects. In that process you discover culture and politics, and you discover that you are in the middle of a raging war that is, in effect, a great secret because hardly anyone notices it. It is a psychological war, a war of incompatible visions, and it looks like the bad guys have the upper hand.

This blog, In the Blind Spot, generally explores the history and current state of that war, the rivalry and combat between two visions of the human situation, two very old enemies. On one side is the philosophical vision of people as individually transcendent intelligences, the tradition of humanist rationalism and Stoicism, for example. My attempts at interpreting and extending that tradition are typically in aid of clarifying the overall situation of individual subjectivity: in aid of self-discovery, self-possession, personal empowerment, and voice. Postings of that kind include:
Encountering subjectivity
Existential non-appearance
What is being called thinking?
The transcendence of intelligence
The brute actuality of nature

If we can characterize modernity roughly as the era of state sovereignty, science, money, human rights, and proletarian literacy, then the presence of the last two items means the vision of individual transcendence has not been utterly defeated. In humanism, the legacy of classical heroism is manifested in a narrative of the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, classical heroism turned inward and made universal. That has been an influence against the legitimacy of slavery and abuse. We could not call any society modern that accepts slavery. The ownership class claims the freedom to enslave workers (value them less so to achieve and depict radical inequality in material displays), but in modernity the freedom to enslave confronts humanist individual dignity. Literacy also has been crucial because voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence. Authorship engraves and extends a voice beyond the ephemerality of conversation and speech. The literary voice is both public and private, internal and external, straddling the distinction. Reading and writing, literacy, has been a technology of honouring individual voices. Having a voice is godlike, that is, transcendent. Holy books have been thought to carry the divine voice.

The opposing vision in this great war is the religious vision of monotheistic divine dictatorship and the radical inequality that follows from it. That vision of divine dictatorship is cultural malware which infects and infests the great human interconnectedness. With the spread and dominance of the monotheistic religious traditions over the homelands of Hellenistic humanism, there descended a philosophical dark age that began under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I (347-395 A.D.). The dark age extended roughly from 380, when Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity the only legitimate religion of the Roman Empire, until well after Martin Luther (1483-1546) began a revival of something like Stoic humanism. That long age was dark because there were insane punishments for thinking unorthodox thoughts. The thirteenth century struggle in which the Roman Church exterminated the Cathars of Languedoc was a defining moment in which the Church revealed its mission of death-grip social control. In the case of the Cathars, the Church first applied its old technique, launching a crusade (1209-29), and then followed up with a special invention for the purpose: the Inquisition (1233). The murder of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), executed by burning alive by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, is a late example of that same vicious repression. Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as such did not burn anyone, no matter how much disagreement there might be. Burning people was a Christian speciality.

The debate or war between the monotheistic worldview of divine dictatorship and the philosophical tradition of individual transcendence is a clash of cultures within western civilization itself. That culture clash is as lethal as any between different civilizations. It is also asymmetrical warfare, since the divine dictatorship fable was, from the beginning, and continues to support, a projection of the archaic alpha-trophy-looting model of predatory masculinity. The war is not a contest for power, but rather a lust for and possession of power on one side against an urge for self-possession and freedom on the other. Capitalist alpha-trophy-looting culture (ATL) is the modern face of the ancient malware that is divine dictatorship, reinforced in post-Roman Europe with a glorification of looting by nomadic invaders from the north-east. Capitalist sovereignty draws its brutality, energy, and orientation from that tradition, and has been extending its dominance. Nothing is gained through stopping the vision-war by giving up, but only by defeating the oppression. Blog postings that map out that historical drama are:
The Two Traditions
Reality as a Construct for Concealing Class War
Gender Culture in the Political Situation
Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom
Theological Black Holes

The war of visions is not a closed system, however. A third cultural force and tradition was identified in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations, and then elaborated in posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation, namely the female-carried culture of first language acquisition and nurture (FLN – first-language-nurture). First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it continuously day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. That third force carries far more antiquity, energy, and potential than the philosophical tradition, and it would be hopeful if those forces could be allies in creating alternatives excluding the common enemy.

The raging of the vision-war came into focus in the original attempt to find bearings as a subjective intelligence, waking up in innocence and concerned about the prospects for a satisfying life. The vision-war is of crucial importance but is not the whole story in the problematic situation of any subjectivity. There is something like an innate subjective imperative to discover itself, arising from the fact that subjectivity seems to have a blind spot and in fact itself resides in that blind spot. The elusiveness of self-identification highlights the fact that both inward and outward investigations are crucial in the effort to establish personal bearings. A special sort of mirror is needed to show a blind spot containing a force with no face, but the project of inward investigation has been marginal among commonly respected human efforts. There is a cultural history in that as well, the same history that features the war of the two visions. A primordial failure to reflect on subjectivity, inwardness, maroons us on a kind of surface of subjectivity, stranded within external surroundings. Lacking the grounding of self-awareness, we are enabled to feel and grasp our own being only by accomplishing overt gestures and representations, often shaped by the needs of simple survival, and often grandiose demonstrations supposed to defy any hints of uncertainty, to express contemptuous rejection of elusive inwardness. That orientation became a shell, comfortable, habitual, and culturally normal. Within that orientation of strident outwardness the heroes and exemplars of confident human power would always be the alpha trophy accumulators, who then project their own version of personification onto the cosmos as the father-god, the ultimate dictator and war-god. The counterweight to that can be only the assertion of inwardness, and so we are brought back again to that first set of postings on interpreting and extending the tradition of individual transcendence.

This narrative is a small catalog of reference points for an alternative, elemental, orientation.

The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Narrative, Subjectivity

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The situation of any person is far more complicated than location in a material environment (being-there), although placement in a material environment is elemental. Every person is also situated within a human environment and the human environment is always in an historical drift. It is useful to pick out ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ aspects of that human environment, but political aspects are just particular features of the cultural situation. Considering both the human and material features of the environment, what any individual encounters outwardly is material determinism and cultural and political control. That is the context in which the question “How can freedom be possible?” has to be answered.

The Social Life of Intelligence

In general, any person seeks to maximize the experience of intelligence or personality through creating mutual reflections or resonances with other intelligent entities. Although questioning is peculiarly individual, we all have questioning, voice, and existence-in-time in common as intelligent entities. Culture is poorly understood, but builds from this: imitation communicates intelligence; rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is a declaration of intelligence, an odd sort of self-declaration: “I can re-create from myself all that is external. As intelligence, I contain everything.” It is the beginning of the human social-nature. Imitation has such power just because rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is an intelligent act, a communication of deliberative intelligence. That is the whole basis of culture. Conversation is an intelligence game, acts of clear repetition, but each with a relevant novelty thrown in as a personal contribution and as an invitation for a further collective movement. Music may focus the natural rhythms of the body, but it takes them into a game of abstract expectation and surprise, a conversation of pure intelligence. The experience of intelligence is a subjective value, that is, we keep wanting more.

