Category Archives: Equality

Spirituality of the Left

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Fragment 195, word count: 474.

tags: hierarchy, equality, culture war, politics, transcendence, realist essentialism, Hegel, Marx, Descartes

The left vs right political difference can be clarified by where each side stands on social hierarchy. The political right takes hierarchy to be essential, decreed by God or nature, the proper triumph of the strongest. The political left disputes the legitimacy of hierarchy and asserts an ethics of widespread equality. The left does this ultimately on the basis of spirituality: there is something more important than nature’s food chain or even the realist essentialism of any Great Chain of Being, and the more important consideration is the great equalizer which is individual spirit, not the religious conception of spirituality, which stipulates an external almighty to which mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a philosophical conception which completely removes the external almighty and asserts individual human drama-projection as the only transcendence. The individual self-perfecting of the Renaissance, Luther’s protestantism declaring an unmediated communion between deity and individual, and the mathematical rationalism of the Enlightenment, beginning from around the time of Descartes, all circled around an inkling of individual transcendence.

Materialist Marx

Marx, as a materialist, had no concept of spirit or of spiritual self-possession, and his materialism distorted left-wing political principles in a destructive direction. Hegel’s overarching architecture of spirit in history, identified in the gross units of mass movements, led to Marx’s concept of materially determined collectivism, which was another distraction from the individualism of spirit. Marxism squandered the transformational potential of the political left. Defining the left in materialist terms saddled it with all the apparatus of violence and centralized social control that go with property as a primary standard of personal definition and evaluation. The focus on material equality could only ever be approached through violence. Marx was specifically focused on possession of capital, the kind of property that is the means of production. Wherever there is property possession there is the apparatus of violence, and the apparatus of violence always attracts people who want to prove themselves the strongest. The culture of strength adulation blooms and then there is no escaping patriarchal hierarchy. This was a misdirection, and a distraction from the deep foundation of leftist principles.

Unpicking the Violence-Based State

Self-recognition as creative spirit (acquaintance-based metaphysical knowledge) unpicks the knotted tangle of the violence/ property-based state. Direct acquaintance with creative transcendence discredits declarations of the inevitability of a pre-determined course of nature or history. It eliminates the idea of an external almighty, which is always the ultimate support for an orientation up toward high command to receive the collective plan and story arc, judgment, supervision, and orders. By eliminating the legacy of metaphysical pseudo-knowledge (angels, gods, and demons; along with materialism), unpicking this knot eliminates the orientation toward a commanding height, and disconnects the personal dramas of individuals from the command-based hive-mind.

Embedded links :

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

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

tags: metaphysics, existence, deity, science, politics, dystopia, capitalism, gratification, culture, spirituality.

There are two opposing explanations for the existence of something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act of intervention, OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and anticipating intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. Each of these explanations is a particular statement of metaphysics. The metaphysics of existence as an intentional act of intervention, in a variety of versions, was ubiquitous in human societies for ages, for example in feudal Christendom, and it always joined forces with the culture of patriarchal dominance which exploits and makes concrete the idea of deity by violently imposing the will of the strongest on everyone within reach (sovereign exceptionalism), and by instituting worshipful cult collectives with the softer attractions of grand cosmic visions and close personal belonging. In opposition to explanation by divine intervention, the mere occurrence explanation dawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the boutique metaphysics of mathematical materialism in the scientific Enlightenment. It began a process of removing wind from the sails of sovereigns and the social structuring around sovereignty. In the current state of modern civilization there remain these same two institutional proponents of metaphysical ideology, each supporting one of the two existential possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Religious institutions champion the deliberate interventionist side, and institutions of science and scientific education champion random occurrence, near enough. This is the shape of our civilization’s foundational culture war. Yet these two have come to an effective peace accord based on the fact that both support the (ready-to-detonate) capitalist incentive and reward system: consumption as identity-defining trophy. Science explains this system as the inevitable working of animal nature, and Christianity explains it as the inscrutable Divine plan in action. Notwithstanding their differences, both sides developed metaphysics on the model of a law-giver, divine law on one side, natural law on the other, and laws always apply top-down (unalterably) to things understood as unalterable building blocks of reality, all tidy and settled in a hierarchical chain of Being extending down into economic and political structure, social roles and relationships, and even into gender and race categories. It is a vision of existence as rigidly pre-structured and is the ideological matrix of the right-wing politics of winner-take-all inequality.

