Category Archives: Culture

The Birth of the Left

22 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Fragment 148, word count: 628.

As long as the ubiquitous metaphysics in the European cultural system was creationist monotheism, there was a blanket sanctification for the rights and privileges (ultimately sovereignty) of the strongest, since they are evidently favoured by deity and typically partnered with priestly institutions dedicated to studying and proclaiming divine messages. However, that blanket sanctification was disrupted beginning as early as the later fourteenth century, gradually building toward the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789-99. Over those four centuries there was a convergence between two distinct philosophical streams in the developing culture of western Christendom, one stream focused on the nature and movement of objects and the other on the status and dignity of the subjective personality of individual humans relative to divine personality. The object-focused stream was mechanistic materialism (anti-Aristotelian) inspired by Lucretius (ancient Roman Epicurean materialist rediscovered in the Renaissance) via Spinoza (1632-1677). Such scientific materialism was used to undercut claims of the divine right of kings, aristocracy, and Church to dominate society, but it also re-conceived human nature as being inclined to rationality, with the inherent ability to reason mathematically and logically, to question, recognize relevant evidence, investigate and judge reality. In other words, it recognized humans as competent to acquire scientific knowledge of the natural world. This was a profound upgrade in human dignity compared with the Christian teaching of hopeless inherent sinfulness since the Fall from Grace. There was a serious effort in this philosophical stream to make human rationality consistent with a mechanistic universe. (Materialism always stumbles over an awkwardness to accommodate conscious ideality, intelligence.) The other stream was also a major upgrade to general human dignity. It was a stream of thinking about human spirituality, expressed in an early form in the remarkable work of John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), concerning the individual self-sufficiency to read and understand the Biblical word of God. This developed as the spirit of Protestantism, ascribing to individuals the inherent nobility to engage with deity directly, without interceding saints or priestly sacraments empowered by the institutional Church, along with the innate power to take a mental leap to faith (Luther), which is to posit conceptions of reality. Both of these streams of thought had philosophical force, and their combined history accounts for why the political left-wing is the party of philosophy: because the convergence of these streams of philosophical thinking came to conceive human nature as having the inherent dignity of rationality and creative self-possession, in the spirit of protestantism but also extending beyond religion into secular politics. Even the protestant stream contains an implicit politics: with God exercising sovereignty directly within every individual’s intelligence, there is no justification for any military commander-in-chief to exercise sovereignty as a local expression of divine will.

Democracy is an expression of the political left-wing, an assertion (against the age-old dominance of the strongest) of the rights to political self-determination of the most numerous class of people who must sell labour for wages to survive because they possess little or nothing. It is leftist to derive inherent and inalienable rights from mere sentient existence, from the inherent dignity of life prior to any possession of property. Based on this philosophical convergence, developed over a long troubled history, there is no metaphysical justification for any claim that a collective can own anyone, or that anyone can own anyone, even on the grounds of being the strongest. No one has a metaphysical obligation or duty to submit to or be subject to the commands of a collective or individual, no matter how gifted. There is no metaphysical commanding height. The crucial freedom is the freedom to disbelieve the bogus metaphysics that sustains the dystopia: that rights belong to the strongest.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

A City of Plato’s Kings

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 147, word count: 872.

Plato, in the Republic, claimed that humans come as three different kinds, and only the rarest kind is capable of philosophical thinking. Now, a couple of thousand years later, it is no longer plausible that some humans are different from others in that particular way. Plato was all about hierarchical categories, and he designed a political system suited to controlling a city made up of three distinct and unequal kinds of humans. Theorists in the Church hierarchy of feudal Christendom were proud that the institutions of their vast society actualized Plato’s design, with themselves as philosophers in ultimate control, confident in Plato’s claim that philosophical thought is the guiding treasure of any society. Political conservatism is still a remnant of, and nostalgia for, the political ideology and religious metaphysics (creationist monotheism) of feudal Christendom. However, since we no longer accept Plato’s division of humans into types, it follows from the manifest existence of philosophical thinking that it is something important which all humans might do. It could even be argued that everyone begins life as a philosopher. The goal of education, then, should be to reawaken the spirit of philosophy. Before anyone is a tinker, tailor, professional, or capitalist he or she should be abled as an adult, competent to digest diverse and conflicting information into an overall sense of orientation that serves the personal construction of a sustainable life. That is already pretty close to being a philosopher. So, what political institutions would be suitable for an entire population of philosophers? Such a population would eliminate the reasons given for the use of ‘noble’ lies (propaganda) as a technique of governing. They wouldn’t be taken in by lies.