In addition to forms of subjectivity such as curiosity, appetites, and expressive impulses, there is that force of mutual attachment which is neither gravitational, electro-magnetic, nor nuclear, but a force peculiar to intelligences. The force of mutual attachment has different aspects, including an orientation toward sources of attention, kisses, help, food, and the reflection of intelligence. We experience our nature best, in some ways, in resonance with other time-conscious entities, and so we come to absorb ourselves in relationships with and imitations of other people. An enlargement of the sense of intelligence is accomplished by imitating socially modeled activities: the way we live in our group, and that situates the imitating person as the medium needed by cultural forms to propagate through yet another generation. Mutual stimulation is natural to time-conscious entities, but the resulting attachments take forms which are imitated unconsciously, and take on an importance which is more enduring and more apparent than individuals.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, postures, gestures, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Although we might be born free, we have no choice about social participation. We need a caring social group to ferry us across infancy and childhood. That caring group itself needs others for mutual support in dealing with the indifferent environment. Both the immediate group and the larger one assign us objective categories such as boy or girl, good looking or not, strong or sickly, good or bad reader, good or bad athlete, good or bad singer, good or bad. Quite early these groups assign us tentative economic roles such as tinker, taylor, soldier, sailor, clergyman, teacher, driver, cook, cleaner. Those roles and categories have fixed characteristics. They have the face of objectivity and eternal validity as varieties of human nature. So individuals are objectified by social participation.

The Great Interconnectedness

Social interconnectedness is essential for humans, and in many ways the greatness of humanity resides in the web of our conscious interconnectedness as a collective creation. As isolated energies we are dramatically more restricted to a locality, less powerful, less expressed, less happy, and in many ways less free. We look at the world out of interconnectedness. The feat of visiting the moon was accomplished by a human interconnectedness, and not by a few individuals. The foundation of that interconnectedness is language. Learning a first language, accomplished in infancy, sets up habits of conversation, conversational skill, pleasure, and readiness to converse which enable a lifetime of personal connections and bring a vast collective sophistication to the individual. Culture generally is both product and mechanism of interconnectedness.

The interconnectedness of consciousness across multitudes of individuals is different from culture, and separately important. Every individual’s orientation toward news, gossip, stories, textbook presentations, or popular culture, in the family or village, at work, in the nation or the world, is part of the great interconnectedness. That orientation connects each single intelligence to all others with attention on the same range of information, as well as to the persons and themes about whom the stories and presentations report. It also connects each individual to the arc of information that has gone before and which is expected to go on being renewed and enlarged, and so watched routinely, refreshed routinely.

Isolated lives participate in producing the great interconnectedness of intelligences. For that, intelligence needs deliberation but also cooperative attachments with other lives. An individual’s knowledge is enabled to go beyond strictly personal acquaintance to include what an untold number of others have discovered, thought, doubted, and imagined, the projection of possibilities and probabilities, and it enables the integration of an unlimited number of points of view on the world and the prospects of a life. Individuals receive many gifts from the social interconnectedness that surrounds and nurtures us through infancy. In return, families, religions, communities, and states make claims on the energies, talents, ways of thinking, and emotional allegiance of individuals. In addition, there are disorders of the grand structures within the interconnectedness of people, and there are injuries from too great a submission of individual energy to the web of interconnection.

The Ego-Avatar Constructed for Social Attachment

There are very few times or activities which do not involve social supervision. Childhood and formal education are almost entirely training in dependence on a supervised system of incentives and rewards. Any work for pay is supervised. Any act for spiritual salvation is supervised. Any society with a focus on religion or on work for pay is a supervising cultural matrix. Supervision normally involves an incentive and reward system, even if the reward is only praise or approval from an authority figure such as a teacher.

Organizations and informal groups exert influence on any individual in sight, sound, and touch of them in a number of ways. 1) There are norms, customs, feuds and fashions, ways of standing, walking, talking, playing, getting food, dressing, topics of conversation, menus of attitudes to express in conversations, menus of moves in the current conversation game. 2) Collectives have organized structures of productive work or effort into which individuals can fit and earn a place as well as vital rewards. 3) A big group ‘personality’ is a safe and powerful collective intelligence to meld with. The myriad social micro-patterns relate us to macro-entities: playing a category such as man or woman, for example, is training for belonging within the economic and political arrangements of a nation, city, family, or religion. Customs and norms are imitated more or less unconsciously, for intelligent invisibility within the herd-system, but when ignored they are enforced. We choose ‘the way we live in our group’ rather than exile into a wilderness of isolation and uncertainty.

There is a social construct, the ego-avatar, which is different from the subjective person. The ego is a display of tags of status and dignity, or lack of them, a schema to display a gravitas score, to display placement on a culturally defined scale of worth, the trophies of social competitions. This has much in common with Freud’s “superego”, a mental internalization of public authority figures or role models, which then act as a restraint on merely personal impulses. In the alpha dominated world of big brittle egos in pageants of competition, egoistic aggrandizement is a social and historical creation. Intelligence creates and builds ego-avatars but is not limited to avatars or to any particular avatar.

The force of mutual attachment is rewarding enough to challenge all other impulses and rewards, but cultural formations also manage to take on a force of their own by inspiring loyalty and personal identification in many people. From that emerges a custom of social control and enforcement based on intentional injury to people who do not conform. Basic inter-personal attachments shape an individual’s voice to what being-together with others will permit. It is easy to assume that a personal relationship is entirely the product of the participants, but not all bearings are direct from the pre-cultural self. The self also pretends, learns roles and avatars, and imitates. If anyone is bringing learned behaviour such as language to the ways in which being together is practiced, they are incorporating social pageantry and value assignments. We live in an environment of cultural value assignments, narratives, explanations, and rhetorical defenses of social collectives and the function-roles that structure them.

No individual has much control over the evolutionary momentum of big cultural entities such as states, cities, religions, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink. In that way they are similar to biological evolution. Our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for millions of years. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. The dead ‘momentum’ of social forms soon separates us from awareness of the originality of our personal intelligence.

It makes a crucial difference that innocent, pre-cultural, individual impulses are of the nature of curiosity and creative impulses to mark the world. The social nature of people brings with it a default cultural hegemony and a resulting alienation of innocent creativity. However, individual rationality in actual behaviour or practice does not require the social and cultural constraint, nor any occult congruence between knowledge, nature, and language. Nothing prevents even innocent individuals from appreciating the needs of others. In fact people do that easily and so are enabled to establish human attachments and learn spoken language in the first place. (Please see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.)

People have a natural, innate, or innocent gift for spontaneously creating social attachments. Acquisition of spoken language is part of that talent. It is a robust gift and a very early accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are not unnatural in any way and do not require leadership, supervision, religious revelations, visions of heaven or hell, gods or demons, codes of law, threats of insult, injury, or death, or any other special intervention or extraordinary circumstances. There is no social contract and no need for one because social attachment is a casual accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are based on deliberate acts of imitation as expressions of intelligence. Although imitative culture is not unnatural, it is not preordained or “hard-wired” either. Culture is largely accident and spur of the moment invention, ad hoc, and provisional. It is software, updating continuously in patches. The ways of life, language games, and ways-of-being practiced in any group have a strong force of attraction as models to be imitated as a way of attaching with a clear and distinct manifestation of intelligence. Since ‘objective reality’ is approached from within some such cultural narrative, it is edited, selected, and interpreted to serve that narrative. Experience is profoundly conditioned or qualified by cultural influences in ways which are easy to misidentify. Social attachments embed individuals in sets of imitative activities which constitute cultures. Adults generally are sufficiently embedded to be almost entirely determined by cultural influences. The menu of life narratives and scripts made available by a particular culture has a determining influence on how an individual understands and relates to his or her environment.