Both bastions of metaphysics are able to embrace the capitalist incentive and reward system because each misconstrues something crucial about the reality it holds dearest. Religious institutions attach themselves to the overriding reality of creative teleological interventions, the power of spirituality for spontaneously expressive novelty, so much so that they project spiritual teleology outward as the great cosmic parent hidden inside all existence, literally deifying it and proclaiming it the origin of everything. By doing that they reduce individual human-scale spirituality to ignorance, vanity, and misery. On the other side, science attaches itself to knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as unalterably definite. Science focuses so much on material objectivity that it disappears human experience into mere mechanism. Each of these entrenched metaphysical doctrines so drastically discounts the importance of the other that actual human spirituality is distorted grotesquely by both. Dystopia follows from the denigration of individual-scale human spirituality from which certain factions gain power and benefits. Setting aside the grotesque exclusivity of the sides in this culture war, we are left with ordinary human scale experience which absolutely depends on both novel teleological creativity at the level of individual persons, and with the stability and clear discernibility of some material objectivity. We have no direct experience of deliberative interventions at a cosmic level, but we have no end of experience of them in our everyday social interactions.

Getting beyond the all-destroying capitalist incentive and reward imperative to consume requires getting beyond the outrageous denigration of individual-level spirituality in metaphysical culture. It demands nothing more than a dualistic synthesis of the opposing metaphysical visions in a new configuration: recognition of random occurrence at the cosmic level and of creative novelty, foresight, learning, and personal expression, which is to say, spontaneous spirituality, at the level of the individual person. Removing the genius of agency in our scenario from some top-down imposer of laws, and relocating it instead to ground level where everyone breaths and talks and carries on living day to day, provides a profound equality of persons. The fact is that a standard practice of creativity as personal expression is the most gratifying and self-affirming of experiences. This is the ultimate grounding for democracy because every individual brings an inherent personal fountain of gratification that bypasses the competitive market economics of trade and barter. This is a metaphysics more congruent with a leftist politics of universal dignity, equality, and mutual support. The left has always been weakened by the lack of a strong and special metaphysical foundation, and so the authentic culture war between left and right politics has not yet even really started.

Context:

Fragment 180, August 28, 2021, Existence and New Reality (word count: 505)

Fragment 173, January 30, 2021, Absolute Incompleteness (word count: 202)

Fragment 171, December 9, 2020, Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia (word count: 779)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Loneliest Un-Loneliness

08 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Nature, Political Power, Why thinking?

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Fragment 181, word count: 913.

tags: human hive-mind, embodiment, attachment, war, philosophy, un-loneliness, culture, imitation, originality, freedom

The most urgent issue for philosophy is the relationship between individual persons and collective identities of the kind described here previously as hive-minds which make war with each other. This urgency can be illustrated by reference to the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians, in which the crucial divide between the Asian cultural system and the Euro-American cultural system is eastern collectivism (extended-extended patriarchal family values) as opposed to the legacy of individualism from the European metaphysical upheavals: Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Revolution of 1789-99. Obviously, western societies are also still largely organized as patriarchal hive-minds. Human hive-minds, collective identities, are the important and dangerous structures behind war, colonization, imperialism, and national exceptionalism expressing the conviction that strength and power merit the privilege of dominance and special rights. Hive-mind collective identity is distinctly not universal but instead an imprint of the point of view of some self-proclaiming superior beings club, an ‘us against the unworthy’ ideology. However, the metaphysical contests of western history have had some effect, and citizens of the resulting modernity are somewhat less rooted in an unquestionable patriarchally defended essentialism with its vision of rigid permanence in the structures and cycles of everything!

To be human is to relish engagement with other intelligences, and culture is always created to aid that engagement. Personality is inherently a creator and imitator of culture. As a deliberate intentional act, imitation is a declaration of intelligence to another presumed intelligence, a declaration of sensitivity, perception, memory, and caring, within a declaration of recognizing or supposing perception, memory, and caring embodied separately and paying attention. Imitation is a crucial declaration of pattern recognition and an invitation and promise of a conversational future, imitations with surprising innovations.