The spirit of enquiry that we now associate with science was philosophy first. Science is a sub-category, natural philosophy, but the broad enquiry of philosophy covers the whole of culture and experience. This posture of enquiry arises from an implicit judgement that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions. The quest for philosophical awareness is a quest to recognize and move beyond such assumptions and assertions, to know that reality is mutable because ideas make up much of the structure of reality. Science is now considered an accumulation of reliable knowledge, but philosophy, even with its rich historical arc of ideas, remains mainly a spirit of enquiry, of incredulity, questioning, and of the importance of ongoing conceptual research.

We don’t admire philosophers for their scholarship, but for their original re-conceptualizations of experience. That fact expresses a human freedom to re-conceptualize experience comprehensively at the level of the embodied individual, a profound unpredictability in the creativity of human nature. Moreover, philosophy is not only about understanding reality. Understanding has always been in aid of ethical living, and arranging the best political institutions for the expression of human nature and ability, especially emphasizing the ongoing impulse to philosophize, to question and search for alternative ways of conceiving. It is a philosophical act (central in Epicureanism) to resist a dystopian society (any asserting a dystopian metaphysics that denigrates human nature) by re-directing energy toward recognizing the powers of personally interior ideality. That recognition displaces legacy metaphysics, both creationist monotheism or scientific materialism which perversely denigrate the nature of ordinary personalities. Science dismisses the creative freedom of personality as mere illusion, and Christianity dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama of salvation from inherent guilt. The point of thinking as a philosophical act is not knowledge in the ordinary sense, certainly not absolute knowledge of eternal necessities, such as mathematics, that removes the knower from engaged subjectivity. Instead it is to enact a personal reorientation to enable empathic agency, from full recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, ordinary consciousness. Philosophy works by thinking, acts of ideation, and soon finds its way to thinking about thinking and discovering the transcendence of ideality in its creative freedom*, untethered as it is from brute actuality by its temporality. Personality experiences its creativity, its ideality, as freedom because it encompasses in advance, from within itself, alternative possibilities for personal agency in mutating reality.

Political institutions are a test of truth because dystopian societies always rest on false metaphysics that either deny or misconceive ordinary ideality. Ideality is individually created freedom, and as such, transcendence at the level of the embodied individual. Freedom to philosophize comes from disbelieving the bullshit cultural metaphysics that sustains a dystopia. From the fact that it includes such thinking, we learn about human nature that it is innocently independent of social and cultural authority and control. In a society made up entirely of philosophers there would be no cultural background of metaphysics that denigrated human individuality, say by reducing personality to responses programmed by an immutable nature. There would be no dismissal of either ideality or actuality. The whole frontier economy of trophies from contests of strength would also be meaningless. Everyone would self-create personal identity and much of their own value experience because awareness of an interior fountain would be universal. It would be a society in which everyone recognized in all, individually, the creative freedom of ideality, and the dignity of its transcendence.

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Fragment 144, March 28, 2019, The Freedom of Ideality (word count: 442) (URL: https://wp.me/p1QmhU-b7)

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History

04 Thursday Apr 2019

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Fragment 145, Word count: 2,189.

In eighteenth century Europe there was an epochal change in the culturally dominant conception of reality, a change from the dominance of religion to the dominance of science. This is familiar cultural history but poorly understood because, so far in our epoch, science has kept up a barrage of triumphal self-glorification. The story science tells of itself is that over a recent and well documented period humanity’s leading teams of theorists and researchers finally came to understand reality when they used the objective empiricism of scientific method to overcome superstitious assumptions. Events, that were once considered deliberately framed messages to humans from a supernatural world of disembodied but personified (caring) entities (such as angels and demons) with effective powers in our world, were re-conceived in science as concrete cause-effect sequences that can be measured, mapped, predicted, and controlled by human intervention. With establishment of science, the global culture of intellectual inquiry is now proud and happy to have finished its task, content with a post-heroic and workmanlike mopping up of loose ends, filling in little gaps, and working out technological applications of scientific knowledge. Any re-conceptualization of fundamental reality is unimaginable. There is an intellectual certainty and a narrowing of focus that comes with faith in the unlimited explaining power of mathematical science, universally prized. This finally relegates philosophy to the status of museum piece, bringing forth a heartfelt sigh of collective relief from the community of scholars.

