Author Archives: Sandy MacDonald

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The Value of Stardom

There are important organizations promoting the concentration and centralization of property, power, and esteem, in a structure that makes up the social star system. Those organizations operate to express the beliefs, values, and tactics which achieve those concentrations and so create stardom. Stardom itself is the dominant value, and the organizations promote themselves as opportunities to achieve stardom. Stardom doesn’t have to be fame as played out in popular culture, but sometimes it is. The exercise of power and influence is not always ‘in the limelight’. The security of that system requires a nervous vigilance for threats and alternative visions which might divert energy away. There is an effort to spread the beliefs and values of stardom, and to promote their dominance in the community at large. A tsunami of star-system glamour-imagery is washed over public spaces and communications media. The message put about is that the world simply works this way, that the stars with remarkable accumulations must be permitted special liberties and immunities, must be admired and followed because they are the leaders who create and develop the community culture. In that way the star system functions as a social control mechanism.

Right-Wing Oversights and Misrepresentations

The star system as just described is the core element of right-wing political thinking. Devotion to stardom is devotion to inequality. So it is that the basic idea of the political right-wing is inequality itself. In addition, the claim is made that inequality is simply natural, and uniquely represents the spirit of nature.

There are fatal problems with these right-wing claims. Perhaps most important is the evidence that people do not need leaders or contracts to create cohesive social systems, language, or meaning in their lives. The creation of those fundamentals is broadly decentralized and nonhierarchical. Leadership is generally parasitic on innocently created social groups. Individuals do not need to be provided with identity by a collective or culture since we already have it with our subjectivity as described in previous blog posts. Additionally, that subjectivity is not savage instincts, lusts, aggression, delusional imaginings, or a blank hole to be filled with outside influences. It is a specific intelligent questioning which accumulates. It does not require close supervision or hierarchical placement to prevent it from harming itself or others.

Right-wing political rhetoric claims to champion simple justice. The appeal is to individuals who have accumulated property through work, diligent application of their abilities and energy, and perhaps personal risk. Such people seem justified in not wanting the rewards of work and talent to be sucked away to support people who might seem lazy and stupid to them. Fair enough, but neither does accomplishment entitle anyone to control, exploit, or torment the less accomplished, and that is an assumption that typically accompanies such an appeal to ‘justice’. The star system as a social control mechanism lurks behind the rhetoric of rugged individualism, and meritocracy is a typical star-system. It is also important to acknowledge that nobody accomplishes anything without a lot of externalities provided by the contributions of many people, externalities such as the stability of law, health care, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, a fruitful and healthy environment, maybe summed up as a healthy human interconnectedness.

Rugged individualism as manifested in star systems takes just as much centralized administration and control as equality. That is why right-wing political forces always balloon the size, powers, and immunities of military forces, police, prisons, and secret intelligence operations and simultaneously reduce civil rights and the transparency of authority. Private property accumulators are terrified that their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. The more property a person has the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases.

Psychological War

The personal use of thinking is to exercise and experience some agency, initiative, and control in a world where so much is beyond control. That was the point of Stoicism and Hellenistic humanism generally. Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism all developed ancient Greek heroism turned inward, the personal use of thinking to act as an individual force in the face of nature and the gods. Their teaching was not competitive, hierarchical, or star-system enabling. The message was a profoundly egalitarian call to exercise creative subjectivity no matter how small it may seem in relation to world-historical events. Feel the transcendence of your subjective intelligence. Find happiness in the freedom, creativity, and transcendence of it. Nurture yourself in happy creativity and Epicurean delight, even when the whole force of nature, gods, and culture works to drown you out and leave you silent. Cultural star-systems are important in those silencing spectacles. The personal use of thinking is still egalitarian. Philosophy has always been a presentation of the thinking of an individual person, not divine revelation or decree from occult inspiration or authority of any kind. It is thinking that can be considered and evaluated, and so thinking that is an invitation and portal to thinking for every individual. The gift of philosophy is validation of the power of individual thinking, and so the self-subsistence of individual identity, freedom, and self-possession.

Given the dominance and force of star-system culture and organization it is not too wild to characterize politics as psychological war raging around us and through us. The stream of messages from standard news and information organizations is a reality distorting campaign in support of systems of stardom. Star-system culture is an enemy trying to disable your agency and creative initiative. Inequality as a political value is an enemy to most people because it specifically discounts and writes off most people. That is the foundation of class war. In that psychological warfare the distribution of property, power, and esteem is far less important than the distribution of self-possession. That is the psychological battlefield on which the war rages between attempts to disempower and efforts to self-empower people at large. Stardom is the opposite of self-possession. The personal use of thinking is to wake up to self-possession.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Ground and Sky

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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We are Grounded

Ground is important to us because we are pressed against it. Ground is what dwellings and furnishings are supported on, so we can say that when we stand on a floor or rest in a chair we are still pressed against the ground. We have merely provided ourselves with a convenient shoe. Ground is what we plant gardens in, and sometimes bury treasure and our dead in.

Being pressed against ground involves first that ground draws us toward its own centre with a force we have come to call gravity. The ground also prevents us from approaching its centre. That exclusion is a general characteristic of ‘material’ objects, manifested in 1) resistance to change in their shape and integrity (resistance to penetration is a form of this) and, 2) resistance to change of place or movement (momentum or inertia). These resistances can be overcome if enough pressure is brought to bear. The effect is our being held at our point of contact on a surface, fetched up against an impenetrable, pressing, presence.

