Category Archives: Blind spots in thinking

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

19 Thursday Dec 2024

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Fragment 209, Word count: 579.

tags: aristocracy, value culture, violence, science, religion, arts-washing, spirituality, time, ideality.

The culture of violence is a core element of aristocracy, out of whose practices in an earlier historical era emerged the forms of modern sovereign state governments. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from ‘bourgeois’ culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of consumption without the overt and personal use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations (true heirs of aristocracy) generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing. The culture of violence is inseparable from the aristocratic value culture of tangible rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive property wealth, trophy possessions, along with coercive power, and such a value culture still dominates popular aspirations and conceptions of personal success. A great deal of arts-washing has always been showcased to hide the viciousness of aristocratic venality and to manufacture an image of aristocratic glamour.

The Ultimate Left

Ultimately, the political left must be a spiritual alternative to the material treasures of violence-based wealth systems grounded in competitive property possession, but also to the great-spirit-in-the-sky religions of our dystopian past. The spiritual alternative is a matter of recognizing the anomalous existence of teleological orientation and bearing, ideality busily self-amending as an embodied “I” active in the creation and recreation of futurity. To say that intelligence is caring is to say that intelligence is an “I”, a personality, an embodied idiosyncratic caring. Caring expresses a very strict kind of particularity: of sensitivities in aid of felt dramas, of powers to recognize relevance and structural connections for interior model-world-construction as the framework and lens of perception within personal orientation, particularity of point of view, of quests and questions, of curiosity, of pleasures, of aesthetic gratifications, of energy, of the self-declaring voice. Perception is not an imprinting somehow made upon an innocent and passively receptive consciousness. It is an active intervention by an ideality, a reaching and taking hold, an interest-driven study that is performed in a vast echo-chamber of personal recollections and anticipations. The “I” of this discreet spiritual existence, this ideality, is appropriately followed by a name, indicative of a rich uniqueness: “I, Odysseus”.

Each such anomalous existence is one among a multitude of points and arcs of improvisational indeterminacy in existence, the existential opposite of a black hole, creating new reality all the time and experiencing value in creating. The inventive freedom of each individual ideality means that no form of social, economic, or cultural organization is strictly determined (say, by divine fiat or natural law) to be or remain as it has been. It follows from this that the scientific consensus on fundamental reality is decisively incomplete, and, as such, wrong, just as any previous religious consensus was. The fact of ideality’s metaphysical status as an anomaly (shining peak vs black hole) with respect to the brute actuality of nature, means that neither individually embodied instances of spirit nor their creations are subject to the two normal justifications for social hierarchies: decrees of capricious divine will and the deterministic laws that describe brute material actuality.

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Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

Fragment 205, February 3, 2024, Our Dystopian Past (word count: 1,543)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

What Science Can’t Do

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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Fragment 208, word count: 366.

Actual Intelligence is Caring

Let it be said. Intelligence is caring, and more particularly, it is idiosyncratic caring, an individual’s caring. None of the machine-based operations currently misrepresented as artificial intelligence is even in the ballpark of actual intelligence, because none of it is in the ballpark of caring. Whatever those huge power-sucking arrays of servers are doing, it isn’t caring or anything like it.

Let’s stop pretending that science, technology such as AI, or STEM education will solve the worst problems plaguing humanity. Mathematical science, the knowledge culture that developed rapidly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, always promises the progressive change that will eliminate miseries of the past and present, but its track record contradicts that promise. Everybody is well aware of dystopian features of investor supremacist capitalism: corporate profiteering from environmental destruction, war, addictions, and rigged markets; broad injustices of stark inequality and brutal imperialism. There has been lots of technological change here and there, much of it devoted to improving the lethality of violence on every scale, including weapons for mass religion, murder and catastrophic destruction of physical culture. The enduring prominence of violence in the intent of technological innovation proves an ongoing commitment by the funders of research-and-development to the preservation of extreme economic inequality, to there being haves and have-nots, to a profound alienation between “us” and “them”, a “them” who don’t matter. It is all part of the fabric of top-down human-on-human parasitism. It also proves an ongoing commitment to placing the highest value on things that can be won, hoarded, and guarded by violence: trophies, property, weapons, bunkers, and appearances that suggest a conquest over ordinary human limitations such as collective and personal mortality. This did not change in the historical transition from the overtly violence-based aristocracy which was embedded in religion, the previous knowledge culture, into the modern investor capitalist oligarchy. So, science and technology are not authentic foundations of progressive modernity but merely new means of parasitic concentration of wealth, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The authentic foundation of the struggling seed of modernity is mass literacy*, bringing with it a new personal experience of spiritual** power.