There is, of course, an unmentionable giraffe in this picture. The stunning oddity is the ongoing pervasiveness and cultural authority of both religion and science, in spite of their stark incompatibility. This simultaneous acceptance of two mutually exclusive principles of authoritative explanation should not be possible, but is certainly the case and apparently a comfortably stable cultural structure. As fundamental systems for explaining what is real, both science and religion are philosophical claims, metaphysical claims, one affirming and the other denying the effective existence of ideality.

Creationist Monotheism

Before science became a coherent matrix of explanation, the previously dominant metaphysics in Europe was creationist monotheism, exemplified in the three Abrahamic religions. Creationist monotheism is a dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (divine intelligence) who created the objective material world (in itself measurable, mappable, definite, and predictable) in a unique episode of exuberant caprice. Humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created in the likeness of that creator, similar to divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality, even though humans are materially embodied within the material world. This peculiar existence which has no appearance as such, the existence of ideality, is inseparable from what is familiar as personality, but the story of divine creation presents us with two very distinct categories of personality: embodied human personality and disembodied divine personality. This bi-modality was fundamental to the entire worldview of feudal Christendom, for example, explaining all existence as the will of a disembodied spirit-force, which, being pure ideality, bridged existence and non-existence in its very being. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention and agency, bearing-into-futurity teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and is the essence of creation. There is no conception of creation that does not begin in teleological ideality. The idea of divine creation, like any idea of creation, falls completely within the description of personalities as vectors of ideality. What is decisive is that ideality is always personality, that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of some teleological personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, sensitivity, knowledge, and the preconception of intentions. Any claim placing ideality as crucial in reality is an idealism. With idealism something is recognized as a living being, personified, with a creative agency-calculating gaze into an open futurity, open with various possibilities anticipated from an inventiveness inherent to itself. So, idealism encompasses freedom, spontaneous creation, and unpredictable novelty, and insists on these as crucial features of reality.

In the creationist monotheistic version of dualism (Creator and created) the divine principle of creation, and so ideality, is primary and dominant, making it strictly idealist even though not often declared as such. This was the culturally dominant sense of reality prior to the advent of science, and what science meant to accomplish was the annihilation of all forms and vestiges of idealism. Since idealism affirms spontaneous creation, freedom, and unpredictable novelty, it seems, from the scientific perspective, like an easy slide to angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, because, in its essential creativity and freedom, ideality itself is essentially transcendent, something like magical in comparison to lumpen entropic dust and rocks. The tendency of science is not merely to demote ideality from its once dominant place (as divinity) in reality, but to eliminate it from reality completely. However, without some strong conception of idealism encompassing freedom, spontaneous creation, reason, and unpredictable novelty, the totality of existence is merely falling in precisely the way it must, and none of it matters in the least. That is the utter nihilism of science. It invites us to accept a grim stoicism but without the providential Logos that softened the ancient version. Not many people can seriously accept the nihilism of science because we have vivid personal lives of ideality and easy interconnectedness with other personalities making expressive utterances within lives of reasons and willful agency.

There are obviously many problems with creationist monotheism as a culturally dominant idealism. The grading of personalities into divine and human categories clearly proved to be toxic. With an omnipotent will creating the totality of existence, everything, again, is exactly as it must be, this time by divine plan in which the future is eventually to reveal some overriding goodness and reason. Divine personality was conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and tester of men, and as such a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Nature had to be the actualized will of divine personality. Earthly trophies (property) were divinely awarded markers of merit, proclaiming a divine right of the strongest to impose sovereign ownership upon the lives and property of the weaker. The sovereign state, ruled by the strongest as personal property, was the local representative of divine sovereignty, a personified collective entity always being tested in conflicts with others for property and standing. What jumps out in this version of idealism is that so little was made of what human personality has in common with divine personality: the fundamental existence of living ideality. Rather than interpreting that commonality as a decisive transcendence in human existence, emphasis was placed instead on selected features of human embodiment, a fleshy animal embodiment, mortal carrier of decay, as the main determinant of human nature. (Science later built on this enthusiastically.) Human ideality was interpreted as the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. This sensed sameness, made miserable by the needs and indignities of material living, in the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of embodied personality, part of a twisted effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to a divine-like existence of individual creative freedom, on the hope that embodied denigration would atone for the claim to divinity and so qualify the individual for an eternal afterlife of pure disembodied ideality. This is the root superstition that makes creationist monotheism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human to human relations, sanctifying pervasive human macro-parasitism.

