Category Archives: Embodiment

Consciousness is a Time-Wave

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Fragment 170, word count: 377.

Consciousness can’t be adequately described by even a complete catalogue of its objects. Objects have only a passing and tentative almost-presence unless they are made to matter by a rich personal context of ideality. Consciousness is formed of anticipatory intentions of agency and the reasons for agency within a personal life-drama. There is an emotionally committed questioning, a desperately caring gaze from an ever-learning knowledge-poise of orientation with its bearing onward, defining a point and arc of creative agency improvising the personal drama which is an individual embodied life.

We individually create a supposition of not-yet and been-and-gone defining a newness and incompleteness as the primordial context in which we exist as dramatic free agents, leaping future-ward in our drama, aware that everything in our envelopment of entropic actuality is falling away continuously. The supposed content of not-yet and been-and-gone is changing constantly. Knowledge and expectation are forms of supposition that constitute a drifting context-content slipping into proximity and then into an increasingly remote separation, a sense of things slipping by and falling away in the ephemerality of objects. Such is the context of personal agency as it leaps into anticipated openings of not-yet. That everything actual is slipping away is essential to the drama of individual human existence, to the willful creative leap open-ward which answers it as a moment-by-moment affirmation of a power of living to open reality and make it unexpectedly more than it was. Ideality moves to make actual a specific not-yet, to realize a new non-actuality, and that is the creativity for which freedom is possible.

The medium (non-actual past and future) in which time-waves exist is not independent of the knowing, curious, questioning, dramatically desperate agents who propagate ourselves in ceaseless ephemerality. Consciousness thinks itself as a time-wave, a formation of ephemerality through which freedom is possible in the genius of ideality as not-a-thing but a self-propelling continuity of creative expression across time. It is a fountain of future possibilities from which is enacted, having learned and conceived aspirations in been-and-gone, an original arc of developmental continuity that is the personal drama of life-creation.

Embedded links:

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

Fragment 118, November 8, 2017, A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory (word count: 1,656)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

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Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

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) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Time-World

24 Thursday Sep 2020

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Fragment 168, Word Count: 480.

Ideality is a desperate engagement with the passing of time, a moving shape of caring that feels, anticipates, and fills the passing of time. It is a person actively living a particular embodied life in the time-world. Decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer is the primordial context for every person’s dramatic agency, for personality, humanity, spirituality, intelligence, sentience. Ideas are acts of opening and connecting in the dramatic edifice of orientation which is a sensibility, a preparedness for carrying on, having learned, searching and going further, opening future-ward in expression of a personal peculiarity of creativity, newly launching an expression for this moment. Ideality is the spontaneous vector in the passing of time, the creatively aspirational vector, expressing freedom. Freedom is the moment to moment originality of the creativity of ideality. Every person’s living is a developing drama conferring a shape of relevance and importance on its envelopment of inertial/ entropic nature. In that way any and every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, some parts more than others, crucially different for every individual.

A monadic centre of agency, spinning out a personal drama which is a continuously located movement in the time-world, is defined by a seeking gaze, a questioning, curiosity from an ever-learning poise of orientation and bearing-further, readiness for surprising discovery and empathic encounters acknowledging other dramatic agents. Language* competence is a complex edifice of readiness, of knowing and empathy. Knowing the taste of Chardonnay isn’t an image, but a vigilant readiness to recognize sensations. Sensibility is everything a person is looking for, centrally and peripherally, both what is expected and what would count as surprisingly good or surprisingly bad, an active poise of sensitivities from ever-greater accumulations of increasingly remote acquaintances. The crucial intervention of a personal sensibility is to bring to any here and now all the learned context, in the form of vigilant readiness and an intentional direction of effort, that gives the moment meaning and sense. Sensibility is an individual’s expectations and personal intentions engaging every moment of sensitivity as a lens through which sensations transform into features of a coherent world that is stage setting for the personal drama but especially for what’s next in the drama. The centre of agency is reading sensations through the interpreting lens of a knowing, caring, and actively aspiring sensibility, already shaping what’s next.

In ceaselessly passing time and without an otherwise fixed essence, personality, as a point and arc of agency, has an inherent imperative to create (and power to do so, moment by moment) an ever revising personal presence and passage through an unstable and temporally discontinuous actuality. To anticipate and act with intent is to dwell in the personal tilt or bearing-further beyond now and no-longer, into the unformed not-yet which is freedom.

* Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077. See subsection: Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Time is a Dual Instability

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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Fragment 166, word count: 416.

‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘an anticipatory ideation of agency’. The existence of teleology is a certainty, perhaps the only one, although we also act routinely on the practical certainty of known features of actuality that have been reliably stable. I know what a coffee machine is, where mine is, and how to use it to make coffee. That knowledge is part of my orientation, my sensibility. Let’s accept from science that measurable nature is perfectly non-teleological in its brute material actuality. The completely different existence of teleology is a certainty because it is the very genius of our knowing and caring agency, our living existence within brute actuality. “I anticipate, expect, wonder, and intend, therefore I am.” Since teleology conceives a place and grasp in the non-actual future, it is by definition an idea, a constant re-directing of the willing of an ongoing agency. Every teleology is, of course, an individual person. With teleology at the core of our dramatic lives of knowing and caring (we know because we care, we reach knowing through caring *), we cannot coherently claim uncertainty about its existence or its power to intervene effectively in the arrangement of things in brute actuality. So, we discern reality in its duality, two contrasting but entangled moving streams of instability, one which, in itself, doesn’t matter in the least as it falls insensitively by inertia and entropy. The other is teleology which creates importance and relevance in the personal drama of its individually embodied living. Teleology is the only reason anything matters, and that, along with its ideality, is its claim to transcendence. The notion transcendence tends to lift our gaze to the sky, away from the simple light of individual consciousness. However, it still makes sense to call teleology transcendent when it only belongs to embodied personalities of the familiar kind and not something skyward or cosmic. If teleology (the only certainty) isn’t transcendent then nothing is. The foundational status of ideas and ideality in the world that matters, the world as experienced, lands us in metaphysics, and the whole of metaphysics rests on the single question: What should we make of teleology? What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which is our consciousness of time as our primordial context? The answer lies in conceiving an idealism that identifies teleology as a multitude of individual and locally embodied sensibilities in an irreducible duality with measurable actuality which is perfectly non-teleological: time is a dual instability.

* Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t care, so can’t know.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Genius of Ephemerality

05 Sunday Jul 2020

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Fragment 165, word count: 595.

There is a longstanding pattern in the Western intellectual tradition of artificially separating a cognitive-rational aspect of a person’s engagement with experiences from the active play-out of emotional drama which is a person’s life in the world (and the definitive existence of ideality). As well as dealing with the precarious situation of living on the surface of planet Earth, what mainly shapes the drama for everyone is seeking out other sensitive beings to nurture and care for, constructing profound and enduring relationships with them. In this way ideality (always I-deality) is primarily empathy. Learning facts about things and solving problems are strictly incidental to the conceived imperatives of empathy. On the basis of the separation of cognition from empathic and dramatic agency, an edifice of conceptions has been built distinguishing data, facts and truths, from the emotional drama of “subjectivity” (often denigrated as inherently biased and limited by specific embodiment). However, it is always someone’s emotional drama which confers identified existence on anything.

We carry on living on the basis of a practical certainty that there is an actuality, some of which we eat and breathe and make clothes from. Actuality is what it is and persists in its nature quite independently of how it is conceived by us multitude of individually embodied ideality living with it. Yet it does permit a variety of ways of being conceived, and our ways of conceiving it express how things matter to us in the active play-out of drama which is life in the world.

The genius of ideality is creative ephemerality, turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to an endurance of never-ending newness made possible by purposefully plunging and probing through time, conceiving freedom in a strictly non-actual but variably probable and possible future. The questioning push directing ideality’s gaze at the world is a self-directed re-orientation in flight: with a specifically directional bearing but also questioning, always incomplete. What is crucial to subjectivity is semi-reliable markers for orientation, to make agency,  operating into an open future, possible. We orient ourselves with ideas about actuality and other personalities, interpretations of experience, concepts created in the context of the teleological need for an open-ended and socially interconnected future-ward arc of living. Ideas are constructive acts of a consciousness living a life in the world, acts of gazing, creative acts of a knowing and learning at the questing point of an arc of purpose. Ideas are openings of newness, created outside actuality, interventions of an instance of a supra-actuality, non-being, which is the existence of living consciousness.