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

**Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

See also:

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Fragment 179, July 23, 2021, Knowing is Caring (word count: 621) **

Fragment 184, January 2, 2022, What Knowing Is (word count: 198)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy as Knowledge

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Fragment 206, word count: 1,076.

tags: writing, history of philosophy, spirituality, culture, hive-mind, self-possession, value.

It is very common in philosophical work to find critiques of any account of reality that comes as a cultural package, as widely shared culturally orthodox conceptions of reality. Such cultural packages include justifications for the existing social hierarchies and forms of exchange, of inequalities of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The canonical values of such an orthodoxy will be the values and treasures declared and embraced by factions which are most esteemed at the top of the hierarchy. The carriers of a culturally packaged reality typically form a collective with a sense of unity and identity, held together by competition for and imitation of certain styles of living, by a shared superego abstracted from exemplars of the life-best-lived, groups with most power, property, public attention and approval, awards, celebrated talents, and evident good fortune. The collective drama of inequality is rooted in orthodox conceptions of weaknesses and dangerous powers in the individual human spirit. Such culturally orthodox conceptions of reality are fetishistic in the sense that it is considered transgressive to doubt or question them.

Here are eleven examples of such philosophical critiques.

Socrates went to the Athenian marketplace to question people, and his intent was to show that ordinary assumptions about justice and virtue were far from well founded and often incoherent.

Plato extended Socrates’ identification of popular illusions to include all change and the experience of time itself. From the metaphor of the cultural community as a cave fixated on shadows, we learn that Plato thought that perceiving reality as it truly is would be a vision of the eternal.

Diogenes of Sinope, arguably the original Cynic, lived according to ‘nature’ in contrast to normal people, whose culturally formed style of living he declared an oppressive fantasy imposed on human nature.

Martin Luther is an example of profound self-possession and alienation from orthodox assumptions about fundamental reality as represented in Roman Christian orthodoxy.

Descartes carried through a rigorous inventory of everything that can be doubted about normal assumptions, but that people usually avoid thinking about.

Spinoza, like Plato, thought that properly perceived reality would be “under the aspect of eternity”. Since this is far from the norm, then normal perceiving involves some profound illusions about reality.

David Hume found rational grounds for scepticism about material substance, cause-effect, and the continuity of objects and of the subjective person. He concluded that, because of our psychological nature we soon forget our philosophical rationality and revert to ‘common sense’ habits of assuming we know what we really don’t know.

J.J. Rousseau did a critique of his contemporary culture, a critique of up-to-date arts and sciences in the tradition of “the bonfire of the vanities” and in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Rousseau’s critique was launched in opposition to the ‘man of the world’ style of living promoted by Voltaire, the life of wealth, privilege, consciousness of social superiority and exclusive group membership, consumption and patronage of the arts and sciences.

Kant figured out that individuals are self-legislating, and so not fundamentally in need of any exterior sovereign. That was a peculiarly philosophical discovery with profound political and social implications firmly rooted in the Lutheran tradition. Just as Luther conceived the individual as independent of the mediation of the Church, so Kant followed by showing the individual independent of the state or any other externally imposed superego.

Nietzsche wrote explicitly about common human herd mentality and the necessity of breaking out of it to do anything creative.

Wittgenstein saw his philosophical work as a way of “getting the fly out of the fly-bottle”. For Wittgenstein, the fly in the fly bottle was people caught in philosophical problems, snared by “language on holiday”. However, it isn’t just the vanishingly small population of philosophers who get themselves caught in the fly bottle. Culturally orthodox ways of conceiving reality also can do the same for all users of a common discourse.

A Graphically Projected Language Model of Thinking

Something that emphatically enables an exceptional perspective outside collective orthodoxy  is the personal use of writing in the process of developing and expressing judgements and ways of understanding reality. Of the examples listed, only Socrates seems not to have been a writer, although he was likely literate. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and available people, untethered from the common discourse. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces an assumption of inevitability about the way things are.