This brings us back to the weird co-existence of religion and science, strictly incompatible systems of explaining what is real. The reason these two co-exist is that they must, since neither is truly viable by itself. Science gives us a fatal nihilism and religion gives us a fatally warped recognition of the transcendence of ideality, a recognition so warped that it readily slides into fantasies of angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, and justifications for unspeakable cruelty. However, each provides a crucial counter-balance for the other. Science provides enough of a check on superstitious fears and wishes to secure a practical grounding in actuality, incidentally generating technology that channels enormous energy and sometimes provides great conveniences. Religion provides a crucial focus on ideality as essential reality, a reality in which an eventual future is expected to reveal some overriding goodness and reason to life and nature as a whole. Reason doesn’t exist outside ideality. Reason and ideality are one. Without the existence of ideality nothing matters in the least because there is no reason for anything, no sense of harm or benefit, bad or good, no sense of anything at all. There is gravity but no gravitas. It is only the existence of ideality, that is, personalities, sensitive, caring, and future-creating vectors of ideality, which bestows an importance derived from reasons on the world of things or on anything. The only strength of the religious outlook, the reason for its cultural survival, is its recognition of the transcendence of ideality, although it projects a grandiosity that warps perception of the place of transcendent ideality in reality. Of course, the idea of divinity is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It must always have been the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of divine transcendence (at far cosmic horizons) since there is no other direct experience of ideality.

Science carried over from creationist monotheism a denigration of human nature, recognizing only bodies, of course, biologically driven conflicts to select the fittest for dominance, and promising a completely body-determined psychology without the creative freedom of ideality. The nihilism of science is expressed in its eager engagement in development of ever-more lethal and destructive weapons, now bringing humanity to the brink of self-annihilation. Scientific discourse eliminates ideality completely, leaving a nihilism so absolute that it is ridiculously inapplicable to the world of the living, to our world of personalities. We certainly don’t want creationist monotheism to be any more dominant than it is, and we don’t need it. It was only ever a grandiose abstraction from the ordinary ideality of embodied personality. We don’t require a special, absolutely unique and all encompassing ideality to confer on existence a reason for things to matter. Any personality living, caring, and building a life in the world makes the world matter. The ordinary embodied personalities we live among, every single one, make the world matter. This sort of personality is clearly not omnipotent, but instead is a strictly local creativity and freedom instanced separately in vast numbers of embodied individuals. Embodiment is a necessary part of the interventions into brute actuality that constitute individual agency. So we don’t need any eventual revelations of an overriding goodness and reason in the course of existence. We need only an idealism that recognizes transcendent ideality in the ordinary embodied persons we connect with through utterances and acts which express knowledge, caring, reasons, and preconceived intentions.

There are both personal and political consequences from recognizing in every individual the entire transcendence that is ideality. First is a dismissal of legacy metaphysics and the perverse and gloomy denigration of human existence they impose from the cultural background. Politics becomes the test of truth because dystopian societies always rest on false metaphysics. A politics based in the reality of ideality will promote and protect the creative freedom of individuals and not undertake to control it with a frightening superego marshalling a collective hive mind. Hive minds make war. The organization of relationships among people does not have to be a dystopian nightmare created with force and hive mind engineering. We don’t need any “us against them” collective narrative to establish a personal identity, nor competitions to accumulate an avatar of property. Ideality is inherently and uniquely creative and experiences identity and value in expression. The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary personality, has been sensed as such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism have just evaded admitting the full ideality of ordinary subjectivity. Instead of providing a foundation for sovereignty, for the ownership of individuals by collective institutions, the transcendence of individual ideality negates any such ownership or authority. It is a declaration of individual self-possession that incidentally eliminates all versions of cosmic hierarchy such as the Great Chain of Being.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Frontier Freedom

21 Thursday Mar 2019

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

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Fragment 143, word count: 447.

The Franks, Goths, Angles, and Saxons and a number of other groups came overland into western Europe around the fourth century, colonizing and displacing indigenous peoples there who had previously been colonized and were now abandoned by the imperial Romans. Somewhat over a thousand years later, from the sixteenth century, descendants of those Goths, Franks, Angles, and Saxons, now fully Christianized European imperialists, subjected the indigenous peoples of America and many other places to the same assaults with new weapons. Deja vu all over again. There is an essential racism at the core of such violence, an idea of superiority which licenses any brutality. That idea of hierarchy derived from the macro-parasitism of herding culture on the Great Eurasian Steppe. Subjected people were perceived as livestock. In both colonizations there was a profound contempt for empathy which defined a (Kantian) lawlessness and ensured that the supreme value would be personal fighting ability and a culture of organized fighting which came to define masculinity. In that situation, it is the strongest who claim rights to anything that might count as a trophy, not just property but lives. Without empathy, rights (and everything else) belong to the strongest, and frontier freedom is the assertion of the superiority of the strongest and the unlimited rights of superior beings. Theirs is a parasitic freedom that creates and depends on slavery and murder. The American idea of freedom grounded in the freedom of the old western frontier is identical to a romantic idea of medieval feudalism in western Europe and expresses a cultural memory of that experience *. Frontier freedom (no taxes, no regulations, private guns) is the freedom of the marauder. This idea of freedom in which strength in combat and competition defines rights is still a living force in cultures of value and wealth based on consumption and trophy property, conspicuous in normal operations of corporations and generally in investor supremacist capitalism.