Absorption in an ambient culture is so crucial for people that the understanding of basic reality in any individual’s encounter with the world is almost completely mediated and structured by culturally transmitted religions, stories and ceremonies of national patriotism, and the ethos of some specific and exclusive stratum of social status and esteem: socially normal expectations about styles of consumption, work, and family relations, of gender expressions and attractiveness, social manners, niche cultures of decoration, costume, dwellings, celebrations, topics of conversation, and markers of success. The human world is a patchwork of such cultural niches (up to and including civilizations) all addicted to certainty about themselves as the best possible expression of divine will and of nature, the bedrock of categories and laws that determines things to be just as they are. Each collective’s cultural expression supports it feeling superior to others no matter what appearances and comparisons may suggest, stridently unwilling to accept reality checks, dangerously threatened by reality checks. As superior beings clubs, these culture pods are determined to remain as they are and to keep everybody under the spell of their dramas. However, cultural ideas that self-aggrandize, and externalize a supposedly less worthy subset of humanity, are arbitrary stipulations based on superstitious fears and magical wishes. In this context thinking philosophically can be a serious business that depends on a personal separation from the cultural currency of suppositions. The stakes are high here for individuals, and in this cultural context philosophy can be a reality check where a reality check is needed desperately.

Notwithstanding reveries of utopias and primordial states of nature, philosophers have not often questioned the stratification of society and political power as they found them. They mostly laboured to ‘justify the ways of God (or nature) to man’ on the essentialist assumption that food-chains of power, wealth, and social esteem (essentially master/ slave social organization in superstitious hive-mind formations) are unalterable basic reality. It is assumed that it must always be this way because nature is strictly pre-determined to vary within a narrow range, fated to swing through ever-recurring cycles. However, there have been various intuitions of monadic personal agency, in which the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is recognized and treated as inherently greater in depth and scope than the imprinted cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. This can be illustrated by a consideration of language. Language is a public transit system. Experience for any individual goes vastly beyond the territory marked out by language, just as geography goes vastly beyond the streetcar tracks. When poets or philosophers make efforts to communicate experience that is not included in the current transit system they have no choice but to bend and stretch and sculpt new parts of language to draw attention to previously private regions. The individuality of spontaneously questioning sensibility grounded in embodiment is enough to permit individuals an exit from-hive mind collective identities.

The lesson of philosophy in its long and complex history is that individuals, as defined by embodiment, have the power to conceptualize creatively and originally the world that can be abstracted within the rich spiritual context that digests what is given externally. Philosophical statements have been an individual’s declaration of independence as a conceiver of living a life, and, as such, a challenge to the collective orientation of hive-minds. Philosophy is a person’s description of encountering the world after discounting the cultural currency of suppositions previously supplied by an ambient society, when, in their loneliest un-loneliness, they encounter the universality of innocent experience: intentionality, sentience, caring, within an eventful given world. In this innocence no one is a member of any collective subset of the interconnectedness of personal beings.

Embedded links

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

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

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia

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Fragment 171, word count: 780.

There is a western consensus that the rapid launch of mathematical science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe drew the decisive line in human history, the crossing of which heralded a future with unlimited improvements in all human affairs. There was some speculation that after understanding the energies of nature humans would use them first to perform essential production work and then venture on to accomplish our fondest hopes. It was thought to be self-evident that ingenious mechanisms for channelling energies far greater than human and animal muscle power would free people from the physical burden of work and create such abundance that none would suffer privation. This, roughly, was the theory of science for a better world, material progress. It didn’t work out because understanding the energies of nature did nothing to change the cultural limits on how the wealthiest groups distributed empathy toward other breathing beings. The result is that now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the idea of progress, Better World Theory, is confused and seriously disputed. Developments in digital technology over the last half-century have given a new boost to STEM-based hopes for a better world, although weapons of mass destruction and climate change loom larger than ever and technology still doesn’t break down the cultural barriers to expanding empathy.

The reasons for intractable and extinction level problems in this age of mathematical science, which promotes itself as the means for solving all human problems, cannot be discovered by scientific research. Materialist science cannot settle the culture war between the core values of patriarchy from feudal Christendom along with other antique societies which similarly control strictly and sparsely licensed empathy, over against an emerging conception of culture and society based on a universality of empathy. Nostalgia for an imagined past along the lines of feudal Christendom is still widespread and a characteristic feature of fascism, a worse dystopia than what we have. From this perspective, what makes a society dystopian, a mortal danger to itself and others, is a poverty of empathy.

Populist Sense of Loss: Birthright and Patriarchy

The sense of loss that drives right-wing populism results from progress made in extending empathy, bringing with it some degree of dignity and equality, to previously denied people, and especially from the successes of feminism and its inexorable drift of values toward nurture and away from the masculine culture of dominance-derived pride. Right-wing populism is nostalgia for misogyny, racism, celebration of masculine strength, patriarchy, and terror of a supernatural masculine mind in the universe at large which decrees all those dystopian arrangements and certifies their eternal endurance.