The experience of breaking free from common discourse itself involves the acquisition of some uncommon knowledge, such as knowledge of the power of community discourse to impose collectively shared conceptions of what is thinkable and what is unquestionable in community orientation, as well as knowledge that the community orientation is capable of hiding reality, including the reality of human existence itself. Philosophers often speak from knowing that the sense of reality which is normal and normative for speakers of any given language is largely supplied by ambient culture and carried in the meaning structure of the language as used in ordinary conversations. This is knowing that there are cultural hives of false reality, and that human collectives construct themselves as such hives in part to shelter from the potential terror of not knowing the most profound truths of existence, in part to fabricate a human unit larger and stronger than the embodied individual in the face of the cosmic vastness, but also to preserve certain dystopian injustices from which powerful factions benefit.

As the examples show, a philosophical sensibility often includes recognition of a personal discordance with the orientation stipulated by a culture-hive, and a sense of curiosity about encountering existence in a way beyond cultural influences. This is acquaintance with an individual spiritual power that is completely at odds with a top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. It is an experience of profound self-possession and creative power, and as such discovery of a human spirit not confined as cultural orthodoxy stipulates. Such knowledge is transcendently important, bringing gratification that is non-competitive, non-imitative, and adventuresome.

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Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Our Dystopian Past

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Fragment 205, word count: 1,543.

tags: Christendom, modernity, literacy, justice, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, hive-mind, time, humanism.

The conception of social organization in feudal Christendom identified three Platonic functional groups stacked as a power pyramid. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and the lowest stratum. Baronial fighting families formed the next level up (a big step up) and were far fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land, natural resources, and often workers, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed, in theory, the high point of the pyramid. The clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. They also claimed to be God’s agents on Earth. The baronial aristocracy disputed this way of understanding things to some extent but could not maintain their position of parasitic dominance without the authority that came from the culture and organization of religion.

The two power-factions asserted the necessity of an eternal stability in the order of society. Both aristocracy (of which monarchy is just a feature) and the theocratic hierarchy of the Christian religion planned with fervent determination to keep the arrangement of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power exactly as they had arranged it for their own parasitic benefit. There was a Platonic influence here as well since Plato declared that reality was strictly unchanging. The passing of time was an illusion for Plato. However, there was a way in which some change and continuity were reconciled, and that was by something like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”. Seasons change, but in a continuously repeating cycle that expresses a circle, an eternally closed loop. The vast majority of the general population accepted metaphysical determinism in the social order and found it a theme of common discourse. They were taught by the parasitic power factions to be afraid and to feel dependent. Notwithstanding this intent and practical control, nothing like complete stability was ever realized. Medieval horizons* expanded profoundly, and yet, there were blind spots, directions in which horizons did not expand. The general parasitic hierarchy of society persisted and still does.

In Christendom the core ideas of religion included universally inherited guilt coupled with supernatural surveillance for the purpose of moral ledger-keeping on every person’s thoughts and deeds, all leading toward an inevitable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, that made the ever-looming prospect of death terrifying, and the Church proclaimed itself as essentially God-on-Earth, the only way out. Just as the coercive power of aristocracy resulted from its culture of violence, the power of the Church depended upon its monopolistic culture of sacred knowledge, the Revelation it claimed to possess concerning the Divine drama involving every individual’s fate after death. As for the aristocracy, their iconic form was as armed men on horses, claiming everything as their property and asserting that claim with practiced violence toward anyone unable to resist with equal violence. These are the cultural niches which conceived and put into practice the form of human organization which would mutate into the sovereign state. Sovereignty was focused on securing the ownership of private property by force but also on religious mystery-cult insistence on group belonging and conformity (communal hive-mind). Patriarchs of religious pageantry were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still cultivated the scribal culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable in their role as advisers and administrators for aristocrats, keeping records of contracts, costs, products, properties, distributions, income, and consumption. However, in monastic libraries and after 1088 in increasing numbers of universities, they also kept alive surviving vestiges of ancient pagan literary culture. The rediscovered texts of philosophy, science, and mathematics from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Islamic east were recognized as profoundly more complex and advanced than anything native to Western Christendom, containing knowledge and courses of thought that opened vast horizons.

Although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with top-down imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and proximate people, from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. Time as experienced in the process of personal writing untethered from commonplace conversations opens in the direction of discoveries and creative opportunities and as such is progressive (modern) and starkly different from the cyclical repetitive time as normally represented in traditional conservative community discourse. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces the assumption of stable continuity. Humanism, as an exploration of the independent voice untethered from common discourse, is the expression of the individualistic experience that develops from moving through that portal. Ultimately, the humanist project of self-cultivation through reading and writing, expresses a claim about the fundamentals of human living, including individual freedom and creativity. It points toward a philosophy of living spirit that has never been articulated. (Although Existentialism could be a humanism in this sense. Thank you, Sartre.)  Individualism was always the core of Humanism, based on the privacy of the written voice. This individualism was created by literacy, and so was not an invention of the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had an ancient flowering long before the Enlightenment and before the also famous Renaissance flourish.