Jelly

Our own presence on the ground is a body whose material is mostly a translucent jelly, in surroundings that are often hostile or indifferent. Simple survival requires us to defend ourselves against the surroundings, to devise shelter from weather and predators and we have to eat our surroundings to stay alive. That work produces a sense of personal force against the environment, a kinesthetic force of personality, even in the face of weakness from hunger, fatigue, illness, and injury. Some parts of the environment are very good to eat and contribute to that force of personality in being eaten.

Our body of translucent jelly has cores of rigid bone, and sensitive vulnerability. Hold your hand to a strong light, and red and blue blood vessels are visible inside. It is living jelly that springs and vibrates. It is sometimes tough and stringy, sometimes soft and floppy but always changing shape, giving way under gravity, voluntary movements, or touches from outside. In the belly and in large muscle bundles in thighs and shoulders it has liquid qualities. Skin communicates its own surface luster and the shape and structure beneath: muscle bulges around the wands, balls, and sockets of bone, red-blue blood in its pattern of tubes and capillaries, subcutaneous fat. Sometimes the muscle, bone, and skin structure feels like a container for liquid guts and belly organs, deep waters of the body. Thin, tremulous bands of muscle cover those deep waters, holding them in a tough but elastic and sloshing cellular column.

Muscle-Frame Opening

From birth, except for rare occasions when we are falling in open space, we feel the ground pressing on that body. Our skin is sensitive to the pressure and vibration of touch, to textures and temperatures. It might seem that much of our attention throughout life would be directed at warding off such a continuous assault. Yet, it is not so, because we manage to overcome the holding pressure and move. Since we cannot overcome it all at once, like space rockets do, in a great push into orbit, we overcome it in quantities sufficient for a little movement, again and again and again. We adapt the muscle structure of our body to hold ourselves poised on ground against gravity, and as part of that alignment, we adapt part of our body structure, a pair of movable limbs, as a flexible contact capable of pushing against ground with enough force to move away from the point of contact. We make our contacts with ground into a routine, a simple repeatable stepping, that we perform without much attention.

Even more important are sensations of strain that muscles make across joints in the bone frame of the body. A very rich and extensive array of distinctions is available in these sensations. Moving a particular finger is clearly distinguishable from moving a different one, and both are distinguishable from moving a leg or changing the posture of the back. A small movement is precisely distinguishable from a larger one, a slow one from a fast one, a slightly resisted one from a strongly resisted one.

Sensations of muscle-frame tension are sensations of directed pushing against a resistance or holding off a pressure. We sense the solidity of the object upon which we are bearing and the pressure of our body against the object. In ordinary standing we sense in our muscle tension the firmness of the footing and the force with which our body is pressing against that footing, normally the standard force of gravity on the particular mass of our body.

We are moving creatures in our very structure, and, except when we are falling, our movements are resisted by gravity at least, and quite often also by various obstacles. The space outside the surface of ground is largely not occupied by impenetrable presences, so if we propel ourselves in an unoccupied direction we move.

We use ground itself to propel ourselves. By its qualities of (relative) rigidity and immovability, ground provides us with something to push away from in directions we pick. We use it to push against when we want to travel in an open direction, and when we want to stop. This constitutes the region along ground’s surface as space in which we carry on controlled movements and play out our force of personality.

That we have enough leg power to overcome the holding pressure of ground does not negate the continuous presence of that holding pressure. Our overcoming it is not an annihilation of it, nor even a suspension of it. Our overcoming it is always a cost to us. It is an effort in which our vitality is reduced, and it always requires us to make up the reduction with food and rest.

When the only means you have of moving is the power of your own muscles the flat ground virtually rises up around you and closes you off from other places. Ground’s holding pressure constitutes a virtual upward slope, a gradual but important barrier to movement. Because of the costs of moving and barriers in specific directions we are easily marooned, stranded, at a particular place and with the material values of that place. The limits of kinesthetic force, costs of moving, and the resistance of barriers maroon each person at some particular place or locality most of the time. The material particulars of the place determine what becomes of the needs we suffer, what pleasures we have, what shelter we have, and what we are nourished or hurt by.

Down, Up, and Sideways

Ground itself is opaque, so our orientation is mainly lateral to the pressure of ground. Our lines of movement go along the surface rather than into it. Not only do we have to give a lot of attention in the direction of our movement to avoid mishaps, but also the very possibility of moving through a region invites attention there for opportunities, resources, and dangers. We put the continuously pressing presence away from the centre of our attention, but not too far away. In doing so we constitute the direction to the ground as a fixture of our orientation, as “down” and “under”.

Places very near to one another are yet very different in their relative accessibility. Most of us most of the time find ourselves between two great inaccessible regions. Ground itself is one of these and it has in most places a very abrupt beginning, a surface.

The other great region of inaccessibility stands roughly parallel to the surface of the earth and extends in the opposite direction from “down”. It is not marked by a surface but rather a gradual increase in inaccessibility. It is the sky above the surface of the earth. About half the time it is full of light, sometimes glaring, sometimes hazy. When the sky is not full of light it offers a very different spectacle. Given these conditions the portion of the world accessible to us is rather ‘tablet’ shaped on the medium scale, a narrow space between an interesting sort of ceiling and a floor.

Although an individual’s sensitivities and perception are local and anchored at a locality, we are aware of the vastness of the world in which we are placed. We are aware that the vastness we do not see or know may contain and deliver threats and hazards. The moment is always unfinished, never possessed of a fixed essence. There is more to come, which we have a thought (a hand) in creating. We live in that ‘not yet’ as if it were an opening in which we might create a larger, unfolded, form of ourselves. Our questions point us into it. The light of our questions beams into the ‘not yet’ opening, the future.