Beyond Groupthink: Innocence

All this being said, we do not need to experience intelligence only in collectives. Self as innocent questioning, voice, and existence-in-time is already self-subsisting intelligence. We are blocked from that experience by our early involvement in collective intelligence. The sweet kick we get from bouncing off the voices of other time-conscious entities, is compromised by the bitterness of having intelligence confined, blocked, and forced to repeat endlessly its least powerful functions. A stronger experience of intelligence is available in deliberative self-possession, in reclaimed innocence. The normal absorption of individual intelligence within cultural forms makes sense of a project to reclaim innocence, to recognize pre-cultural intelligence and to re-think personal orientation to include that recognition.

(Note: The three graces are: nature, subjective intelligence, and culture.)

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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The international financial collapse of 2008 completely revealed the contemporary high culture of leadership. The undeniably world-class leaders of the biggest financial corporations in world history, along with the political leaders of the most powerful nations in world history, could think of nothing better than to use any means at hand to get back to the way things were before, as quickly as possible, all the while denying all responsibility for any problems. Creative reform for accountability and transparency was ridiculed as impractical.

As such a fresh and vivid example illustrates, what keeps the whole social system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, habits repeated unthinkingly, traditions, sometimes encouraged by appeals to 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”. However, even more important than habit, tradition, and popular misconceptions, is the interconnectedness of intrinsically rewarding human attachments learned within the female-managed nexus of first-language acquisition, child nurture, play, unconditional love, practical support and care, sharing, and mutuality. Please see below, blog posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations for some elaboration of nurture culture. Those are the binding forces of social systems, a framework within which ordinary individuals work at building interesting and sustainable lives, and in doing so keep production and support systems working. Recognition of these foundations of societies is the root system of left-wing political thinking and the reason it can be described generally as “bottom-up” politics.

It is remarkable then, that the extraordinary cultural emphasis on leadership reveals a worldview in which it is a superstructure of leaders who hold the social and economic system together. In the discourse of management/ professional ideology, it is leadership which brings a community together and makes it function, and in doing so sustains and benefits everybody to the degree possible given the specific powers and impediments that individuals bring with them. The leader is presented as bringing people into effective accord by displaying superior energy and dedication, hard work and a work ethic, optimism, self-confidence, self-knowledge, communication and visioning skill, prudent judgment, strategic plans, in sum a tower of strengths upon which others can fix their gaze and be inspired together. This ideology of leadership is the taproot of right-wing political thinking, and the reason it counts as “top-down” politics. That this is an especially alpha-male cultural product reveals that the key to differences between leftist and rightist policies is not class war based on wealth inequality but instead it is gender culture.

There is a deeper layer to the culture of leadership. There is an assumption that leadership is so essential and effective that it brings into being a sort of singularity, a version of the idea of divine power, a power of sovereignty. In the case of sovereignty, the divine entity is “the nation”, “the people”, a social collective united into a “more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” creature, superhuman and even supernatural, meriting privileges, powers, and licenses that no individual can claim on his or her own, such as sending people to death in war, or deliberately exposing them to dangerous living and working conditions generally. Sovereignty is an extraordinary abstract power imagined to reside in a supra-individual social entity, and it is often invoked to create a warm glow of uncritical belonging in residents of a geographical area, sometimes with a uniformity of culture, language, and ethnicity, but more often not. (In appealing to the warm glow of interconnectedness, leaders are stealing credit for the nexus of first language acquisition, which is really created by people who nurture children.) For achieving the magisterial feat of leadership, the stars of the system take credit for creating legitimate power over life and death, and entitlement to act beyond law and morality to whatever extend they may wish.

People talk about “rising above” or “getting beyond” the political division between the left wing and the right wing, but beneath that division are profound conflicts which are standard features of human communities. Due to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) there is elaborate ideology basing the left-wing orientation in the working class of industrial societies. Left-wing political activists do their best to represent the interests of people who must earn a living by working for wages. However, placing exclusive emphasis on the worker – capitalist relationship is a vast oversimplification, and has been used to cast leftist ideals into disrepute as merely the politics of envy.

Plural Conflicts

Certainly there is an opposition between those families who can live from ownership and those who must live from working for wages. Working for wages is a life-warping burden. However, a far more pervasive and longstanding conflict is between an especially masculine trophy culture and an especially feminine culture of child nurture. There is also a structural conflict between generations, between people old enough to be approaching the last stages of life in opposition to those in the first stages of life. Young people generally are still carrying memories of the female managed culture of nurture, and without having been bent out of shape by irresistible incentives and rewards, have little but an innate sense of justice to guide them.

Appeals to “family values” sound like bottom-up politics, but in fact refer to family values as perceived by the alpha-male focused patriarchal family. The female managed first-language-nurture culture tends to ignore family separations and instead creates informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. It is the culture of predatory masculinity which insists on using family groups as rigid stand-alone cells, reminiscent of the alpha-male harem social organization of gorillas, for example. Again, gender culture illuminates the political alternatives.

Groundwork of Political Dualism

The domestic nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. In addition, the domestic nexus always had a competitive alpha-structure to struggle against. The agenda of that trophy-winning superstructure has always been to use the commonality of people to fight wars, cook, clean, work plantations, mines, and assembly lines; and to have them part with their wages to borrow money, land, or a roof. Problems with that result from the retrograde culture of norms and values cultivated by the alpha-structure. The gender culture of novelty seeking masculinity could be progressive, but is exactly the opposite because of historical courses of development.

Alpha Trophy Ideology

The most glamourous culture of masculinity has its source in the ancient life of nomadic animal herders, a variety of cowboy. Ever since human communities began to abandon the nomadic life of gathering and hunting and created surpluses of vital resources, wonders of physical culture, and records of wisdom, their outlying surroundings of still nomadic peoples were drawn in to loot. An important part of the attraction of looting is to avoid having to live by daily work. A whole system of masculine pride was founded on living by other people’s work. It was the high point of accomplishment to murder rival males, destroy what property could not be used and take the rest, including women. Looting is inseparable from mass murder, rape, and enslavement, and those are still attractions of war. Empire building is nothing more than sustained looting. A remnant of the romance and pride of looting exists in the glorification of trophies won in competitive sport, and fortunes won from financial speculation.

Nomadic tribes that devised ways of surviving by animal herding often turned that parasitic technique onto communities of human farmers and city-dwellers. The cowboys became aristocrat estate owners. Social control by aristocracies, warrior-estate families, derives from that innovation. It was capitalism within the context of a rural agrarian production system. Settled aristocracies had the same values as the nomadic herders from whom they descended, values limited to maintaining a life of manly fun, competitive pride, pleasure, power, and risk-braving-adventure, not much different from capitalist elites. We see in ‘crime families’ of the mafia the identical cultural pattern still being re-created. Some families conceive extraordinary ambition and devote their energies to achieving ever more control of resources by whatever means they can get away with. In pre-modern times ambitious families controlled private armies to enforce their possession of lands. Armed violence was their source and refuge. Their focus was protecting and expanding their private property by organized and cultured violence. Their culture was built around organizing subordinated persons into gangs to carry out looting and destruction of other peoples property as well as assaults, murders, and enslavements for the purpose of exercising possession. Other humans were often simply a feature of geography to these families, to be used or removed as needed. Such military families named themselves aristocratic and noble. The use of the term “crime family” here is a means of balancing the usual academic tendency, derived from an art-history “golly-wow” approach, to admire and project positive value on whatever was dominant and powerful, the glorification of winning and wealth as such. That approach is not objective or value-neutral, and merely accepts without question that victors are privileged voices in the telling of history.