By contrast with medieval and old regime devotion to stability, the idea of progress is what defines modernity, and it emerged from the experience of literacy. This culturally transmitted idea of progress includes the certainty that justice requires progressive change in the ordering of society, that justice is impossible without a different organization of property, status, knowledge, and power. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being as well as for justice because the past has been revealed as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, violent oppression, misogyny, tribalism, monotony, poverty, and conformity imposed by fear-based myths of safety in numbers. To various degrees in different places, those dystopian conditions are still normal, but now often recognized as reasons for improvement. Modernity has embraced the idea of future justice through progressive change in the social order, but it has no clear vision of how to overcome the forces that benefit from established injustice. The French Revolution** of 1789-99 was a major effort at government by and for the majority but it was subverted and descended into the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of Napoleon. Marxism was another major effort at justice through equality, but it became a cult of inevitability about the laws of history, highly dependent on a central sovereign power exercising death-grip control by violence, and so could never approach genuine equality. The conservative backlash against these essays in general justice that failed has almost discredited the very idea of progress.

Humanist Individualism: The Third Way

Humanism does not present itself as an authoritative edifice of knowledge, even though it specifically contradicts both religion and mechanistic science, which certainly do. Humanism celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality, but it doesn’t assert an original conception of human existence in nature that advances an individual-sourced power that can overcome the objections of mechanistic theory from science and deterministic religious conceptions such as original sin, Karma, or divine command and judgment. Humanism has declared human freedom and originality by practicing those powers via individual self-cultivation in the medium of literature, reading, and writing. It thrives because the mechanistic vision derived from science is fatally counterintuitive as a representation of living as experienced by a person. Materialist/ mathematical science misses the self-aware agency that explodes from the conception of time as a personal opening. Religions also lose credibility by separating personality, the restlessly unfinished and incompletely defined existence as experienced by a person, from ordinary embodiment and then aggrandizing it to infinity. In doing that, religions cast strictly embodied personality as inferior, secondary, and derivative in relation to some wildly speculative and implausible original. Both of those authoritative systems in effect leave the ordinary self-experience of the individual out of their picture. So, even now, in this age of knowledge, what it is to be a living human person is profoundly misconceived, and the result is dystopian society. Humanism, though, is still developing, and the way we people of modernity know and live in time has the project of progress inherent in it.

* Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.

**  The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, written by Robert Darnton, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books (2023), ISBN: 978-0-713-99656-2.

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

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Between Spirit and Dystopia

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Fragment 202, word count: 1,379.

Tags: nature, knowledge, simulation, caring, transcendence, politics, religion, science, spirituality, self-possession.

Experience can be situated and explored in terms of two cardinal points of philosophical concern and discovery, with a focus on individuals managing some degree of agency in the interplay of two great forces. The first of these is the force of agency itself: any individual’s own anomalous existence as personality, embodied spirit or intelligence, ideality vectoring future-ward with hope and expectation, with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and power to overcome its own normal habits and regularity, power based on impulses of self-expression, constant learning, and impulses to make a distinctive personal mark on the world. The other force is the individual’s social context of dystopian culture: economic, political, interpersonal, metaphysical. Phenomenology of embodied spirit is at the centre here, ruling out all claims about disembodied spirit, including all-knowing surveillance and moral ledger-keeping. Dystopian societies constitute the main context for spirit, but not the whole context. The context also includes brute uncaring nature as well as the great human interconnectedness, the most important human achievement. There is considerable tension between individual spirit and social dystopia.