These cultural experiences have inspired a certain idea of human nature as a blank slate, an inherent problem (of non-existence craving existence) overcome more or less successfully by projection of a self-image using external consumables, properties, and the conflicts to possess such things. The strongest or fittest are revealed by the quantity and sparkle of the properties they conquer. This is the metaphysics of patriarchy, propaganda for the romantic idea that the strongest are legitimate sovereigns. However, human nature and freedom are really quite different. Human nature is the spontaneous creation of freedom at the level of the embodied individual, a creation that is interior to the individual as ideality. This universally inherent freedom of the individual is invisible to anyone conceiving psychology without conceiving ideality.

* Compare Chapter 8, ‘The Frontier’, pp. 103-117, in: A Vanished World : Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment, written by Christopher Lowney, Published by Free Press (2005), ISBN: 0743243595.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

 

‘What Matters’ Idealism

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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Fragment 142, word count: 291.

Metaphysics is part of the orientation within which we operate. Everybody has some metaphysical framework, learned with other culture at an early age. Religion, for example, is metaphysics, since it asserts specific ideas about existence as such. Without thinking about metaphysics you have a culturally imposed perception of everything. Thinking about metaphysics usually begins with wonder at the existence of the world-of-things. However, the world of things doesn’t matter in the least without the existence of some personality such as you, dear reader, engaged in experience of that world, having ideas about it. The existence of things is much easier to measure, map, describe, conceive, and confront than the life of ideas, but without ideality the world of things doesn’t matter. So, metaphysics that matters is an effort to clarify the problematic existence of ideas and ideality. There have been different versions of metaphysical idealism, ideas about the existence of ideas, from Platonism* to Romanticism**. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention, agency, teleological bearing-into-futurity. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the very essence of creation. What is decisive is that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of an embodied personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, for example. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. This is the existence of the teleological vectors of ideality we know as personalities.

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* Fragment 93, April 20, 2016, The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7R)

** Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7E)

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Ockham’s Razor Meets Ideas

31 Thursday Jan 2019

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fragment 141, word count: 432.

An advantage of recognizing the effective existence of ordinary embodied personalities as vectors of ideality and caring is that it then becomes unnecessary to violate Ockham’s Razor by positing some metaphysical fable about ideas. To deny ideas is to deny consciousness itself, since consciousness is ideality, the most evident ideality. Ideas certainly have presence in the consciousness, that is, in the orientation and deliberate actions, of particular persons. We know this from personal experience and conversations with fellow beings. With the recognition of teleological personalities creating their individual lives in the world, there is no need for Platonic Ideal Forms at the apex of a hierarchy of existence, or for Aristotelian universals, substantial forms, existing in addition to particulars. There is no need for levels of reality such as in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism. There is no need for any kind of idealism which in any way separates ideas from ordinary embodied persons. Certainly ideas are elements of culture, but culture exists only in the orientation of particular persons and the ability that such orientation includes to create, read, and understand artifacts.

Ordinary consciousness is full of ideas, full of caring. Any person’s consciousness is a bearing future-ward expressing an elaborate orientation created over a personal lifetime. It is a fountain of teleological possibilities in a creative arc of developmental continuity that is a particular life. Personality is a self-thinking idea of a particular embodied life in the world, an oriented bearing into not-yet from a particular no-longer, here among a structure of theres, now among thens-no-longer and thens-not-yet, in a creative arc of ideation. Personality, the self-thinking idea, is always revising itself without breaking its creative arc of continuity. Every individual at any moment is calculating the probabilities of an array of expectations, enacting intentions, reading sensory stimulations as revelations of the surroundings, searching for reference markers and making adjustments on the basis of surprises, constructing a teleological structure within the sense of the passing of time. This being is a fountain of original curiosity, guesses, and expressive impulses, a being of ideas and ideality. Reading sensations in perceiving brute actuality is restricted to some here and now, but there is no perception of here without a sense of there, and there is no now without a sense of then, and then and there are always ideas, features of a person’s orientation in a continuously elaborating situation in a world in time, a situation demanding ongoing teleological reconstruction of intentions, aspirations, and guesses about possibilities and probabilities in an increasingly remote future.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Why Politics isn’t Science

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 139, word count: 793.