There is also a populist rage against the elite status and honour of education and scholarship, of expertise, study, scribal skills and their culture, because they override the tradition of birthright. Birthright claims to be the decree of nature or the almighty creator, in which people are born to a certain social status as a man or as a person of the dominant race, a meaningful niche with a certain richness of rights, privileges, and dignities. In a world of education, there is no birthright. Everyone must accomplish what they can through effort and ingenuity. That has given women, racial minorities, and marginalized groups generally, a way to bypass birthright in dominant cultures.

The broadening of empathy is not an accomplishment of science or technology, and not likely to be helped by artificial intelligence. It is instead a product of the two culture engines identified as threats by the political right-wing: the culture of nurture and attachment cultivated mainly by women, and the scribal culture of broad literacy, inquiry, and scholarship. The posture of inquiry that is philosophy, for example, covering the whole of culture and experience, arises from a judgement, beginning from Socrates, that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions.

Early on in the twenty-first century, the political left-wing might be desperate in its struggle against advances by traditional patriarchy in a conservative, neoconservative, and neofascist onslaught, but in a long historical perspective the political right-wing is at least as desperate because people generally have become and continue to become more nurturing and to embrace nurturing ethics and values. Violence is less tolerated in many cultures than it was even one generation ago, although there are still forces striving mightily to legitimizing authoritarian patriarchy and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, brandishing and glorifying the tools of violence. The truth about individual human spirituality is that the potential for empathy is inherent and as near universal as we need for a better world.

Embedded links:

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

A Western Project

11 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Political Power, University

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Fragment 163, word count: 750.

What muted the traditional cultures of vicious racism and patriarchal misogyny for a time in the U.S.A. and much of Europe was the prestige and promise of intellectual culture. This was a legacy from world history, just as the racism and misogyny were, but there were special contributions from European history that establish it still as the exception in the history of the progress of ideas. The American colonies always had to compete against the senior societies in Europe which were eager to emphasize their vast superiority and authority. However, the continent that the colonizers had stolen was fertile, a treasure trove of resources, so with slave labour the colonies became rich and able to emulate and compete for leadership in the cultural achievements of the senior societies. The mutating of rigid European class culture on the new ground of the colonies, along with political institutions conceived in the intellectual fervour for social liberation underlying the great revolution in France 1789-99, helped enable a greater range of personal expression and commercial venturing in the USA. Universities in the USA advanced scholarly culture in all areas, especially engineering (drawing comparison to the Roman development of the cultural legacy from ancient Greece). By 1939 on the eve of World War II the American view of Europe can be seen in the classic movie from that year, The Wizard of Oz. Europe was Munchkin-land inhabited by little people in Medieval costumes, incapable of freeing themselves from the domination of fairy-tale witches and wizards. The child Dorothy in her healthy American innocence towers over the Munchkins, bound as they are by hereditary hierarchies and traditional folkways.

After World War II, somewhat democratic institutions provided a basis for European countries toward the Atlantic coast, and the USA, to claim moral superiority. This began after WW I during which occurred the Communist Revolution in Russia and the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the 1920’s and 30’s. The claim to moral authority of the west rested on the contrast with fascist dictatorships and authoritarian communist regimes in the east. However, it wasn’t just political institutions that made European culture remarkable. It was the depth and complexity of intellectual culture which, of course, included science, and science became so ascendant that it is easy to assume that science was the main feature, but it wasn’t. Deeper than science was a sense of a western project of social and cultural progress expressing a spirit of personal autonomy, a cultural movement that had blossomed profoundly in the Enlightenment as well as in earlier manifestations such as the protestant reformation, and constituted the decisive contrast with authoritarian societies. As well as conceiving dramatic upgrades in the dignity of human nature, the spirit of science and the spirit of protestantism were both rejections of authority even when it claimed to express divine sovereignty. Science had to reject the very forceful authority of the Church in describing nature, astronomy, for example, and protestantism (justification by faith) confronted both religious and political authorities in claiming personal autonomy in the teeth of decrees made by high officials and councils of the Church. In public debate with Church authorities, Martin Luther was continually confronted with the question of how his individual wisdom could match the accumulated store from the whole history of the Church. Luther could well have quoted Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing.” It is a claim of the inherent dignity and power of individual innocence from mere existence as personality/ humanity. In this conception, inseparable from the culture of thinking philosophically, the individual person is an autonomous point and arc of creative agency with inherent power to re-conceptualize experience, and, as such, inherently greater than the cultural imprint of any collective identity, any human hive mind. This claim applies universally. The intellectual, scribal, culture of Europe, with the tradition of philosophy at the core, pioneered this experience of enlargement of the individual self in sharp contrast to other cultural conceptions, such as that of feudal Christendom. This is the inner attraction and variably successful accomplishment of liberal education in the western tradition. However, hive minds of vicious imperialist racism and patriarchal misogyny from feudal Christendom have not gone away, and remain active in many ways to subvert the project of universal autonomy. They are springs of anti-intellectualism and their resurgent influence has discredited the moral authority once claimed by western institutions. Considering history, though, the past is not the future.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Being Human