Phenomenology of Spirit: Anomalous Existence

Freedom is possible, and indeed actual, because of the anomalous existence of embodied spirit at the unfinished temporal edge of a world always still emerging into existence. Embodiment brings with it a radical individuality of placement, strict locality, and peculiarly personal limits to sensitivity and mobility. The anomalous existence of human personality, as compared to nature’s rocks and rivers, has been characterized speculatively as an existence that reflects or mirrors nature from just outside it, reflecting the world in such a way as to register and be moved by its inexplicable beauty and grandeur. However, we are very bad mirrors of nature. Spirit constructs itself partly as a crude and limited knowledge-simulation of the great environment in which it finds itself, a simulation in the form of ideation, expectation, a non-verbal sense of having a specific location and a specific directionality with respect to a pattern of features in what is open to mobility, all elements of this simulation chosen, assembled, and shaded as an expression of what matters to this particular personality. There is an active gaze by a creative knowledge builder among shapes of matter which don’t matter at all in themselves but only as I or another caring builder project personal dramas outward and bring objects into them. We are not about appreciating the awesome grandeur of the existence of nature, but rather about coursing through time to change and re-create our world, to personalize it and make it a livable and delightful home. There is always a spirit from which any gaze upon objects derives its reasons for being, its expectations and rewards. Every personally experienced visual encounter with objects, every moment of every gaze, every looking, every seeing, is an act in someone’s personal drama. Something is surprising here. Something is missing. Something is being hunted, something expected or hoped for is sought, maybe found. Something is being loved in this loving gaze or feared or hated. Some personal state of dramatic caring must always be the driving source of encounters-of-perceiving with items in the world. Such encounters re-structure and extend the personal knowledge simulation.

So, the metaphysical principle that spirit brings to reality is a principle of personalizing world simulating that builds its suppositional structure around personal interests and cares, creating an embodied life in a world of bodies and other spirits. The world of physics is made up of things, but spirit is not a thing but a spontaneous and fluid vector of intervention into not-itself guided by an imperfect simulation, localized and caring desperately about its own continuing force and viability in the world, a personalizing vector of world-reorganizing.

Roots of Dystopia Now

As for dystopian societies, the kind of stratification that is common globally is exactly as if there was in ancient times an outpouring of conquering herders from the great Eurasian steppe who transferred their control and exploitation of herd animals onto the human communities they defeated by violent assault. This stratification is not mere inequality but exclusionary subjection, contemptuously arranged, the cruel exploitation of creatures made to seem weak and unworthy by those in a position to benefit, who define themselves as noble and superior beings. Another dystopian force derives from the exploitation of fear toward demons and deities, occult personalities. Charismatic enthusiasts convince people they are chosen by divine power to exercise unlimited sovereignty, ownership, over communities, enforcing rules of conduct and rites of submission and self-denial. This foundation of power, like the first, licenses unlimited greed and cruelty, justified by unquestionable assertions of supernatural command. Imperialist war, slavery, colonization, genocide, extractive devastation of the environment, all follow directly from these origins. Such are the living legacies that shape neoliberal capitalist dystopia in contemporary societies. These roots of dystopia begin from metaphysical denigration of human spirit, the failure to recognize human spirit as transcendently anomalous, universally.

Hive-Mind Reality Distortion

In order to maintain coordination among factions in societies with these vicious value dynamics, some special mental accommodations are required. People must be persuaded counter-factually that, no matter how miserably certain groups are living, they themselves, along with most others, have a chance of doing all right, and that, in spite of appearances, the collective is a single entity profoundly unified by transcendent elements: a deity, a sovereign leader, a common origin and history, a destiny, an exceptional grasp of ultimate reality, enemies. Stratification is explained as a matter of merit. Not everyone is equally good. The life style of the most wealthy is idealized and accepted as the measure and proof of merit and worth. Everyone wants to ape the wealthiest, encouraged to take vicarious pleasure in the luxury of those who possess the most. There are goods to be had and ways to win them for those who deserve. It is crucial that people concentrate on the competition for dreamy trophies and not on the exclusionary contempt and cruel exploitation. Attention must be kept on working to do better, on the dream of doing better. Maintaining this focus on dreams of great possessions as a culturally given shared orientation always depends on a body of false but authoritative teaching about sacred and transcendent things, beyond ordinary evidence and logic, declaring that the master/ slave social hierarchy of wealth and power is pre-determined by God or Nature, so sadly inevitable, even though it has to be maintained often by violence and misinformation. The pleasure and relief we gain from companionship and sociability inclines us to full  spectrum imitation and conformity. Such are the bindings of dystopian hive-minds that block awareness of even the possibility of spiritual self-possession.