Politics is the competition for power, for effective ownership and control of lives and property, but there is also a countervailing movement against power that is inherent in politics without being part of the competition for power. This countervailing force expresses the underdog side of the historical quarrel over transcendence. The dominant side of that quarrel is the idea of a cosmic teleological force to be feared and placated, an external sovereign transcendence who promotes local operatives to impose the universal structure of supremacy and hierarchy. That idea of transcendence is a sanctification of power, normally coupled with a depiction of ordinary embodied personalities as envious and grasping. These are in the background of every person’s upbringing. On the other side of the transcendence quarrel is the idea that the only transcendence is each embodied individual’s teleological processes, each individual’s ideas, ordinary consciousness itself, and that is the resistance to power.

There is a third option, a repudiation of any and all transcendence. Materialist science claims to assert this but presents its ultimate mystery of mass/ energy/ space/ time as a distinct sovereign transcendence, a dead one, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in itself, absolutely doesn’t matter.

The reason that politics can never be science is precisely ideas and ideality. The past and present of political actuality, dominated by hierarchical power, do not determine the future because ideality is unpredictably creative and utters conceptions of change in social, economic, and political cultures. Such changes always face predictable efforts to stifle them by conservative factions dedicated to preserving systems of hierarchy by both lethal force and the grotesque ideas of sovereign transcendence cited above. The scientific attitude that everything is determined by inflexible law, and so must always remain much as it is (a metaphysical idea), is indistinguishable from the conservative effort. Science has no help to offer in our political predicament. However, realty as experienced has two foundational constituents. One is actuality and the other is ideality in the form of a multitude of embodied personalities fountaining ideas. Every individual is an idea, the self-thinking idea of a particular life in the world, a particular idea of freedom, and ideas are not intrinsically hierarchical. Ideality is the transcendent being of personality at the level of the embodied individual, and ideality can effectively override in actuality what may seem to be givens of nature. In our being as fountains of ideas, people impose original events on the brute fall-lines of nature. A fountain of ideas is an imposer of change, and not a passive receiver or victim of time. (Here is the teleological structure in the sense of the passage of time.) Materialist science is not equipped to conceive personalities as fountains of teleological ideas, but an understanding of politics must do so for the chance of improvement in our longstanding dystopia.

The Question

The foundational status of ideality in experience, that is, in the world that matters, lands us squarely in metaphysics rather than science, and the whole of metaphysics rests on a single question: What should we make of teleology? ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which we know as consciousness? It is standard to present teleology in a stripped-down form to make it seem consistent with a mechanistic stimulus-response model of behaviour, separating it from how it is encountered in ordinary experience, namely as embodied personality. However, teleology really is personality. There have been attempts to show that purposive action can be reduced to automatic mechanisms pre-set to be triggered by specific stimuli. Such attempts are thoroughly political because if people are mechanisms it doesn’t matter how they are treated since morality and empathy are inapplicable to machines. So, denying ordinary consciousness as transcendence, as a fountain of teleological ideas with a creative arc of developmental continuity, that is, as personality, has the intent and effect of legitimizing the deception and manipulation of groups and individuals by people in culture pods enacting a fetish for power and trophies.

Teleology isn’t as simple as programmes of specific pragmatic operation, but also includes various creative postures bearing into futurity including curiosity, wondering, seeking and discovering original ways to make sense of things, existential questioning, and expressing all this in a personal voice. As thinking beings who use ideality for freedom by anticipating and imposing the novelty of original ideas on brute actuality, we are all in an immediate position to know that the bleak conservative story of human nature as a pit of appetites and envy is false! Liberation comes simply from declining to believe the default cultural teachings because the truth is plainly different.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Human and Divine Personality

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 136, Word Count: 923.

Positing the idea of divinity (even Platonic ideas) removes from the idea of humanity the transcendent power of creation, which properly belongs with the ideality of any personality because personality is teleology. Both of these ideas, divine and human, are unquestionably instances of personality since only personality strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation and of teleology. Teleology anticipates conditions and objects which do not exist except in some person’s ideation, but which might possibly be made to exist if a specific anticipated agency is exercised through an increasingly remote and improbable future. Human persons do this all the time and, supposedly, so did the divine personality. This teleology of creation is the crucial identifier of personality, expressed as curiosity, caring, questioning, learning, and expressive voice or agency, all teleological postures.