Individual subjectivity has to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the instability of actuality experienced as the passage of time. Having the power to do that is the genius of ideality. Knowledge is precisely a state of subjectivity in relation to the world in which a subject lives and orients itself. Nothing can be knowledge except in someone’s knowing, and only a particular subject/ person can know anything. Knowledge is first and always someone’s ideas. The conceptions of reality created by subjective ideality, and their cultural expressions, are tentative and mutable under the force of new experience, deliberation, and creativity. There is no absolute world-order (as in Plato) given (as data) to be known without the constructive activity of subjective ideality. Learning is a change of directionality of intent, expectation, and aspiration, of orientation, rather than a collecting and recollecting of images or word strings.

Notes

“ … Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, An Existential Contribution, Volume I: Text with Introduction and Notes, written by Soren Kierkegaard, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1992). ISBN 0-691-02081-7. (p. 203)

“Feeling is a kind of knowing; it is only through our feelings that we know that we have been insulted, that we love someone, that danger lies ahead or that it is uncertain what next step we ought to take.” How to Be an Epicurean, The Ancient Art of Living Well, written by Catherine Wilson, Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. (2019). ISBN: 978-1-5416-7263-5. (p. 269)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Self-Thinking Idea

15 Monday Jun 2020

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Fragment 164, word count: 553.

In the tradition of humanity’s search for understanding there are two general directions of questioning: the public world of actuality, and the individually private experience of I-deality. The predominant orientation of classical Indian philosophy, Vedanta*, for example, was a questioning of the experiencing subject, the self, I-deality. Much more development and mastery has been achieved overall in the direction of material actuality.

Vedanta is an Idealism

Classical Indian philosophy pondered the elusive existence of the self engaged in experience. The concept “Brahman” is closely equivalent to the concept “ideality”. Very similar mistakes about ideality were made in both ancient Greek and Indian conceptions. The ancients seemed to move immediately from immateriality to indestructibility, perfect permanence, specifically contrasting ideality with actuality by conceiving ideality as eternal, fundamentally unchanging and, as such, the ultimate source of quasi-illusory ephemeral things such as objects and phenomena.

The reason there was only murky and questionable development from the classical turn inward is the typical mistake of equating immateriality with eternal endurance, and, based on that, the promotion of turning inward as an escape from ephemeral emotions inherent in dramatic efforts for pleasurable habitation in the world. The cultural context which influenced this conceptualization of ideality was a (mistaken) tradition of fatalism, an assumption that the social and political hierarchy was a permanent and unalterable part of life, part of an ugliness to actuality that motivates a search for ultimate escape. On that assumption there is no point in examining ideality for implications for political agency.

Idealism is any conception of reality which includes ideality as fundamental and special. Only ideality (spirituality, intelligence, humanity/ personality) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objective actuality, and, as such, a clear transcendence of nature. Ideality is points and arcs of freedom. Ideality creates freedom by conceiving a future which is not completely predetermined, a future with some predictability along with various possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Novelty and originality are possible because ideality is not limited to any predetermined nature or future. The fundamental quality of I-deality is time, a dramatic temporal flight to futurity as an opening. The questioning push directing a gaze upon the world is an ever developing orientation in flight: directionality, bearing, questioning, self-directed re-orientation, always incomplete.

The most striking historical contrast to cultural communities embracing unalterable permanence in their social hierarchy of wealth and power is the formative spirit of European protestantism, a spirit in accord with a kind of idealism that creates a novel future.

As soon as individual persons universally are recognized as the only supra-actual forces creating novelty out of the drama of what matters to them, then the political situation stands in a new light. Politics is no longer about arranging a proper hierarchy among different kinds and qualities of people (as in Plato, for example), some fulfilled by leading and others fulfilled by being led. Instead, rights and dignity derive from human existence as living ideality in which an orientation and bearing of questioning is central. Individuals create the greatest benefits when they are enabled to take a substantial measure of participation and control in conceiving the ongoing evolution of their society and culture.

Note

* Classical Indian Philosophy, Volume 5 of: A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps, written by Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, published by Oxford University Press (2020), ISBN 978-0-19-885176-9. (See Chapter 19, pp. 129-134.)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence Matters, Being Doesn’t

30 Monday Mar 2020

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Fragment 162, word count: 340.