Bonfire of Vanities

The sometimes comfortable life of a hive-mind focused on market-centred competition for increments of status, value, personal meaning, and self-esteem, existing as a reflection projected back in treatment from the world around, is ultimately a disablingly unspiritual condition. This degree of imitation and conformity feels like a collective evasion of reality, and it is. There is an alternative to this kind of dystopia-masking hive-mind. There is a current of value that doesn’t have to be bought, won, or earned in any way, and can’t be. Self-possession in the dystopian context requires deriving personal value from something other than property, titles, trophies, competition, or anything that can be bought. Recognition of this follows from discovering an innocence, sometimes an active de-culturing, a (figurative) bonfire of cultural vanities. Two connected areas of discovery are crucial: first is direct acquaintance with the anomalous metaphysical self, of spirit, which includes the fountain of original creativity from within. This replaces the cultural denigration of humanity/ personality with a recognition of where transcendence is found in ordinary experience. Spiritual self-discovery is soon followed by discovery of the dystopian context which clashes so violently with spiritual reality. Recognizing dystopia breaks the hive-mind faux-reality, the false sense of political collective identity. This alternative is a personal adventure of existence as embodied spirit recently arrived into a very ancient nature and a vast and terrible cultural edifice. It creates new possibilities for the crucial human interconnectedness.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Popping Hive-Mind Bubbles

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Fragment 201, word count: 722.

tags: utopia, dystopia, politics, culture, reality, spiritual simulation, metaphysics, phenomenology.

It is typical of utopian texts from the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to idealize small societies with a strong collective sense of unity *, societies in which every individual agrees with everyone else about the dramas that constitute the emotional vectors of life and especially collective life. This collective cultural and psychological uniformity was, and often still is, seen as the foundation of social stability, and it is supposed that social stability is an ideal to be sought. However, what is always sinister, oppressive, and inhumane about repressive authoritarian governments is the deliberate social engineering of a collective single-mindedness, a cultural hive-mind in which dissent is punished with intent to obliterate. Human hive-minds are far more pervasive and ubiquitous than ordinarily recognized, and there is no point in trying to distinguishing good hive-minds from bad ones. All of them are destructive of individual self-expression, creativity, freedom, and self-possession. Remarkably, and this is the nub of the issue, the richness of sociability and the great human interconnectedness does not depend on hive-mind reality bubbles.

It used to be thought that if people in a community had different religions, for example, or no religion, then social breakdown would soon follow. It is now obvious that societies with a mixture of different religions and no-religion can thrive. The same thinking applied to sexual orientations, to gender identities, to a fixed hierarchy of genders, to race, language, and to reverence for a sovereign leader who, along with various officials who judge and evaluate compliance with social norms, would be universally internalized by people as a dominating superego. It is now obvious that none of these is necessary for a thriving human interconnectedness, and nor are symbols of collective identity such as flags, uniforms, monuments to glorious battles, a romanticized and sanitized history, heroes, weapons, a fearsome and contemptible enemy, an exceptional group destiny. These are all mechanisms to bind individuals into a hive-mind, and there are influencers pressuring people to embrace them, supposedly for the communal good, sometimes called the higher good. The conforming societies that result are not the realization of any higher good.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of an essential structure to existence that extends into the order of societies, are always canonized in dystopias to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. Dystopian arrangements become normalized and accepted through the use of fantasy metaphysics to persuade people that hierarchical social arrangements are the inevitable products of God or Nature, both pillars of essentialist belief systems. A phenomenology of spirit, on the other hand, establishes that social arrangements are not inevitable and certainly not pre-determined by God or Nature. Such a metaphysics of experience is the route to de-normalizing dystopia. Any exit from dystopian societies will require the individual self-possession that comes with self-acquaintance unmediated by antique cultural fantasies.

The Spiritual Simulation

The sense of the world by which an individual is oriented and grounded is built from fleeting perceptions and personally curated memory, and since it can’t be a sculptural physical likeness or scale-model of the world, nor any kind of continuous perceptual contact with every part of the world known by the individual, this sense of being oriented within knowledge of some region of the world is a personal simulation of a world. These simulations are constructed of perception-based suppositions arranged in the service of an individual’s pattern of personal caring, all accomplished in the medium of suppositions, ideality, the poise of a busy self-interested spirit at a place in the world. Spirit orients itself and survives by simulating a world un-naturally stretched in time, supposing what it no longer perceives and anticipating the world as staging for a moment by moment enactment of its self-created arc of intended interventions. Supposing, caring, anticipating, and intending are spiritual non-actualities, postures of ideality, the only metaphysical reality. This phenomenology of spirit recognizes that individual creativity in manifesting a caring personal agency is crucial to the shape of all aspects of the human environment. It reveals the very opposite of essentialism, an alternative to the determinism stipulated by theologies or by physical materialism.

  • Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (Chapter 42, pp. 298-304).

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Instead of Nothing

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Fragment 189, word count: 95.

tags: wonder, caring, knowing, existence, spirit.

The wonder is not that there is something instead of nothing, but rather that there is so much caring about what there is instead of nothing, and so many different reasons for caring and so many different and independent vantage points and dramas that are contexts of caring. Wonder itself, the spirit in wonder, is the great wonder, not only for its peculiar existence as drama-powered sensitivity in its own blind spot but also for the shape of its placements, its distribution, and the contexts it assembles for discovering and knowing what there is.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

What Knowing Is

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Fragment 184, word count: 198.

tags: existence, reality, drama, physics, metaphysics, spirituality, time, transcendence.

Spirituality has nothing to do with immortality, eternity, or qualifying for immortality. Instead, spirituality is bringing drama to existence, so, knowing the passing of time.

Awareness of the boundless world of enduring structures and processes, cycles repeating within cycles, a world that doesn’t matter to itself and doesn’t care, discover, or regret but goes on existing and shape shifting, structured and complex but just falling through the ways of least resistance: physical reality! Any beholding and knowing such physical reality expresses and demonstrates an order of existence which is different and higher than physics, an order of existence which does care and which questions, discovers, supposes, and contextualizes: the order of existence which is ordinary subjective spirituality. The physical universe cannot identify you and me, but we identify the physical universe. The physical universe can’t care what happens. It doesn’t wonder or fashion a demeanour expressing curiosity or determination. In no sense can it identify and remember the features of a context for initiatives, a framework of orientation and purpose. Metaphysical reality is exactly the power to construct some understanding of the system of physical reality, to construct an appreciation of the existence of a world of objects.

Another step:

Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335).

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

What are Ideas?

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Fragment 183, Word count: 375.

Various answers to the question “What are ideas?” mostly have in common that ideas exemplify a distinct immaterial face of existence. Idealism encompasses answers to that question which emphasize the foundational or primordial status of such immaterial existence. Essentialist idealism presents ideas as primordial templates for the categories of all things that exist, absolutely independent of any living consciousness, excepting possibly a unique eternal divine consciousness. These ideas are prior to the rest of existence in some profound sense and supposedly cause the rest of existence. As exemplified by Platonic idealism, there is a certain sense of metaphysics presented by essentialist idealism: a primordial reality that is profoundly different, in its immutable immateriality, from the world of ordinary appearances, a reality of predetermined forever templates for the forms that any physical existence must take.

A non-essentialist idealism presents a very different sense of metaphysics: ideas are ephemeral features which shape the frame-work of orientation that guides the future-ward tilt or bearing of some living individual. Ideas exist only in the intentional agency of living individuals. Instead of standing as eternally enduring categories and structures, the special genius of ideality is its fluid subsistence by leaping ceaselessly into losses and novel opportunities expressing personal dramas of caring; plunging, partly falling, into an ever-just-opening non-existence, evaluating the uncertain prospects for improvisations of personal dramas within a mix of expected and unexpected circumstances and expressive impulses. There is no question here of ideas existing separately from the living of particular sentient and intentional agents. Even as such, ideas cannot be left out of a description of fundamental existence, of what there is, since they present an undeniable complication to neat conceptions of reality as fixed, atomized, and final. As necessarily temporal and immaterial (even though organized as embodied), ideas are anomalous existences, inseparable from the subjectivity of personal experiences. Ideality is still metaphysical but its meta-physicality is in its living spontaneity and creative agency, in its sentient-intentionality at the raw ever-becoming edge of existence. Human existence is living: experience-derived anticipation as context and inspiration for important intentions and aspirations. It is an actively reaching incompleteness or openness to existence at its core: discontinuous, multiple, monadic, locally limited, ephemeral.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

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Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

tags: existence, metaphysics, time, creativity, freedom, caring, drama, agency, empathy, science, religion, politics, patriarchy, civilization, malaise.