Crime Families

The narrative at the core of crime family culture is that the senior members of the family are natural and legitimate authorities and supervisors, and that no authority is superior except possibly supernatural power. All other authorities are merely rivals and threats to the family’s power. Your family is “us” and everyone else is “them”. The vast resources of the family are there to reward and assist those who dedicate themselves loyally to protection and advancement of the family as envisioned and declared by the patriarch. The prizes are high status and influence in the family hierarchy, conspicuous and intimidating wealth, gestures of subordination from everyone, power over others, and immunity from criticism.

Crime families or warrior-estate families were serious organizations who based collective ambition for wealth and power on a core of blood relations aided by carefully selected servants of various ranks and functions. These organizations recognized no outside supervisory authority. They were powers and a law unto themselves, competing with other families of a similar kind for the greatest possible control of people and resources. In ancient Rome the patrician family patriarch was the sovereign law within the bounds of his estates, with power of life and death over his family, servants, slaves, and tenants. The only help or protection possible for any individual was from one family or another. Royal families of Medieval Europe were later examples of this type of cultured family. Their willingness to make war is an illustration of the normalization of violent assault in their culture, and much of the war and business they practiced was conducted covertly by spies, assassins, and agents provocateur. These were the families for whom Machiavelli’s The Prince was written. Another modern version is the capitalist or investor family, hoarding important capital wealth. The hoard is the central value, and the need to protect the hoard inclines such families to distrust whatever they do not control. The origin and continuing main support of the political right-wing is that crime family.

Two Groups

In the anarchy after the Romans abandoned the western regions of their empire, two groups wanted control of resources on a vast scale, including control of populations. The first was the collection of warrior-estate families, and the other was the organization of Christianity. Both were alpha-male culture pods, still carrying the alpha-glorifying cult of looting. Since the personnel of the Church were nominally celibate males without children, the upper offices of the hierarchy were recruited from warrior-estate families, and so the two cultures had a lot in common. Radical inequality was the focus of the former and collective belonging was the focus of the latter. Crime families and religious cults will always be the winners from anarchy, and both will be leader-centric, animated by the alpha-male legacy of looting culture, rallying people to devote their efforts for the ultimate benefit of the looters.

Warrior-estate families formed a league that combined brutal rivalry with the cultivation of inter-marriages and mutual support. In the middle ages the families who would eventually make a reality of sovereign power were working out their techniques. They were social fetuses which would grow into modern government. The focus of the collective based on this narrative is capital concentration and control, private property and a security apparatus for protecting the privately concentrated capital. Behind it all was still the culture of alpha-type males proceeding with continual war against all other alpha-type males, principally for the fun of it. Their families carried the culture of war and there was no limit to their cruelty in pursuit of supremacy. The general practice in medieval warfare was for armies to break into small units to carry out a widespread looting and burning of villages and crops in a deliberate creation of famine and disease. Sovereignty was focused on private property and securing its ownership by force.

The other cultural entity with aspirations toward total ownership of populations was the Christian Church, based most powerfully at Rome. The main focus of that theocratic engine of sovereignty was control of individual religious belief and obedience to dictates of the Church. Organizational unity over vast expanses, in addition to a grip on fundamental and universal fears, enabled the Church to attempt a theocracy in Medieval Europe. However, the Church was not strong enough to exercise sovereignty on its own. It required alliances with particular crime families and generally with the collective of crime families, the class of aristocrats. That combination developed, especially during the crusades, a military-Christian culture known as Chivalry, which provided great advantages to both groups. Patriarchs of religious ceremonies were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still carried the developing culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable, keeping records of costs, products, properties, distributions, and consumption. That uneasy alliance between religious and military cultures in the exercise of sovereignty is very ancient.

Historical Arc of Crime Families

The historical arc of crime families began with control of productive land by brute force, terrorism, and extortion. The power exercised by crime families went through a process of sanctification in the post-Roman history of Europe. Even before the full elaboration of chivalry, the Roman Church had a policy of placing bishops in the households of crime families to organize and advise, and enforce recruitment to the Church of everyone under the family’s power. That supernatural association had a legitimizing effect for the chosen families. The bond between Roman Christianity and power-families became deeply fused by the Crusades. The looting aristocracy of Europe created a new brutality in holy wars against the Islamic middle-east. That brutality was brought back to Europe fused with an outward enamel of religious ritual and pageantry.

This is not fable but history. The power vacuum, created by first bloating and then abandoning the Roman empire in western Europe, was filled by two groups: confederacies of crime families and the organization of Christianity, headquartered at Rome. In the course of the crusades those groups formed a partnership under the title Chivalry, superimposing symbols and pageants of divinity on the mechanisms and practices of lethal brutality, thus hatching the military-spiritual engine of sovereignty, gradually downloading the mechanisms of power to increasingly independent regional dynasties. Hierarchies of crime families and Christianity wanted populations to be devoted entirely to the systems which generated wealth, power, and a sense of superiority concentrated in the hierarchies. Crime families needed people to work the land and the mines, and the Church needed sinners to threaten and punish into begging for divine intervention, tweaking their odds by donating from the little they had. Each had their pageantry of superiority. Because the medieval alpha structure wanted populations to be totally devoted to serving the wealth and grandeur of the alpha-structure they did not want the commonality of individuals to be inwardly self-possessed through the creativity of their own subjectivity. Such a condition would distract from devotion to the very outward work of the hierarchies and possibly hatch rival organizations of effort and discourse, diverting energy, grandeur, and celebrity from the established order.

Such is the value nexus that established the culture of sovereign power and social control which we still take for granted as government. The two medieval groups supplying incumbents in power were replaced, in the course of the nineteenth century, by captains of business, finance, and industry as the economic organization of wealth came to base itself on energy from combustible minerals instead of on muscle-force from animals. The new captains remodeled sovereign culture slightly into the modern military-spiritual-industrial state. Captains of industry are much the same as their medieval counterparts, maintaining and elaborating systems of pageantry depicting their special importance and superiority. However, industrial captains could not claim divine appointment, and so had to arrange some fig-leaves of legitimacy through gestures of being accountable to the governed and being constrained by law. The ideology of sovereign control remained much as it was in medieval times. The notion of institutional hierarchy as the primary organizing principle of life is still a staple of market-society, and originates by direct lines of imitation from the ancient crime family.

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funneled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves economic and political control and the fruits of control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Employment is structured as a systematic psychological confinement. The reality-distorting demands of the alpha-stratum superstructure (detailed in blog posting 10, Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality) suppresses self-possession as a psychological and cultural commonplace. It isn’t that the alpha-structure knows anything about the creative freedom of subjective intelligence. It does not intend its strategic agenda specifically to deny that experience. Subjective intelligence is the blind spot of the alpha-stratum. The alpha-stratum acts as it does because it is immersed in the age-old culture of masculine pride and the value alpha-male trophy culture assigns to public displays of adulation. The history of leadership is in the refinement of a caricature of masculinity, pageantry of divine immunity proved by bravado displays of risk-defying, daredevil feats and victories, acting out sufficient contempt for personal danger to call up gasps and cheers of adoration from the crowd.

Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, there were beginnings of what promised to be real cultural change. However, whenever there was a life-style experiment which began to broaden the orientation grid of the commonality of people, such as the French Revolution of 1789 or the Baby-Boom Revolt of 1963-74, there has been a mighty backlash mounted to roll back the advances, so that wars can still be fought and transferrable wealth concentrated upward. There is nothing authentically transcendent in that masterly style-of-life. It has nothing to teach the commonality. It just needs to interfere in order to cling to its own sense of specialness. That alpha-structure sense of superiority is the only thing threatened by general self-possession. A luxurious and opulent style-of-life for a few is certainly not the problem. The problem is that the stratum which celebrates wealth addiction imposes an agenda of strategic control and interference with the discourse of the commonality of people.

By contrast, the history of nurture culture is in the chain of generations joining linguistic communities and getting on with life. To break the death-grip of war and refined forms of looting, to remove the disincentives and barriers to basic self-awareness, a way has to be found to limit the legacy of looting culture and greatly enlarge the influence of the nurture culture practiced by women. It will be necessary to devise a civil society and government based on nurture instead of on looting.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

The mission drift from escaping misery to escaping determinism for a profound experience of freedom developed with the gradual success of the project to remove disembodied personalities and intelligences, spirits, from descriptions of nature. The project eventually extended to human nature. The strength of the process became irresistible when combined with the modern reiteration of determinism by Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza attempted a thorough ‘disenchantment’ of nature. In his philosophy the world was completely pre-determined and unitary. All was one “God or Nature” and all features and events were considered logically necessary, like steps of a proof in geometry. There is some irony in the fact that Spinoza’s philosophy generally looks like a re-statement of Stoicism in terms of seventeenth century mathematical reasoning and emerging science, but it muted the Stoic emphasis on an individual spark of freedom.

The answer to scientific determinism was created by philosophers still working with the Stoic tradition of humanist rationalism. Stoic double-aspect theory, emphasizing a discontinuity between outward experience and inward experience, is crucial in their account of how freedom can be possible. The answer to this version of “How can freedom be possible?” is substantially this: Since the evidence for determinism is deliberately cherry-picked from a narrow range of experience, freedom still can be encountered directly as both possible and actual on the basis of an enlarged survey of experience.

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a providential Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. A realm within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated. A link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on inwardness is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity was continued in the work of Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but it runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

The evidence for determinism is entirely outward, and selectively disregards, without convincing justification, the inward experience of immediate freedom. Spinoza did not demonstrate how inward freedom is reducible to the determinism of objective nature, but only declared his preference for pre-determination, in the spirit of Calvinism which was “going around” at the time.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Revival of Freedom

Kant was responding to Spinoza’s vision of total determinism, which still loomed as the central philosophical challenge a century after Spinoza’s death. Influenced by the rationalist tradition also via Leibniz, as well as by Rousseau and Hume, Kant argued that individuals are nearly trapped within our own psychology and our own creativity, and consequently have no perception of objective things-in-themselves. Leibniz and Hume had presented versions of that same isolation from nature, and in a sense Kant was trying to get the genie back into the bottle, trying to justify philosophical thinking and a life of duty and virtue within an orderly society even when ultimate Truth and Knowledge were not achievable. Kant was responding to Hume by following Hume’s own investigative procedure, which might be called reflexive self-consciousness, an intentional consciousness of the ordinary course of subjective activity and experience, with a special interest in distinguishing subjective contributions from those imposed on experience from outside subjectivity. The mental activity encountered by Kant in that process was far richer than what Hume had reported. For Kant, the apparently outer world of appearances or phenomena is not the be-all and end-all it appears to be, since the structure of phenomena is largely supplied by a perceiving subject, by requirements of any possible consciousness, such as a requirement to identify substances, space and time, cause and effect.

Freedom, and the Genie of Lower Human Nature

Kant’s work focused on freedom, very much following issues raised by Lutheran Protestantism. Kant’s identification of freedom used the subjective experience of moral choice as its occasion. There are moments when a person can be aware of the freedom to act either according to a principle that could be willed as a universal rule or entirely from immediate self-interest. In those moments a person can be aware of freedom to take the leap one way or the other. That moment of moral decision is direct acquaintance with freedom. On Kant’s view, exactly that freedom is the thing-in-itself as experienced inwardly. The ultimate principle is one thing-in-itself, freedom, as experienced directly by individuals in the subjectivity of their moral decisions. It is in stark contrast to the world of outward phenomena, the world of objects present in perception. In that outward world of measurement and science all is found to be determined by the principle of cause and effect. For Kant, phenomena (outward appearances) display a complete scientific determinism, but the moment of moral choice, the choice between acting from a universal principle of justice instead of from a self-gratifying impulse, can be experienced undeniably as freedom. The main duality in this vision seems to be between ‘inward’ experience of freedom and ‘outward’ experience of determinism, but the higher vs lower conflict is still present within inward experience. It is present in the alternatives the free chooser must consider: the moral rule or simple self-gratification. Of course in Kant a choice of the moral rule manifests the higher human nature, and self-interest a lower humanity. Since the exercise of moral freedom is transcendent for Kant, it is a vision of transcendence on the level of the individual.

Kant’s idealism, with freedom as thing-in-itself or metaphysical nature, reduced “body” or “substance” to a misunderstanding or a mistaken impression. Fundamental reality became spiritual or subjective, what it is that can exercise freedom. In Kant, the direct personal experience of freedom is immediate awareness of identity with the ultimate thing-in-itself. For a person facing a moral choice to be truly free, the leap one way and not another must be created in the instant of decision. The assertion of rationality was not dependent on cultural norms but on individual creativity. The free agency of subjectivity is identified with strategic rationality creating a balancing force against animal impulse. Acting on the principle was always the actuality of freedom, the higher power, in Kant, but it is especially discernible when noticed against a contrasting self-interested impulse. Acting on the principle would never happen on impulse, because a mental process of inventing a rule had to be accomplished first. So acting on the principle is always deliberate. Freedom requires creativity. The individual is the author of moral choices and actions. Creativity for Kant was not very colourful but it was fundamental and crucial, and his idealism rests on it.

Even though the impression human perceivers have of the objective world is pervaded with psychological contributions on Kant’s view, he remained convinced that the impression still bears some unidentifiable relation to a thing-in-itself which exists externally prior to being experienced. Consequently, even though there is inward experience of freedom in intelligence and outward determinism in nature, it is not legitimate to impose the system or principles of one side on the other to declare a tidy monism. You can’t justify an exclusive preference for inner experience or outer experience as the grounding of everything, since there is such a stark discontinuity between them. Embracing that irreducible discontinuity for the broader understanding it enables is exemplified also by the Stoic treatment of Logos, Luther and the inward leap of faith, and Schopenhaur’s explicit double-aspect reality.

Kant’s response to Spinoza and Hume, both of the latter ‘philosophizing’ aspects of Calvinism, inspired a great pulse of philosophical creativity, especially in Germany. Kant’s identification of a subjective experience of freedom inspired subsequent German idealism, Romanticism, and Existentialism all the way to Sartre at the middle of the twentieth century. In answering scientific determinism, romantic philosophers, originating with Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) tried imposing the inner subjective side of experience onto everything, in a mirror-image of Spinoza’s declaration of his preference for outward determinism. Fichte declared preference for the subjective aspect of experience as a revelation of fundamental cosmic nature. The claim is that it is less denying of important dimensions of experience, more inclusive of the richness of experience, to give preference to the inward side, subjective intelligence, than to declare an objectivist monism. In romanticism, whimsy and creative spontaneity were the portal to the individual’s freedom over stark scientific determinism. On the question of the relative merits of rationality as compared to bestial lusts and impulses, romantics departed from the mainstream of humanist rationalism by expressing a certain contempt for strict rationality and an admiration for nature, unrestrained energy, and boldly quirky individualism.