Humanity/ personality is a gaze into nature from a time-bound drama in which some things matter more than others. Without the gaze of a personality, nature has no drama and nothing about it matters. The gaze is a questioning of what’s there to encounter, a living point in an arc of intended intervention, knowing, anticipating, aspiring, discovering, and learning. The seeking gaze is a bearing onward in an ever changing poise of orientation that defines a monad of agency conducting the personal drama of a person’s life. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, but it is an act of the drama, a move forward in and by the drama, a creative act that is an essential piece of the drama. The gaze is the drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world. An individual’s momentarily located orientation and bearing is inseparable from the emotional stakes of the larger dramatic idea of this embodied life. The direction and sensitivity of the gaze, the specifics of its questioning, are the application of a curated sensibility, a many layered orientation, a sum-up of all previous engagements, lessons learned, and vectors undertaken, the whole of a personal no-longer. All the context that makes sense of anything is in the questioning of the gaze, the sensibility expressed. The orientation and bearing of an individual’s questioning is reconfigured by everything learned, by every recognition and discovery. What personality has instead of an essence is a learning arc, a personal fountain of curiosity and intent expressed in a questioning engagement and in the creation of an ever changing path through a temporally unstable actuality. The scientific conceptual system leaches all drama from existence, and so leaches out reasons, meanings, creation, and ideas in general, and so presents a limited impression of reality. The only kind of conceptual framework that can comprehend the drama of what matters is an existential idealism.

Embedded links:

Fragment 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky (word count: 2,752)

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

Fragment 160, February 8, 2020, Existentialism is an Idealism (word count: 728)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Existentialism is an Idealism

08 Saturday Feb 2020

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Fragment 160, word count: 728.

Existentialism is an expression of modern idealism as sketched in Fragment 158, The Arc of the Monad. This will be clear from a quick review of the main points of modern idealism worked out mainly in Germany in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. It features the claim that the ideality of experience is fundamental in human reality, so that the existence of certain special characteristics of ideality is undeniable. Central to those special characteristics is that ideality is always personality, all forms of ideality occur together in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. The existence of ideas is the existence of ordinary thinking agents. The only reality we can possibly experience is completely structured as and by ideas constituting the interiority of personal experience (Leibniz, Fichte). Ideality is willful becoming, always questioning, learning, and creating, the exact opposite of being. What this amounts to is that personality is not a thing of nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation (Sartre’s existence without essence), it stands outside nature and transcends nature. The supra-actual creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but in ordinary personalities. How things matter in the world does not depend on eternal ideas in the mind of a deity nor in a Platonic heaven where ideas are master molds for material beings. It depends only and entirely on the occurrence of ideas in the living of individually embodied persons. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature at large, but each person creates a personal orientation and future-directed bearing, a life of possibilities, impossibilities, and probabilities in an interiority of non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary persons.

Existentialism inhabits experience as lived by a fully elaborated personality, what Fichte called an “I”. Heidegger’s dasein is a phenomenology of the interiority of an “I”, the monad from Leibniz/ Kant/ Fichte. The focus on freedom, decision, (Kierkegaard, Sartre) at the level of the living individual expresses the central theme of modern idealism that ideality is a transcendence, a transcendence with the drama of life-being-created moment by moment between misery and ecstasy, that is, with caring, at its core. Existentialists expanded on the drama of the life of the “I”, the everydayness of being in the world, but also the profound drama of freedom: dread, anxiety, sense of absurdity, despair, fear and trembling, and ecstasy (Nietzsche). This is a portrait of the interiority of the life of the “I” contributing to modern idealism. Modern idealism provides the conceptual cluster that encompasses freedom by conceiving personality/ humanity as ideality, something not of nature. The established conceptual cluster for nature, from scientific materialism, is antithetical to freedom, a failure of science that is crucially detrimental for politics. Existentialism and phenomenology (a technique of de-culturing) lie in the developmental arc of essentially Protestant idealism, notwithstanding that Edmund Husserl was Jewish and Franz Brentano, Heidegger, and Sartre were variably Catholic.