When momentum does not account for what happens, a person tries to fit events into patterns from subjectivity, assigning subjectivity to otherwise separate and different presences. To recognize intelligence, other than personal subjectivity, is to recognize an entity moved by intuitions of predicament, value, and opportunity, a memory-based sense of the relevance of things, a sense of the future, and problems of achieving presence in the world. It is to distinguish a voice, actions which express desires, judgments, and sensitivities instead of movements due to mechanical momentum. You cannot see or touch another intelligence. You have to sense it in action. For example imitative action, especially mimicry with an original addition, is a declaration and communication of intelligence. Rocks and bushes do not imitate.

We recognize intelligence too much, sensing human-like personalities in the form of gods, ghosts, or spirits ‘behind’ all kinds of natural events and irregular occurrences. The assignment of intelligence to separate beings changes a person’s presence in the world into a being-with these others. Being-with is a sense of having an existence larger than personal privacy, of self-experience as something others might be aware of, share, and possibly meddle in.

When sensing personality outside ourselves we are recognizing questions and intentions that are not our own, and so recognizing other entities acting from intelligence. We are making sense of movements of people and animals by recognizing intelligence as a force. Empathy is difficult in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be common. Toward the external personalities identified as gods, people do not feel empathy but fear. Still, beings moved by intelligence sometimes shelter each other from the boundless darkness, uniting by imitation as well as by physical closeness. The first experience of other intelligence is probably mother.

Humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees, storms, and the universe as a whole, and we might next imagine personality in computers and robots. Desire, purpose, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations. “Somebody did it.” “A spirit did it.” “God did it.” These are still accepted among educated people as sufficient accounts of why and how something happened. There is even an inclination to fall back onto such act-of-personality explanation where it is clearly not appropriate: “There is a little guy inside the machine who counts the money you put in and drops out the change.” Anyone who claims belief in god, gods, or a deity is irrevocably committed to subjectivity and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything that exists.

Living has to be maintained continually by effort. We need to be taking in food, water, and breathable air which are unevenly and thinly scattered. The survival of a body requires coverings and shelter. Embodiment brings the necessity to work. Work is required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life. That is especially problematic because everybody wants to escape from work to enjoy and wonder at the mysteries of nature and intelligence. It has been customary, culturally structured, for people to unload tedium, fatigue, discomfort, and filth onto others when they can. Based on that, tedium, fatigue, and filth, ordered onto you by someone in a more powerful position, are defining qualities of the experience of work. Humans have always had disease, injury, fatigue, hunger, weakness, and old age. Anchored to the ground, the human body is at the mercy of wild nature, disease, parasites, predators, and hostile marauders, in a situation that is often out of control.

Considering all this, humans worry about survival and well-being, and not just because of uncertainty about invisible spirits. Such worries support formation of collectives. There is a longing for grandeur, the supra-individual nation, social-class, race, Church, or even civilization.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

There is lots of evidence that, for most of human presence, the landscape of the night sky looked far better than the clutching ground. In a world without urban crowding and smog, and without artificial lights, the awesome beauty and fascination of the universe as revealed in the night sky likely had an importance quite lost to modern minds, in fact seeming more real than the world on the ground. Life on the ground has been nasty, brutish, and short. People struggle, fight and run, get sick, hurt, tired, weak, and enslaved. People looked up at night and saw a landscape of soft light. It was huge, bigger by far then the turf below, and movements were few and slow. The daily drift from east to west is unvarying, recurring in a continuous pattern. The movement made it seem alive, yet without vulnerability.

Because the rotating pattern of stars does not change, in contrast to things close to the Earth, including the moon and planets, the starry sky was taken as a model of eternal being. It occurred to some that the realm of stars did not change because it was a vision of perfection. The fact that stars are immeasurably high and distant, pure light, and incomprehensible did not stand in the way of interpreting them as sacred and peculiarly real.

The night sky was an early inspiration for the idea of a transcendent world, everlasting, completely primal, and sacred. That world was imagined to have a different kind of Being, subtle, ethereal, pure luminosity, and immune from organic growth and aging processes, wear, tear, random change, or decay, the Being of Eternity. It was separated and different from the ordinary surroundings of human lives, but there is a historical pattern of people believing that the sky above creates and moves the earth below, the idea of the sky as a top-down causal and creative force. It seemed to be the foundation and source of ordinary surroundings, apparently creating them as a sort of imperfect echo or model of itself. The sky is the primordial clock, apparent driver of time. The night sky is always drifting or coasting (and falling) around a set of complicated cycles. Intelligence brings time to the brute actuality of nature. The great firmament of the night sky had a message for intelligence: together we hold time.

Intelligence has an analogous relation to the brute actuality of unintelligent nature. Both stars and subjective intelligence separately were sources of an impression of a kind of Being more subtle and sublime than the material world-of-work, but the star-world is easier to point toward. People of ancient times used qualities from the star-world to express intuitions of their self-experience, of intelligence and thought. The star-world gave them an image of an ethereal, subtle, and present-but-separate kind of existence suggesting thought itself. In the delicate beauty of the clear night sky they thought they saw a reflection of their own invisible Being.