Positing the Grotesque Bifurcation of Personality

The conceptual removal from humans of the power of creation results in two monstrosities. First is an impoverished conception of ordinary embodied personality. What is left here is the conservative vision of human nature as a deficiency that craves acquisition, consumption, and competition, a hollow pit to be filled with property acquisition and competitions for trophies. That is a human nature in urgent need of control and sovereign supervision because its default mood is envy. On that view, inherent deficiencies drive a compulsive egoism that is such a flaw or taint that people deserve and require sovereign supervision to dampen the inevitable war of all against all; in practice to reshape it into ‘good’ wars against other sovereigns. Supposedly, any sovereign is better than none. The second monstrosity is an imaginary disembodied super-personality with exclusive and total creativity, fountain of all existence, who naturally picks favourites to impose the required sovereignty. Once the bleak egoism of this hollowed out humanity is structured into political institutions it becomes difficult to question, even when the idea of divinity weakens and fades into the cultural background. The political results of this vision are always dystopian.

Humanity

Contrary to the conservative and consensus view, the crucial thing about ‘human nature’ or personality at the level of the embodied individual is creative teleology, the spontaneous creation of freedom through the ideation of alternative ways into the future. Ideas, and only ideas, are not restricted to what is actually the case at any particular time, and ideas are always features of the developing orientation of a personality in the temporal flight of agency. Personality isn’t a hollow pit but a fountain of ideas. Ideas fountain from personality, and fountains of ideas benefit from a different kind of interconnectedness than that ordered by sovereignty! The being of subjectivity is ideality, which is to say, the sense of orientation in time in a particularly embodied life in the world. Subjective ideality is an existence, the particular flight of such a life. Time as teleology is the self-creation of a particular life-in-the-world, the effecting idea of a particular life, a spiritual being, a person. Realty as engaged by any personality has two fundamental constituents: actuality and ideality or ideas, and ideality, entirely a feature of individual personality, often overrides what may seem to be dictates of nature. Actuality cannot be only and entirely an idea, but teleological time is entirely ideas.

Politics as the Test of Reality

The existence of teleological ideality (personality) is what is crucial politically because its existence, as the means by which freedom is created, is completely de-centralized, active independently in the consciousness of each embodied person. Human ideality will always make efforts to express its fundamental nature which is individual creative freedom. We orient ourselves with ideas about nature and other personalities, interpretations of experience, concepts created in the context of the teleological need to create an open-ended and interconnected future-life. Individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the fundamental instability of actuality experienced as the passage of time. The conceptions of subjective ideality and their cultural expressions are tentative and mutable under the force of new experience, deliberation, and creativity.

In the scientific conceptual system “subjective” is a dismissive pejorative, missing the fact that all knowledge, all conception and perception of the objective world is an accomplishment of subjectivity, spirituality. Without the caring spirituality there is just a pointless drifting of nothing that matters. Knowledge is a condition of ideality, which is to say, a condition of personality, of subjective orientation and the bearing of its agency. Qualities of ideality contribute more to what knowledge is than does strict actuality, and that means that knowledge is inherently ephemeral. Knowledge claims, claims to know things, mean that certain patterns have been stable in personal frameworks of orientation, but conceptions of knowledge don’t define actuality in any absolute way. They define an idea of actuality. Politics especially is far more shaped by ideas and human ideality than by nature. So far, the idea of the bifurcation of personality into human and divine has supported forms of political organization that obstruct the efforts of people to express fundamental humanity which is individual creative freedom. Acknowledging the existence of ideality requires acknowledging each person as a spontaneous creator of freedom, a transcendence, and the need for a social and political arrangement which respects the expression of every individual instead of supporting systems of macro-parasitism such as investor-supremacist capitalism and war-hungry sovereignty.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Getting Past the Political Right-Wing

04 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 135, Word Count: 585.