Nobody was Ready for Modern Idealism

As a distinctly European cultural development, modern idealism (including existentialism) was feared and loather by bearers of the ascendent culture of the USA after World War II, an ideology of national exceptionalism grown from a fresh cultural memory of cowboy-style frontier freedom and colonization, expressed now in patriotic militarism in support of the capitalist assertion of the divine rights of property. Already in the nineteenth century, with the world-shaking adventurism of Napoleon following the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789-99), combined with fervour for the explaining power of empirical observation, it pleased people to generalize from their historical moment to the idea that it is exceptional great men such as Napoleon, romantic heroes above all laws, who create history, art, culture, and civilization (eventually), with regrettable but unavoidable death, destruction, and romantic mayhem along the way. Such people had to be admired, it was thought by the cognoscenti, and given a chance to work their will. This romanticism became fundamental to the American myth-system. Such a cultural environment was lethally inhospitable to modern idealism focused as it was on the unexceptional universal individual, and so the idealism was academically marginalized and left unnamed.

Embedded Links in order of appearance:

Fragment 158, January 9, 2020, The Arc of the Monad (word count: 803)

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 143, March 21, 2019, Frontier Freedom (word count: 447)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

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Fragment 157, word count: 552.

The pivotal dystopian feature of existing hive-mind-structured cultures is their denigrating concept of human nature. Hive minds are founded on an idea of human nature very far from creative free-agency at the level of the embodied individual; for example, on a conception such as Freud’s (in the tradition of Hobbes and Augustine): a human nature that is lethally dangerous (id) if not repressed by social control (superego). However, human psychology is so pervaded by social control that it is impossible to make reliable generalizations about human nature from either psychological phenomena or the history of human behaviour.

If acts of philosophical thinking are to be unprejudiced re-conceptualizations of the drama of existence, of existence structured in terms of caring, existence as experienced (something that matters), then de-culturing is the single crucial operation of philosophical action, not merely an incidental, occasional, or optional beginning. It is what is required for acquaintance with simple existence as ideality, as creative free-agency at the level of embodiment: a specifically oriented bearing into futurity, the point of view of a knowing, learning, and purposive gaze. Here is living human nature: to occupy, to dwell in, the reach or bearing beyond now and beyond no-longer, into an empty not-yet still to be created, the transcendent moment of ideality.

Any idealism asserts the existence of some supra-actual transcendence, creative fountain of surprises. Such transcendence has overwhelmingly been conceived, as in Plato’s idealism, as separate from the individual person, operating in some manner that is remote from embodied living. The tendency of Lutheran-stream Protestant idealism is to retain a sense of transcendence (the creative freedom of ideality) but increasingly to relocate the occurrence of transcendence from a remote central deity to individual human personalities. We see this worked out through a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte.

The context of philosophical thinking is an age-old historical drama structured around the dystopian culture of patriarchal dominance, expressing the idea of deity by imposing the will of the strongest (imperialist exceptionalism) and culturing hive minds for compliance. Various intuitions of free-agent idealism, in which the individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is conceived and treated as inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive mind, have regularly found the courage to resist assertions that rights are the exceptional property of the strongest. A striking example of one articulation of that contrary intuition is expressed in Kant’s idea of universal maxims, formalizations of simple empathy. As anyone is capable of forming these maxims, everyone’s fundamental duty is universal empathy, recognizing all sentient beings as ends, bearers of rights from their transcendent manner of existence.

The idea of a divine plan and a supernatural planner who irresistibly determines everything has been crucial in legitimizing the lethal power of patriarchal sovereignty. The idea of totalitarian natural law has been used to the same effect. The tendency of scientific materialism is to eliminate transcendence, leaving a desolation of utter predictability: the future will be the same as the past. However, the supra-actuality of creative ideality at the level of the embodied individual completely negates those assumptions. Not-yet is empty and undetermined, to be created out of the transcendent moment of ideality in vast multitudes of individuals.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Only Reality

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 154, word count: 201.

The only reality we can possibly experience is reality as experienced, and such reality must always be partly formed by being experienced, which is to say, by being brought into the drama which is the life of some personality. Spiritual existence, the living of personalities, is inherently dramatic, a personal drama which would be no part of brute actuality. Spirituality is the caring dimension of any experience, and it is caring which shapes experience into the drama of its life.

The strictly here and now would be where the brute actuality of nature would exist, completely bereft of spirituality and of the drama which is the life of spirituality. If you try to “be here now” you find that here and now are defined by there and then: by ideas, non-actualities. To strive to “be-here-now” is life-negating, life-denying, life-rejecting, in the same way as reverence for eternity is. To seek the spiritual nothingness of the “eternal now” is to give up your voice, which exists only through time, as well as to give up creative free agency, which requires time to impose ideas, which is to say, personality, onto the ever emerging shape of things.

Please see Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.