Interpretation of the star world has been complicated. An element of gnosticism asserted that events in the world experienced by people are controlled and determined by the great stellar patterns of the zodiac. These celestial powers were sometimes conceived as demons, fallen angels, or lesser gods called archons. Those powers author the fate of individuals and humanity as a whole, but they are not ultimate powers. There is a higher and greater power which can be touched by individual persons. Inward awareness and contemplation of the highest deity can achieve release from the zodiac powers, and profound self-determination. The gnostic claim is that authentic self-determination is the best life, and it can be achieved only by that very special inward mental accomplishment.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Hierarchy, Leadership

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People are objectified in terms of the job they perform, and they are diminished and misrepresented by that. Within organizations there is an assumption that the job category occupied by an individual is a representation of that person’s character and personality, and individuals are treated differently according to their place on the organization chart. There is an assumption that individuals choose a job as a way of expressing personal identity. However, people do not base personal identity on being fitted into a box such as a job category or organization. Instead, we construct a sense of identity with the whole range of Plato’s “three-part soul” (from the Republic): appetites that inspire us, impulses to make a distinctive mark on the world, and innocent curiosities. Of course we should add considerations such as loving attachments also. Happiness is related to the flow and fate of these and other personal creative impulses. An individual’s participation with an organization may have connections with some of these but will not completely engage any of them. That is how an individual’s “fit” with his or her job is a kind of being squeezed into a box which is too small.

People cannot be happy if they have to become smaller than they really are to “perform” jobs, and they always do. There are the fragile egos of supervisors to contend with and often those persons do not like to see the people they supervise as anything but smaller than themselves. The pretense required is profound and generally pushed to a level of semi-consciousness because it is just the way the world is.

Incumbents of higher office like to understand themselves as part of a meritocracy instead of, say, a ‘greed-ocracy’, an ‘ego-ocracy’, or a ‘bully-ocracy’. Everyone must collude in the myth that the supervisory system is a meritocracy. The result is that workers must act toward those incumbents as if their merit were greater in some general unspecified way. Every worker must be careful not to give holders of higher power anything that might give offense which could be a motive for retribution or disfavour. The higher you go on the organization chart the more calculated is everything presented to you. That might make day to day life pleasant for higher levels but is a stress for everyone else and can result in disaster.

Everything management communicates is calculated to uphold the meritocracy myth and present supervisors as “on the ball”, decisive, and smart. Much is hidden so employees do not have opportunity to assess and find fault with decisions and practices. People are unhappy at work because of false inequalities which are normalized there, indignities of hierarchical inequality. There are special indignities of inequality for women and visible minorities. Whole categories of people have the experience of being diminished by the culture of their employment, and by the general culture of objective market-values. In addition there are distortions of world-view imposed by corporate culture.

Below grand narratives of general contentment, there are complaints and dissatisfactions. There are ways in which working a job is similar to being on the rack: compulsion, insult, indignity, fatigue, sweat, and tedious repetition. People make the best they can of these conditions because they need money to survive. Even Stoics admitted that it is not possible to be happy on the rack. The counter-examples, martyrs and saints, fit a religious-style appeal to higher inspirational powers. Nobody could defend the claim that the only employees who perform well are those who accept their employer organization as a quasi-divine inspirational power. Yet within organizations there is a culture of denial that doing a job is often intrinsically repulsive. That is a reality distorting force.

It is still possible to have episodes of fun at work. Unpleasant aspects can be “bracketed” psychologically and so placed at some emotional distance from the present moment, much as people normally know that there is a great deal of misery in the world but insulate that knowledge from day to day routine and so avoid being crushed emotionally by grief in the world at large. Everyone needs a lot of this every day. Indeed there are always positives to employment that are good reasons to be happy: evading the great indignities of unemployment and poverty, and having access to things bought with earned money.

If bracketing off negative experience becomes important in an organization’s culture, then that culture has much in common with a collective delusion in which people agree to support one another in focusing on a strictly edited misrepresentation of reality. The whole culture of organizational hierarchy says, “Be very careful what you do or say, because it is not safe to be spontaneous!” That must be quite common, since the challenge of “speaking truth to power” is proverbial. Power is a feature of organizational hierarchy.

The organization of work is an oddly private domain, like an authoritarian family. “A man’s home is his castle” is still interpreted to mean that ‘the boss’ can do what he chooses to do within his organizational domain, and no one may question it. All values are trivialized by the overriding value of stardom itself in that star-system hierarchy.

It is remarkable how little difference has been made in employment organizations, in the organization of production, by scientific research in social sciences and psychology. It has made work more mechanical and formulaic.

These are remarkable realities which co-exist with the now ever-decreasing benefit-packages, pension plans, and decent pay-scales provided with the best modern employment. These abusive and injurious realities form a pattern of corporate value-culture undermining each individual’s interpretation of his or her own experience.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Political Considerations

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Gender culture, Political Power

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Right-wing political ideology champions a certain claim about what is natural for the human species. It is very much Thomas Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature, a primal competition of all against all, unfettered individual freedom where the luckiest displace, destroy, or enslave the rest. Such is the right-wing utopia. (That characterization needs to be expanded at some point to account for the contradictory right-wing enthusiasm for interfering in private judgements about such matters as patriotism and sexual orientation. On those issues right-wing ideology demands conformity.) The right-wing utopia is a caricature of masculinity projecting a wish-fulfillment day-dream. It is not difficult to spot the fatal flaw: There are no children to be nurtured in that utopia. It would survive for precisely one nasty, brutish, and short generation. When the value of nurturing children enters the picture then what is natural is co-operation, play, sharing, and love.