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

The Stoic answer is that individual freedom is achieved when a person cultivates and asserts his or her innate rationality. Rationality is difficult to define precisely, but there are fairly clear starting points. Rationality is linked to the quality of a person’s voice. A person’s voice is rational if it can be understood, matches norms of linguistic and logical competence, and shows a sense of relevance to the occasion. A person is rational when she can speak her mind and say what she means in a way others can understand. Rational thought can be spoken and understood by others. Existence in linguistic form gives it a kind of objectivity and graspability. It will hold its form while people reflect and evaluate. This is related to a broader meaning, something like “reasonable” or “in agreement with good sense.” Rationality stands up to reflective and collective evaluation and judgment. In addition, rational action, for example, demonstrates a functional awareness of the shapes, costs, and benefits in the natural and social environment. A person’s acts can be seen to have a reason.

Perhaps rationality is clearest in opposition to natural impulse, for example, an impulse to avoid working by simply stealing what you need. The account of Hobbes’s thinking in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era is exactly relevant to that point. ‘Will’ is the product of rational deliberation in evaluation of consequences, as distinct from merely following immediate inclination or impulse. Bestial reflex or impulse, pre-set by something like biological instinct, is not free, but acts of ‘will’ are discretionary expressions of deliberative calculation. Rationality empowers personal freedom by matching a person’s interests and expectations with the broader structures of the world and with verbal-linguistic accompaniments to acting in the world.

Stoicism was founded on experience of a personal force of mentality which can over-ride habit, appetite, first impressions, and impulsive passion or emotional response. Questioning those responses, delaying or denying action on them, magnifies consciousness of their force and of subjective forces which balance and modify them, specifically the force of rational intellect. That is strictly subjective virtue, a way to encounter subjectivity which bestows new meaning on appearances and objects.

Behind the common sense rationality of an efficient matching up of a person’s activities and vocal performances with features and occasions in their surroundings, there is a philosophical quest for a deep congruence uniting the objective world with the language which refers to its features and with subjective knowledge of the world. The Stoic idea of Logos was taken to imply such a metaphysical congruence or literal unity among matters of fact, knowledge as a mental state, and the linguistic presentation of knowledge. The logic of language was interpreted as the bridge, with rationality or intellect grounded in language. The inward mental activity of thinking was understood as linguistic and propositional, essentially the same in form as a conversation among a number of people, in writing or in speech. A rational self as the locus of thought, in the sense of knowledge of and practice of language, is a crucial piece of rationalism. On that view it isn’t only thoughts that manifest rationality. The objective world is also rational in being lawful, determinate, and predictable; and statements in language are rational when formed according to normal rules. Rationality is a characteristic of all three, just as Truth is. The idea of Truth expresses the fundamental unity of these three modes of being.

Virtue and Individuality

Stoicism was based on the idea of world-intelligence or Logos, which acquired the presence of a benevolent or providential God, identical with the whole of nature. Logos was an all-inclusive principle, completely pre-determining every detail of cosmic existence forever. Stoics attempted to identify some personal individuality within that framework of determinism, fatalism, materialism, and eternal recurrence of historical events. In spite of being officially materialist, Stoics emphasize a special ‘fiery’ nature in Logos. Stoics believed they were aware of that world-soul or ordering intelligence in microcosm in each person’s power of reasoning and choice. With events unfolding according to Nature’s Law the individual could control nothing but his or her own thinking, and could find freedom only in choosing to accept Nature by achieving as broad and inclusive a perspective as possible. Divine Providence determines human circumstances and behaviour to such an extent that the best a person can do is to love his or her fate, but individuals have the power to choose for or against assenting to and loving their embeddedness in nature. However, Stoicism was not mysticism. The desirable condition for Stoics was emotional aloofness from surrounding conditions and events, achieved by awareness of cosmic order and especially by self-control.

The metaphysics of world-Logos, the divine Word or Command, established a heavy framework for the very limited freedom or divine spark of each person. The fundamental insight is that Logos is experienced in two ways, both externally as objective nature, and internally as personal intelligence in which an element of freedom is exercised. Basic to Stoicism is a great divide between the outward world that is beyond the control of any individual, and the inward existence which is entirely under each person’s individual power. There was a core teaching dealing with the individual’s identification of and exercise of freedom. Their teaching was to minimize attachment to the external, and maximize subjective control. In order to develop mental skills, thinking, they used thinking to control attachments to external goods, properties, prestige, reputation, trophies, wealth, and even health, values arising from appetites and ambitions. They emphasized that even when worldly rewards and reputation are taken away, the dearest value remains.

Rationality against Passions, Immediate Impulses, and First Impressions

Stoics identified freedom with ‘reason’ and contrasted it with ‘passions’, and that can be taken as a higher vs. lower distinction. They came to identify abstract reasoning or calculation as the inward spark of divine freedom-fire. It tended to set up an identity between reason and order, law, rules, formality, and control. The focus of Stoicism turned to preventing or controlling flights of passion. Virtue was acting from a practiced process of reasoning. There is ‘pure-reasoning’, such as logic or mathematics, and also ‘practical or moral reasoning’ in decisions about action and behaviour, but on the Stoic view virtue requires a practice of mental calculation, application of principles to particular situations. Passions vs. intellect is an inner conflict. Thinking can achieve control of passions but the outer world is entirely the expression of Logos and beyond the control of any individual’s thinking. Rationality distinguishes between what can be controlled and what not, and highlights the indifference of everything that is beyond control, externalities. The higher vs. lower conflict translates into an inner vs. outer conflict. There is an absolute limit to determinism in Stoicism and that limit is the individual’s intrinsic power of will, understood as an executive expression of rationality.

Ancient Stoicism was officially empiricist. Knowledge was achieved from sense-experience, from the impressions made by sensations on the ‘blank slate’ of individual consciousness. Long before John Locke, Stoics understood persons as ‘blank slates’ onto which impressions were left by the sensations of the body. Sense-experience was the source of truth and knowledge, and not a realm of illusion as it was for Plato. However, since individuals could keep passions in their place by developing a practice of reasoning, the ‘slate’ of individual consciousness could not have been completely blank. A blank slate does not have the ability to reason, nor does it have forceful passions which compete with reason to edit and organize impressions of the body.

It would not be accurate to say that Stoics hated and feared nature at large, and yet they hated and feared nature in the passions of human subjectivity. Stoic acceptance of Logos meant that nature at large was a manifestation of divine providence, and a great accomplishment of thinking was to understand this sufficiently to accept acts of nature as providential. Although social and political role-fulfillment was considered necessary, Stoics practiced non-attachment, indifference, to events, objects, and conditions in the world, and that indifference has much in common with a rejection of ‘outer’ nature in favour of transcendence via a particular power of subjectivity, the inward spark of intelligence.