The difference made by recognizing a bit of metaphysics, specifically a certain conception of ideality, is a much needed and long overdue disruption of two canonical but failing universal explanations: religious personification of nature and the materialist fatalism of science. Thinking of ideality as embodied (discontinuous and discretely located) points and arcs of creative intentionality* opens a way to recognize human-scale freedom and creativity as real without wildly speculative and implausible personifications. Human reality is a beach where a personal interiority of ever-reshaping dramas made of caring and ideas (expectations and hopes, questions, aspirations, and intentions) gush out in deliberate activity and wash actuality. Features of brute actuality can be shaped into culture by these actions. Culture in this sense is any product of intentional craft, any effective application of purposive ideality to the merely natural material of actuality: the carved wood, the ploughed field. Freedom is real in this tumbling co-existence of gushing creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of existence (both ideality and actuality) as witnessed in the endless passage of time. Any serious conception of freedom requires enduring points of ideality actively living, forming actuality, at the incomplete edge of existence, continuously actualizing a stream of spontaneously invented intentions within a personally learned and learning context of expectations. Knowledge is always an elaboration, specification, and development of personally created dramas of caring.

Since the European codification of mathematical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after nearly a millennium of theocratic Christendom, the most innovating civilizations have been stuck with a dysfunctional codependence of scientific materialism and immaterial angels and demons. Both religion and science have ongoing appeal, science from rapidly developing commercial applications, especially communication and data processing technology (innovations in entertainment with advertising), vaccines of course; and religion from a most primitive reflex to personify the world, which is to suppose that purposive intentionality creates everything. But the binocular culture which perceives with the materialist lens in one eye and the world-personifying lens in the other is spectacularly unsuccessful delivering peace and justice in its political and governance arrangements, and no wonder. Science and religion have in common a fundamental legitimation of patriarchal hierarchy as core social organization. To be clear, this is top-down human-on-human macro parasitism, various forms of the master/ slave relationship. Religious personification asserts that such organization is the eternal divine plan (divinity is the primordial master), and scientific fatalism that such a food chain is made inevitable by immutable forces of nature. These are both conceptions of existence as profoundly complete, without any possibility for the creation of real novelty. In that context governance is a matter of imposing on everyone an orientation up the hierarchy for a sense of direction derived from an overarching culturally stipulated drama.

Culture in this sense is the complex system of imitative, repetitive, and normative human activity that expresses and sustains a collective’s sense of unity and identity. This is the sense in which culture, in the context of patriarchal parasitism, imposes a hive-mind on its participants. This has produced and maintained dystopian political regimes poisoned by the history of war culture abetted by religions that demand irrational credulity and fervent expressions of reverence and supplication upward, situating deity at the apex of human hierarchy. Outsourcing the determination of reality to a God, impersonal Platonic Ideas, or even just nature denigrates human ideality by alienating the creative work of conceptualization actually required and accomplished by individuals orienting ourselves in the world. It represents human interiority as a passive recipient of a pre-completed world, including the social and political world, and has the effect of cementing individuals into a mass mythology of inadequacy and dependence. Science further denigrates personal interiority by reducing it to biologically pre-determined lusts and reactions to external stimuli, and religion denigrates it as an engine of error and misery, completely hopeless without the controlling intervention of some more perfect and powerful personification.

Individual ideality, however, is profoundly more active and creative than religion or science can recognize. The primordial act of self-creation by every ideality is the supposition of time. Ideality is the non-actuality which supposes. Every ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating time-wave, living in and through a constant flight through time. A time-wave is a dramatically-propelled progressive change of suppositions. One vector of this flight consists of things slipping by and falling away, and the other vector is a dramatic personal leap into a supposed future. Time is a personal dimension of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality in which, oriented with knowledge, expectations, and questions abstracted from a supposed ephemeral past, an intelligence creates specific intentions to project itself with a degree of creative freedom into an ever-newly-opening not-yet or future. This being-in-time distinguishes ideality from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the opening of freedom-from-nature at the edge of existence and as such the transcendence that spiritual interiority brings to the beach of reality. With an appropriate sense of this interiority the personal importance of competitions and appearances falls away. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles, personal hero story) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant conceptual system.

The political difference made by recognizing persons universally as metaphysical engines of spontaneous creativity, exploiting a precarious position at the edge of existence by improvising a desperately caring drama of sensitivity and personal expression, is a flattening of the political landscape. There is no justification here for master/ slave social organization. There is no general disrespect or denigration of humanity/ personality inherent in this conception. The political imperative changes from imposing control via belligerent us-against-them hive minds to cultivating and encouraging autonomous creativity and person-to-person interconnections shaped by empathy.

The often lamented malaise of civilization is the result of extreme cultural denigration of humanity/ personality combined with a romantic overestimation of the explanatory power of mathematical science. These have killed off innovative thinking involving metaphysics, but only a certain metaphysical reconceptualization can amend the currently toxic cultural legacy.

Note

* ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of pre-conceiving future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.