The Conversation with Children

People continue to have children not because children are cute, or from brute instinct to continue the species, but because children are contributers to collective experience, essential interlocutors for adults. The innocent love of honest attachment and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Children are crucial contributers to the vitality of the human conversation. The realm of child-nurture, managed and cultivated by women, was effectively unknown, ignored, and despised by men from time out of mind. Due to that prejudice there is general lack of recognition for the female managed, child-care focused, culture in which all humans learn our first language and most other profound culture. It is not an unlikely, scarce, or exotic community. It is as universal for humans generally as first-language acquisition itself. There is no place for a contract because social attachment is an innocent accomplishment for ordinary people.

It isn’t just that children bring innocence to their conversation with adults, but also that children are the smartest people on the planet. Their brains are growing so fast that they learn a language from scratch ‘spontaneously’. The Suzuki music teaching method attempts to mimic first language acquisition with parental engagement, positive feedback, and playful repetition. With only these simple declarations of mutual attachment, children learn. Generation after generation of mothers have worked out how to sustain this work with some co-operation and mutual support. First language acquisition is inseparable from the domestic nexus of attachment, co-operation, and play, inseparable from the innocent love of attachment and discovery characteristic of children. Since the general underlying intent and purpose of language is to declare a distinctive voice in mutual play (rocks & bushes do not imitate), language is not as strictly rule-governed and game structured as Wittgenstein and others judged. Proto-linguistic play is fun and done casually all the time.

Hobbes and Schopenhauer represent philosophers who were childless and single privileged men immersed in a special minority culture of alpha-male competition, class, gender, and political dominance. It is not surprising that they grasped human nature as little more than egoism and a war of all against all. In ancient times Plato and, much later, Augustine also were embedded in privileged male culture-pods. Those philosophers believed human attachment is difficult and possible only under special circumstances as a gift from awe-inspiring power. They glorified the state as the greatest human achievement. (Check out Hegel.) The modern state was conceived and put into practice in the cultural matrix accumulated around the strategy for radical inequality which made life interesting and fun for competitive alphas.

On Meaning

A standard criticism of modernity is that secularism, democracy, and commercialism have destroyed meaning in people’s lives. Hegel claimed that meaning is bestowed on people by a hierarchical social order in which everyone has his or her place. (Something like: “It’s not much, but it’s home.”) In a variation of that view, Hitler observed that his best experience of meaning and purpose in life was as a soldier in the Great War of 1914-18. The war provided an overriding need in which everyone was willing to accept regimentation and personal sacrifice for a great cause. Hitler’s gift to his people was their nation at war, gloriously meaningful suffering and death. Leaders of all kinds are influenced by Hitler’s doctrine, often in more moderate forms.

It could be claimed that the ultimate Medieval narrative, the meaning of Medieval life, was the Roman Christian narrative of transcendence. Matching that claim would be that in modernity the ultimate narrative, the meaning of modern life, is competition in the market economy. However, it is just as plausible that the conversation with children and the family life which surrounds it have been more rewarding and meaningful all along. It looks like another instance of a cultured contempt for the female-managed and child-centered value matrix. Children still count as the focus of meaning for all classes. The imperative to nurture children ties people to stability in production and consumption, but not to any particular system. Many things have a presence in a person’s sense of meaning in life, with some being taken as more important if others are reduced. Individuals are fountains of meaning, and creatively confer meaning on their surroundings. A living legacy of classical heroism is the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, heroism turned inward. Anyway, mystery and uncertainty are not always problems. There is never a total absence of mystery and people are generally happy with that.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

The Transcendence of Intelligence

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Intelligence is common to conceptions of transcendence, both ancient and modern. Even if God is the particular form a sense of transcendence takes it is still a matter of intelligence transcending inertial non-intelligent nature. The power of God is always a deliberate teleological power, the power of intelligence. The sense of the absurdity that there is beautiful nature, intelligences, and culture instead of nothing shares a kind of transcendence with the sense of God, because that mystery temps us to interpreted it as a deliberate act of creation. Intelligence itself is the only evidence for a higher plane of existence, and subjectivity is our primary acquaintance with intelligence. The encounter between individual intelligence and merely inertial nature begins to make transcendence thinkable.

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the choice of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. For choices of action, intelligence has more than sensory perception and immediate responses stimulated by perception. It has memory and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote future, rational thinking has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions through conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern imposition, analysis, and extrapolation. It has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows rational mentality with a unique public voice. The rational will or intellect is an individuating personal genius with the dignity of deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

A voice is not the same as the language or words uttered. A voice is also more than the sounds of physiological vocal organs. In addition to the language and the vocal organs there are emotionally expressive qualities from an intelligence in a life-situation. The voice carries or expresses a character, persona, or avatar in addition to any meaning that might be denoted or connoted by linguistic utterance. The voice expresses a continuity of deliberate acts of self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments.

There are grounds for transcendence in these observations. For one thing there are no negations, possibilities, or probabilities in the brute actuality of nature. Neither are there temporally remote features. These are brought to the situation by a personal mentality and clearly transcend the actuality of nature. The rational will is free, beyond the compulsion of natural impulses and merely ephemeral appearances, because it draws upon powers which transcend nature.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Existential Non-Appearance

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Subjectivity

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The actor’s questions are: Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? * This is the fabric of self knowledge. For the question ‘Who am I?’, there is a social definition and there is a purely subjective definition: the gusher of subjective playfulness, curiosities, questions, orientations, synthetic productions of the dream-engine, gratifications, appetites, frustrations and impulses to mark the environment. Subjectivity is a strictly personal answer to the question “Who am I?”. For all the other questions there are also two answers, one focused on the subjective buzzing and bubbling and another focused on a socially assigned “I”.