Given the mass military and industrial mobilization against Nazism and Fascism in the multinational war of 1939-45, it is bizarre and mystifying to witness the popular reemergence of those movements within the same Euro-American societies which previously mounted all-out resistance based on cultural influences from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is a mistake to define the historical Enlightenment as mainly the development of science and mathematical rationality. It is more accurate to think of Enlightenment as a reconceptualization of the human individual as a profound autonomy, freedom, and dignity, based on a universal innate rationality of personality. The broad sense of rationality involved had more to do with a cultural trend of increasing literacy and the unlimited ability to learn which came with it than it did with mathematics. The post-war complacency of both the political donor class and the intellectual class of these societies is to blame for our ongoing vulnerability to the superior-beings clubs, violently exclusive racial, religious, and trophy-collecting supremacists, because those social classes had the opportunity and yet failed to advance political thinking beyond ideas from feudal Christendom: a bleak conception of human personality (as improved by authoritative supervision, and largely controllable by incentives and rewards, fear of violence, and emotionally triggering messages); a starkly contrasting idea of divine personality as judge and tester of men, the model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful; nature as ordered and determined by the divine personality or by rigid regularities (iron laws of economics) with the same effect; earthly trophies interpreted as markers of standing in the divine order of merit; a resulting divine right of the strongest to impose sovereignty over the lives and property of the weaker; and the nation or sovereign state as the local representative of divine sovereignty, a personified collective in conflict with others for standing and wealth. This conservative ideology is always the gateway to varieties of Nazism and Fascism, to the violence of superior-beings clubs, patriarchal colonizers of individuals for the purpose of human-on-human macro-parasitism. Home-grown patriarchy is no better than a colonizing foreign patriarchy. This being the state of political thinking, the idea of a clash of civilizations is valueless because civilizations are all still patriarchal, imperialist. Clashing with one another is what they were made for and the ones that were altered to some extent by Enlightenment ideas soon stifled further advances. The Enlightenment conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices expressing the old conception of reality.

Remaining within or breaking free of that conservative metaphysics comes down to a conception of personality. If we find it absurd that personality takes two starkly different and unequal forms, human and divine, and find instead that it has ever only had the form we are familiar with in embodied persons, recognizing in the ideality of that form the effective transcendence of creative freedom which had been artificially alienated by the old mythical bifurcation, suddenly the conception of human personality is not bleak, and the whole foundation of conservatism evaporates. There is no judge or tester of men, no divine order of merit, no supernatural model of sovereignty, no divine pre-determination of anything, and no merited rights of the strongest. Realty as engaged by any personality has two fundamental constituents: the actuality of nature and ideality or ideas; and ideality, the special being of personality, often overrides what may seem to be dictates of nature.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

From a Hill in the Labyrinth of Ideas

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 134, Word Count: 442

A profound cultural change, which came from the rise to dominance of the scientific way of conceiving things, was a shift in the general presence of the world to people, a shift from having intelligent consciousness (personality) as the crucial presence of the world to having inanimate, inertial, objective matter or nature as the crucial presence of the world. In feudal Christendom, personality was indisputably the crucial presence, but in two starkly different versions and placements, displaying in fact a grotesque bifurcation. That conception of personality included the stark contrast between divine personality and human personalty, but the whole meaning and drama of existence centred on personality, specifically the relationship and interactions between the divine personality and human personalities as both individuals and collectives. Concrete nature was merely a trivial backdrop, a platform or staging for the drama. Both the divine and human were clearly instances of personality since only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. Human personalities do that all the time and, supposedly, so did the divine personality. This teleology of creation is a crucial identifier of personality along with curiosity, caring, questioning, accumulating orientation, and an expressive voice or agency.

Scientific Nihilism

By contrast, the scientific conception of the world completely excludes personality (teleology, abstraction, ideality, intelligent consciousness) from fundamental reality in rejecting the possibility of transcendent freedom. Personality gets placed on a list of phenomena to be completely explained as an illusion at some future time. This creates a deformed lopsidedness to the conceptual system of reality in modernity, which is something like an inverse of the lopsidedness of the Christian conception of the world. Science dismisses the creative freedom of personality as merely illusion, just as Christianity dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama of personality. Of course the grotesque bifurcation of personality into human and divine was another layer of lopsidedness in the pre-scientific conceptual system of reality, which removed the transcendence of personality from ordinary embodied individuals and projected it into a metaphysical monstrosity: disembodied personality as divinity. Just because personality is ideality, that is, immaterial, does not make it more perfect when disembodied! With the modern lopsidedness, science actually needs the continuing culture of personality from feudal Christendom because without it, with only scientific principles of explanation, nothing matters, since it is only to personality that anything matters. With only inanimate nature, we reach a complete nihilism, but people generally know better than to accept that. So, the lopsidedness of the scientific conception of reality prolongs the lingering of outmoded metaphysics and political ideology from feudal Christendom.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.