Intelligence as Virtue

Hellenistic Stoicism and other philosophical sects of that period attracted an important following, even though the world people faced then was hardly more horrifying or discouraging than what most people throughout history have faced. It was a creed that appealed to the powerful classes in the social order of the Roman Empire. Stoicism was widespread and influential in Roman culture during the period when Christianity was developing within the Empire, and made important contributions to Christian thought. Stoics approached ‘religion’ as a mental exercise of rational thinking, rule-governed calculation. The life of freedom based in rational thinking was considered happiest. Mental exercise was their portal to freedom, intelligence, and virtue or authenticity as humans, as well as their personal contact with the spark of divine Logos.

For Stoics, virtue was a focus on what is completely under the control and authorship of each individual, contrasted with ‘external’ conditions which the individual can never fully control. Stoic virtue was precisely subjectivity itself, aloofness from the effects of external objects and circumstances, and instead a concentration on subjective control in personal acts of thought. It was supposed to make a difference and accomplish something crucial for Stoics to do the small personal act of taking hold mentally of their own virtue by thinking about emotional reactions, impulses, and habits. No claims to surpass, defeat, control, lead, or exploit anybody else are involved. You recognize what is most certainly and undeniably your own, your intelligence, and give it a chance to exist. What can be completely authored by each individual is exactly what is most important and fundamental, an inward act of self-realization.

Freedom

Ancient societies were slave-labour based, and there was a very clear and immediate sense of freedom as not being controlled by a master in daily life. However, that common freedom was not the whole story. There were three levels of freedom: 1) not being controlled by a master, 2) strategic rationality overriding “knee-jerk” impulses in pragmatic situations, and 3) mental transcendence of nature. The most important freedom was conceived as freedom from nature itself, especially as represented in the body, associated with privation, suffering, illness, unquenchable desire, and mortality. Stoics can’t transcend all inclusive Nature, but they transcend the least fiery aspect, the strictly determined external aspect of Nature. Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics thought rational thinking was the route to that greatest freedom. Philosophical sects of the Hellenistic period all shared a program of development of personal rationality with a transcendent purpose, to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. In that state of developed intelligence an individual rose above the suffering of ordinary body-centered ways of life. It was a deliberate way of “being in the world but not of it”.

With Hellenistic Greek thinkers there was a rise of the individual as author of deliberation and strategic resistance to natural impulses. With Epicureans, the individual was also the sufferer of pleasure and pain. The individual as such was emphasized more than previously, so much so that this is perhaps the historically crucial conception of the dignity of the individual person which is definitive of western humanism. Classical Greece and Rome had strong literary depictions of individual personality in gods and heroes. Thinking sects of the period might be described as developing heroism turned inward.

See also the posting of October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Transcendence

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Considerable portions of the history of philosophy can be interpreted as answers to the question, “How can freedom be possible?”, especially two particular versions of that question. There is also a third version which makes a perfect series with the others and is freshly relevant in the current political and commercial-industrial situation.

Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

After Alexander (the great) of Macedon (previously tutored by Aristotle) conquered the known world of the eastern Mediterranean between 334 and 323 B.C., there was a penetration of Greek culture throughout Alexander’s area of influence, and a reciprocal opening of Greek culture to influences from the ancient east. Those events and cultural developments are invoked by the term “Hellenistic”. Answers to version 1 of our question were created by Hellenistic thinking sects: Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Their answers can be generalized as humanist rationalism, a philosophical version of transcendence. Stoic rationality was meant to be a portal to freedom in the teeth of miseries and passions arising from the body’s life in a hard indifferent world. It is not a solution to misery, but it is not useless.

Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

A short history of freedom in philosophy is that it was mainly focused on freedom from misery (notwithstanding a long quest for freedom from astrological demons of the zodiac) but eventually altered to a focus on freedom from scientific determinism. In facing the challenge of determinism, it was necessary to respond to a double attack since humanist rationalism had been called into question both internally and externally. The external challenge was the hypothesis posed by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) that every detail of existence is logically necessary and pre-determined. Remarkably, Spinoza’s work was very close to a modern restatement of Stoicism but with a removal of emphasis from individual inwardness, so that the external determinism of God-or-Nature (logos) loomed in everything. Even more difficult was David Hume’s (1711-1776) Calvinistic attack on the power and integrity of subjective intelligence itself.

Version 3: How can freedom be possible in a world of scientifically engineered psychological manipulation conducted on a mass scale, where people around you, without being aware of it, might be under the influence of secretive powers? How can freedom be possible when modernity is a cultural milieu of fierce ideological intent to negate freedom through mass persuasion, often using emotional manipulation by pervasive media imagery in stealthy applications of cutting edge behavioural science?

Critical thinking skills and a skeptical turn of mind may not be strong enough defenses against advertising media and incentive/ reward packages, because you may conduct such thinking within a set of assumptions that serves the purpose of diabolical powers which want to use everyone, or at least disempower us from interfering, so that wars may still be arranged and conducted in murderous ordinariness.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Theological Black Holes

15 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Martin Luther’s interpretation of the leap of faith went beyond divine Grace into individual creative power. Familiarity with the Stoic idea of freedom is plausible groundwork for Luther’s conclusion that you can’t be certain of anything except your own internal act of self-creation, self-determination, self-declaration. Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” is a slight recasting of that insight. Luther’s finding internal power to experience transcendence, overcoming the oppressive gravity of original sin and the taint of nature, showed a way for Descartes and other Baroque era rationalists to abandon the age-old terror of nature and apply rationality to understanding the laws of a merely clockwork nature. It also enabled Jean-Jacques Rousseau to experience a new kind of love of nature, initiating an important thread of romanticism in philosophy. The beginning of the change in the cultural attitude to nature was Luther’s overcoming original sin in human nature.

However, there were still tenets of religion, deeply rooted, that contradicted the tendency from Luther’s work to ascribe freedom to individuals. The natural progress of philosophical thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built on increasing appreciation of fruitful subjectivity, responding also to the increasing esteem for individual minds as literacy became more universal. For several reasons, however, philosophical discoveries about subjectivity did not have their natural consequences in the Euro-American cultural system. Instead of having a balanced understanding of subjectivity and objectivity we have totalitarian objectification.

Two metaphysical propositions of mainstream Christianity stand as barriers to progress. The first is the view, from Augustine, that human nature is so weak and prone to evil that it needs continual supervisory repression and intimidation to achieve a semblance of good. With original sin corrupting the inward person, individuals cannot be trusted to themselves and there is no basis for inward values such as creativity, which genuinely define individual persons. All virtue must be objectively defined and enforced with authoritarian systems of incentive, reward, and punishment. That ancient prejudice was re-invigorated in the backlash against the French Revolution of 1789, and has endured at a semi-conscious level as a bedrock justification for inequality and supervisory control of “the masses”. It has also served as an excuse for the powerful to torture, murder, and enslave. In addition, there is a bit of Christian theology or metaphysics common to monotheism, claiming creativity as a special and definitive attribute of divinity, so only God is capable of creativity. That rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In a cultural system still quietly dominated by Christian metaphysics there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. So, what prevents us from embracing the transcendent gusher of subjective originality, the real guarantor of freedom, is scraps of old culture such as father-in the-sky-religion which insists that only the high God is creative and good. In a culture still permeated by Christian assumptions it seems impossible to abandon the (only semi-conscious) theological principle that creativity is an attribute of God alone. The concept of God can be stretched and molded but not easily replaced by creative individual subjectivity.