As the philosopher David Hume declared in 1739, innocent subjectivity has a problem specifying its own existence due to the absence of a subjective appearance that can be measured and pointed out. It has existence before identity, or maybe existence without identity. It is pointless to undertake a study of something like “soul,” “mind,” “self”, “beliefs”, or “ideas” for example, because that discussion is about imaginary objects. Subjectively is not an object of any kind.

Subjective intelligence has a problem in its own non-appearance. It is a gusher of creativity, building a life and a way of being in a life with questions, curiosity, immediate gratification and suffering, ambitions, appetites, desire for self-preservation, and impulses to mark the objective world in ways which involve self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Yet, it feels the lack of a stable image or essence as a fragility and questionability about its existence. Its existence is verified by that very agonizing, the “existential” dread or doubt of insubstantiality. Intelligence feels that its intellectual and emotional powers transcend voiceless but measurable nature, and yet cannot escape the ephemerality of its emotional, libidinous, actualizing, or intellectual presence. Everything that can be said of it is momentary, and soon something else will mark its presence. Subjectivity, that is, existence as a particular person, is exposed, unstable, and fleeting, especially in our volitional nature and our mortality. Personal acts of volition change and change and emphasize differences between one person and another. As individuals what we have is always sliding away and the unknown is bearing toward us. In youth and in life’s prime that is normally balanced by graces and opportunities raining continually and by the strength, skill, and endurance we can devote to getting along. Mortality means the rain of graces itself is slipping away. However, there is also a subjective accumulation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness”. Roughly, the experience of many teachers is that each student learns best what he or she is really wondering about simply from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Each person’s wondering process could be seen as a peculiar force of nature that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia.

When subjective questioning evaluates and measures nature, the questioning is changed. A question is not a picture of the world, but its bearings and directedness change with satisfactions, disappointments, and discoveries. Its discoveries are part of its moment of directionality, evaluation, and measurement. Every discovery, satisfaction, disappointment, or surprise adds itself to the bearings of a question. Training and education work to the extent that they contribute to a person’s questioning. At a personal level within subjectivity, knowledge is a modification of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, the personal orientation or bearing which confers meaning on an environment. Every change is present in the instantaneous bearing or directionality of a person’s questioning. Everything that is part of the meaning of experience must be present instantaneously, as the question with which a person confronts, reads, and makes sense of sense-impressions. The instantaneous stimuli which fit into the bearings of questioning are those which make sense. Ultimately, a question is a person at some instant. Perception is a reading process, an interpretive activity by a person in a life.

* My Dinner with Andre, A Screenplay for the Film by Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-394-17948-X. (p. 26. Attributed to Stanislavski.)

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

What is Being Called Thinking?

06 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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To think is to proceed on a subjective journey, to go to a new place. Thinking is an act of re-orientation, a leap into novelty of mental focus and direction, self-directed re-orientation in aid of growth, increase, or going farther in questioning. Getting further along can be building a personal mark on the environment from subjective impulses, or evaluating the findings from digging into history and current events. Both involve an individual’s creativity, and both involve accumulating orientation by reference to inertial non-intelligent nature as well as collective culture. Thinking is the creative gusher of impulses and orientations building a global mental synthesis by positing probable relationships among variously discovered features of the world. Thinking is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mentally opening experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities.

Thinking is different from meditation in which the intent is not to get further along but rather to abide with or be with immediate experience. Thinking is more like doubting than like knowing. Thinking is not the same as talking silently to yourself, although sometimes it may take that form.

To think is to engage in some part of a cluster of subjective activities related to questioning, to notice your questioning and develop it, to be a source of questions. Thinking is a searching, holding to a principle or tree of relevance. To think is to wonder or question and sometimes to be borne by questioning to an evaluation of nature, sometimes measurements of nature, and to question differently by including findings in subsequent questioning. Questioning opens features of the world and so connects the reaching intelligence with inertial non-intelligence. Ideas are questions which create openings of the world and become vigils, and as such are ‘through the looking-glass’. An idea is a vigil, a vector of ‘listening’ sensitivity.

Thinking could include any part of an individual’s complicated subjectivity, typically “listening” for pattern building, tentative orientations, or placements from a semi-conscious dream-like process. By far the greater part of thinking is unconscious and pre-linguistic. The mechanics or habits of the process make up the visible tip of the iceberg. You “load” information, theories, and principles, the insights and observations of others, by reading and listening to people, getting things in separate bits without being judgmental too quickly. You let it work in the semi-conscious dream-engine and ‘listen’ for patterns, follow-up questions, and conclusions shot into consciousness. The “visible tip” is often a process of writing by which ideas can be developed through stating a tentative claim, collecting elaborations as well as alternative claims and contrary evidence in the most charitable interpretations, re-reading and correcting, accumulating and organizing by relevance.

Thinking can be more than problem solving. Problem identification is part of survival and creature comfort. There are irritations and hazards to survival and security too urgent for much deliberation. Subjectivity is often dominated by a sense of predicament and vigilance to overcome it. Curiosity and impulses to make a distinctive mark are often interrupted by that. Thinking is personal curiosity, appetite, and ambition evaluating, tasting, and re-making surroundings. Thinking quests after orientation-truth, science; grace (appetite gratification); self-declaration (intelligence creates voices, personae), and self-possession; all without dependence on an existing social order, although much concerned with mutual attachment. Thinking about the social and cultural context of an individual life will always involve questioning history and the legitimacy of authority and the value of the talk going around. Collective memories are often misinformed. There is a kind of mental soaring involved in getting beyond the influence of conventional or current cultural assumptions and projects.

The push of subjectivity should be upgraded as a marker of orientation. Since the perceiver projects so much selectivity and contextual placement onto sense-intuitions, the deliberate re-orientation that is called thinking has a claim to transcendence as a source of experience. Self-possession is awareness of the subjective gusher, awareness that deliberative intelligence shakes loose from the objective world by exercising freedom. (In Kant, freedom is transcendence.) Freedom does not have to be a godlike unlimited power. There can be real freedom within limits.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Disinterestedness: The Vita Contemplativa

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in disinterestedness, University

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Individuals have questions which they, as students, bring to the university to develop skills necessary to find answers. They tap into scholarly conversations with that readiness to research their questions, but study cannot be approached with too narrow a sense of relevance. Study in humanities, for example, is a deliberate encounter with great literature and requires some ‘rising to the occasion’, challenging ourselves to respond in a spontaneous and charitable way to products of original thought, insight, inspiration, and expression. Reading as a study activity requires charity and patience. It requires a suspension of one’s own questions in order to grasp those of another voice. Encountering greatness can enlarge anyone’s thinking, emotions, and sense-of-self in a general way, even in people who simply want a ticket to a professional career with a degree of dignity and gravitas.

Thinking about any issue is assisted by awareness of complications and objections already on record. Being aware of a variety of points of view comes with an awareness of history. Education should leave a person with the knowledge of why it is valuable to know the record of observations and discoveries. Academic disinterestedness includes a willingness to accept that others have recorded important insights and interpretations of observations and that learning them will improve anyone’s thinking. There is no accomplishment in re-inventing the same wheel continually.

Academic disinterestedness is also a subordination of personal likes and dislikes, wishes and fears, to the principles of rational evidence and recognition that one’s personal view might have gaps and misconceptions. Knowing this adds the purpose of identifying biases, agendas, needs, wishes, and fears, as much as possible, and making efforts to reduce their distorting effects. That is part of academic disinterestedness and involves relying on measurement, verification, and logic as much as possible. It is a subordination of ego to logic. Craftspeople of all kinds learn a similar disinterestedness in the love of materials, tools, technique, skill, and of learning itself. The work involves displacement of ego in favour of an openness to nature and materials and a patient searching and trying over until skill and sensitivity are achieved, an acceptance of the solitude of the process. There is a determination to keep going in spite of making mistakes, to accept fallibility while trying to do better.

For any claim to knowledge, it is necessary to consider objections and inconvenient observations, either in debate as Socrates did, or over time by reading and thinking. Writing then re-reading your own thinking is a technique that enables comparisons.

The best thing accomplished in education is contemplative disinterestedness: a discipline of submitting to evidence and logic in the joy of learning and understanding the truth, rather than to wishes and fears or a ‘party line’. Kant’s idea of duty is doing what is right for the joy of something greater and more honourable than personal or party benefits. Socrates thought ethical action results from knowledge of The Good (the greater good, the good overall) which removes the knower from narrowly self-interested motives. For Kant, calculating duty, a general will rather than a private will, had the same result.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Is There a Narrative Here?

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Narrative, University

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There is a narrative here that is not yet very distinct. It has something to do with a sense that the personal use of thinking will sometimes be at odds with what is taught us. Most of the guidance we get about using such intelligence as we have comes from educational institutions, and in the contemporary world those institutions are largely market driven.

Students are Market Commodities

The labour market is a competition. Universities understand and proclaim their mission as enabling students to perfect themselves as high-end labour market commodities. In addition to specific preparation for law, medicine, management, or engineering, for example, employers assume that university graduates have proven themselves capable, that they have been tested in general mental abilities, and also improved by university courses. Grads are assumed to have a high level of general knowledge, and interest and skill at continuing to learn. There is an expectation that grads can mentally organize and evaluate new experiences and information that might appear random and incomplete. The mental discipline of university programming is supposed to test and enhance critical thinking abilities, that is, abilities to assess claims and persuasive presentations for precision, plausibility, and logical validity, to sense relevance relations, to analyze and extrapolate. Awareness of basic investigation techniques is also assumed. Research skills go beyond laboratory experiments, and include awareness of sources of information and how to locate and use them, how to use a library, for example, to take possession of relevant material already published. The practicalities and logic of investigation should be in the skill-set of any university grad. There may even be an expectation that grads are able to get absorbed in work projects, that they are used to getting things done, and are not too self-absorbed to persevere through the hard parts, mistakes, disappointments, and failures. All this enables these people to add important value to their employer and their national economy.

The Well Rounded Gentleman

From their earliest existence, and up to, say, World War II (1939-45), universities were intended as hatcheries of clergy, lawyers, medical practitioners, and (Latin) grammar teachers. Within that mission, the ideal product of university was some version of ‘the well rounded gentleman’. Such a man was acquainted with classical literature, knew Latin (the seven Liberal Arts) and at least a second contemporary touring language. He had the ability to participate in vigorous sporting competitions and to dance and converse with ladies at formal parties. He was acquainted with a broad literary canon which, beyond Christian scripture, included refined poetry, heroic dramas, some Aristotle, the history of Rome, certain military campaigns, and the stories of important generals. He was prepared to be a soldier by practice in using weapons and transport vehicles, by athletic training, and respect for social hierarchy. His preparedness for military life included a sense of practicalities both in basic engineering principles and in ways of persuading others to join a team and follow orders, leadership skills. His presentation and communication skills included the ability to form effective sentences and short written messages, as well as clear public speeches. He valued team loyalty but respected all instances of competitive spirit, strategic cleverness, strength, and skilled performance.