Although Augustine’s Christianity still has a strong grip on western supervisory practices, its cultural dominance was affected by market-commerce and science. The transition to science was easy, as celestial father-god religions share with science a strong outward focus on eternal cosmic forces and principles. Reverence and deference toward external gods was so entrenched at the root of the Euro-American cultural system that this orientation imposed itself onto all new developments. Science became so prestigious in its mathematical precision and its rigour of measuring observations that physics and chemistry came to represent the ideal of intellectual power and legitimacy, and inspired imitation in all intellectual culture. Subjectivity, as the blind spot of science since questioning has no appearance, cannot exist officially. The consequence of scientific inability to comprehend a fruitful and complex subjectivity, in combination with the military and commercial success of science, is that modern culture is under the enchantment of an ‘objectivity fetish’ in which anything subjective or mental/ internal is suspect, and so the very reality of thinking as an individual process has been marginalized and ridiculed. Distrust of the non-rational or ‘lower’ impulses of subjectivity moves by easy extension to mistrust of subjectivity in general. Individuals have to be supervised in their obedience to military nation-states and market-wealth, the modern gods, and institutions representing those gods have much in common with ‘old regime’ patriarchies.

Market-commerce represents, in part, a revolt against the self-denial imposed by old-style Christianity. Everybody is gratified to some extent by having stuff, and after centuries of denial and an ongoing threat of denial, the glamour of consuming and having stuff became frenzied. Yet, market commerce shares with science a profound objectivity. In the market-sphere values are: accumulated property, status in corporate and professional hierarchies (quantified in money), and the glamour of trophies from competitive victories. Although these are gratifying, they are also self-denying in their own way when made dominant.

Another obstacle to recognizing creativity as the core of personal existence is the common observation that by far the majority of individuals blend perfectly into a crowd. That can be shown to be compatible with individual creativity by a study of culture and its suppression of some crucial individuality. The portal back to individual creativity is exactly to by-pass all cultural knowledge and sophistication with the goal of achieving a state of creative innocence. There is an echo here of the myth in which eating fruit from the tree of knowledge caused humanity to lose its glorious natural existence. The portal to innocence was pioneered long ago in Luther’s personal use of thinking.

The Brute Actuality of Nature

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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In every moment of experience, we are just arriving out of the past. This might be described as the newness of the moment. We arrive with expectations: looking, feeling, and listening for certain things. There is always a certain degree of surprise and the possibility of great surprise. We arrive feeling the force of contact with objects or resistances, sometimes fending them off, sometimes weighing on them, grasping and working them. Part of our energy is re-orienting, identifying, pushing and pulling against these immediate presences.

We arrive at particular localities and occasions partly as a result of work and effort. Some also come flowing upon us. We arrive in the act of leaving previous situations, with an expectation and attitude about what is here. An attitude manifests itself in what we find relevant and worthy of attention, in what we notice, and in our emotional bearing toward what we notice. Our attitude is the searching, vigilance, and direction of effort by which we are responding to imperfections and opportunities from before. It is a sort of memory which largely determines what is perceived. Incidents and occasions are streaking by, but something remains and accumulates in ourselves from them other than mental images, namely changes in attitude and bearing.

On one side we have the experience of arriving with an expectation of what will be here, searching for specific locations and resources. On the other side we have the experience of streaking through, streaking past this moment, going through it. The orientation of our effort is through or past what has already been identified, bearing down this corridor or street or into that room, lifting this bag of groceries, heading into the imaginary space of the future. We arrive working things toward a potential shape, pushing and pulling with the purpose of removing ourselves toward a future place. We are leaving whether we want to or not, whether we feel dissatisfied with the imperfection we sense here, or feel contented. This is the incompleteness of the moment which complements newness. The opening we sense as we look down the corridor is the future. This moment features a potential of going that way by the performance of certain work.

Taking both arriving and leaving together we still have nothing of the world but the instantaneous present. Although it has no duration, its newness and incompleteness point toward a world of context. The memory and attitude from which we reach down at the present, and the expectation we have of getting through and beyond it, are the context, and it is much richer and more extensive than the duration-less present ever can be. Questions, emotions, and dreams make up the rich context from which we reach down to the meagre wafer-presence of nature. The force of opening and vectoring into the future is exactly questions and dream-fulfillment, emotional responses to what was. Here are the ideal models by which we read the fleeting sensual impressions which are all we ever have of the world. Indeed we take up and grasp the present as we do because of that context. Nothing could have meaning and sense for us without memory and expectation, but in what way are they with us? How do we have them or sense them as part of the world? They are, by definition, things not being perceived and we do not have them in the same way as things perceived. They are not floating about separately either. They exist in a bearing or orientation built into perceptions of things, in the directionality and force of subjective intelligence.

For everything perceived there are two modes of presence intersecting: a part present by sensation, and a non-sensual context of questioning. That non-sensual context is the intelligence that is perceiving, the project or orientation within which the act of perception is performed. Memory and expectation are features of an instantaneous mental act of thinking sensations of the world. A subjective orientation or bearing is intersecting with something not originating from the self, something objectively resisting the self.

The experience of time is built into what is present instantaneously. Past and future are structural elements of the instant of experience. The past is only the newness of any instant and the place of memory in that newness, reference points receding into ever increasing remoteness from this moment’s bearing. The future is only the incompleteness of the instant and the involvement of mental projection, expectation, and self-declaration in that incompleteness. Both are features of an instantaneous mental act. It isn’t that intelligence endures but that it has, in an instant, experiences which are present in different ways. Our experience of time is the intersection of different modes of awareness. We experience time not by being temporally extended but by having binocular consciousness, consciousness of an elemental transcendence, an intersection of intelligence with object-world.

If there is to be time, there must be intelligence and its object. The object alone has no memory and no teleology, no past or future, and without duration there is nothing. The object-world, without a living intelligence intersecting it, is a wafer of duration with a smallness of infinity. Memory and purpose (predicament and orientation) give the object its appearance of duration. Kant agreed that time is a feature of intelligence, but perhaps we can say that the brute actuality of nature is an infinitesimal duration-less momentum. Past and future do not exist in the material universe. The science-fiction fantasy of time travel is absurd because past and future simply do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. Only intelligence brings time to the world, with a structure of tension stretching memory into an act to strike a self-declaring mark on the object-world, present entirely as an instantaneous bearing.

The Hieroglyph

Since the present only makes sense in a sort of triad of past-present-future, maybe a visual aid could be used, a hieroglyph, an enlarged X. That figure is made up of four arrow-heads which point toward something at the centre with no size. The top arrow of the X would represent certain features of the present. Labels for that space might be: “There is nothing but the instant…The present has no duration…”

For the bottom arrow: “… always new and incomplete… Whatever there is must be features of this instant.”

The left arrow of the X would represent all the purpose, direction, knowledge, and force-against-resistance we already bear in arriving at the present. I might put these labels there: “… arriving, by specific efforting, with a purpose … searching for specific valuables … incidents and occasions went streaking by but something accumulated other than fading impressions or images: a bearing in response to them.”

The right arrow is an opening outward, potential, possibility, and probability surrounding the pointing, vectoring, or bearing of effort and orientation. Part of our energy is pushing past the grip of the present “ … leaving specific predicaments behind with an effort toward self-declaration and creation …”.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Author Archives: Sandy MacDonald

Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

Theological Black Holes

The Brute Actuality of Nature