Along with producing such professional scribes, it was, for a long time and until quite recently, part of the culture of university life to cultivate ‘a life of the mind’, the vita contemplativa. Perhaps that focus was most developed at the top and the bottom of the traditional university hierarchy, in the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Philosophy, but to some extent it pervaded university culture because of the very idea of a university. For the earliest centuries of university operation graduates would engage professionally and socially with aristocratic families and depend on them for patronage, since that was the social segment which could afford the routine services of lawyers, medical doctors, and teachers of children. Theologians entered Church hierarchies and engaged with the aristocracy as partners in social supervision and control. Qualities admired in aristocratic culture were distinctly masculine, military, and formally social, distinctly different from qualities cultivated by monkish scholarship, which was the previous high culture of literacy. University education was conceived to bring those two “high cultures” into a mutually beneficial partnership, to inject some vita contemplativa into the lives of men of action, men of affairs. Graduates should be manly but not thuggish, capable of refinement in thought and behaviour without being otherworldly or indecisive, capable of taking charge but also of deferring to higher authority. Maybe the university idea was an attempt to improve on the dominant aristocratic ideal, namely chivalry, a blending of military and Christian devotional cultures. The new life of the mind had more inspiration from the pagan literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

Do We Have a Narrative Here?

The personal use of thinking might require rejecting aristocratic values along with the quantification of value in terms of money.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Encountering Subjectivity

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Subjectivity

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Rebalancing Inward and Outward in Personal Identity

The description of human intelligence as “being-in-the-world” is a way of expressing the existentialist observation that the being of intelligence is outside-in. On an extreme version of that, intelligence has no inside at all and has no choice but to construct an external mask or icon to represent itself. Trophy culture, for example, is a version of that. With trophy culture a person demonstrates or constructs a self-portrait by entering competitions and accumulating a record of results, which are trophies when things go well. On that view, you are what you own. Trophy culture has huge mainstream support. Everybody in the star system is committed to it, and evaluates the world from within it. On that ground, envy is the right-wing theory of everything.

Outside is Not Simple

No one is ever aware of nature or culture except as scanned, filtered, sampled, probed, and then imaginatively re-constituted, re-modeled, or re-mixed by their struggling intelligence in desperate flight. These are operations of subjectivity. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing. Action does result and skepticism does not apply.

A common concept of knowledge is one in which the consciousness is a receptive slate upon which, little by little, is stamped a representation of the non-personal world, nature. Knowledge consists of impressions, data, projections from the determinate, given, immutable objective nature leaving an imprint on the pristine receptivity of consciousness. “Knowledge” is a sort of property, an appropriation or incorporation of the external not-self.

“Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera, sophist) refers to the fact that anyone’s impression of the measurable world will be edited and evaluated in terms of that person’s location and sensitivities, as well as biases, projects, needs, wishes, and fears, acquired often from ambient culture. There are personal and cultural filters. There is no such thing as a pure disinterested blank slate, no ‘pure’ cognitive rationality. All consciousness weighs and measures the impediments and resistances which enclose and restrict its getting further.

Perception is not an isolated mental condition, but exists in intimate involvement with speculating on probable futures, imagining, negating, remembering, searching and selecting, feeling gratification or irritation, and striving to make some imagined possibility into reality. There is more to thinking than soaking up data and facts about the measurable world. Every individual’s innate mental process is a source of curiosity, orientation, and questioning. Each individual is a source of selective questions and structuring creativity in combination with a specific and limited capacity to sense and make sense of externally supplied data. That is part of the ‘desperate flight’ of intelligence.

The World We Project

The human body’s sense organs are no simple opening between intelligence and the ‘real’ contents of the world. You search for dandelions in your grass and you don’t see any, and don’t see any, and then you see one and then another and then lots that must have been there all along. A curve drawn on paper does not have to be perfectly round and regular or completely closed to be seen as a circle. An observer will ‘fix’ imperfections, and see an ideal circle. We ‘read’ that mark drawn on paper on the basis of the briefest possible encounter, the quickest impression, and read it as ‘meaning’ a perfect circle. Rather than merely opening to let the world in, a person invents and constructs a reading process to relate brief and fleeting sensations with more enduring mental models, patterns, dreams, and narratives which are simple, schematic, and ideal.

To some indefinite extent, see what we look for, we see ideas. The pieces of the world we live among, we’ve domesticated them, made cut-outs and icons, myth-pieces of them. We see the myth of the material object, democracy, socialism, Canadianism, liberalism, or the myth of the wisdom of the free market, the myth of money. Many of these are parts of language-borne narratives taught us by our closest community.

We have a sense of the wholeness of things, the whole world of Eternity, within which local objects and events are placed. That awareness comes with human consciousness and not from sensations of local objects and incidents. The wholeness of the world is not perceivable by the senses, but is known by the perceiving mind. We can be in Eternity by contemplating even relatively simple forms: the beach, the night sky, art. These simplicities enable us to touch something of, or allow an intuition of, an Eternity we ourselves bring to experience. It is an intuition of intelligent subjectivity which cannot be an object to itself.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.