24 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Narrative

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Fragment 151, word count: 367.

The historical rise and accomplishments of the political left-wing in opposition to perennial oligarchic dominance is what makes the Euro-American cultural system actually special. The rise and survival of the political left expresses an intuition that the nature of persons as supra-actual points and enduring arcs of purposeful ideality, self-orienting within a sensed, guessed, and unstable surroundings, is such that we have a self-sourced mission or project beyond becoming a satisfied or even ecstatic eating machine, work supplier in a production system, or follower of commands as the belonging of a hive. Two vectors of ancient philosophy which were already leaning left were, first, an effort to get rid of superstitious myths about capricious divine personalities such as the Olympian gods and demons; and second, to clarify the peculiar existence of the gaze of personal consciousness, opening onto, and questing into surroundings of shifting and drifting possibilities and impossibilities as the context and meaning of brute actualities. The cultural imperative for universal literacy, mass education, free-ranging research and philosophical enquiry, and democratic influence on institutions of sovereignty, all express a striving for open-ended individual empowerment, a sense that existing societies are all too small to contain or express the whole of any individual. This spirit of the left affirms that education should provide individuals with the means to understand and take a substantial measure of participation and control in the ongoing evolution of society and culture.

The dominant orientation in folk societies is backward-looking. In traditional societies time is an eternally recurring circle or wheel. What was done in the past is so revered that it is assigned the status of metaphysical template of what society should be and do forever. From the influence of thinking on the political left, modernity has a different conception of time in which both futurity and temporal anteriority are considered absolutely unique. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being because the past is recognized as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, oppression, monotony, poverty, and the conformity imposed by myths of an urgent need for strength in numbers, from which even the most advanced societies are still only beginning to emerge.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

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.

Embedded link:

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

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Freedom of Ideality

28 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 144, word count: 442.

Freedom is a fundamental function of teleological ideality, which is to say, of personality. Personality is the spontaneous creation of freedom in a poise toward an indefinite variety of possible actions in alternative futures. Personality experiences its ideality as freedom because it encompasses in advance, from within its own creativity, personally invented alternative possibilities for agency, the creation of novel alternatives and possibilities in the construction of a life. Personality lives and orients itself among mostly non-actualities in a playing field of non-actual time. These non-actualities are features of the orientation and bearing of some particular embodied ideality. Personality depends on sensitivity, on a gaze beyond itself, but it is not a strictly sensory gaze. The gaze of any teleological ideality goes through and beyond sensed actuality to an undetermined futurity where different actions and courses of development are conceived as possibilities among variously judged probabilities. Ideality experiences freedom in its gaze (and its bearing) into a non-actual dimension of possible futures, pathways, and plans with always room for the invention of more. The supra-sensory gaze is always expressive of at least curiosity, and curiosity is already an agency. The gaze is an agency, a projection, a searching and a judging, but is also the matrix of creation for new actualities, interventions into the world of things, and so of agency that is specifically expressive of knowledge, intent, decision, and caring. Consciousness is this gaze of ideality, the anticipatory ideation of agency in the moments to come, full of ideas, a fountain of teleological possibilities in a creative arc of developmental continuity that is a personality in the living of an embodied life.

The human nature we recognize here is a fountain of ideas and inventions, goods to be expressed and projected in the making of lived actuality. Value, experience of gratification, is not something that comes from outside the individual, as is assumed in the concept of ‘economic man’, the blank slate or sucking void vision of human nature. Neither freedom nor value depend on access to competitions for properties, consumables, sparkles, or titles, and so is not a product of commerce, the retail, design, or manufacturing industries, for example. Value experience is in expressing the interior creative fountain. Freedom does not require abandonment or suppression of empathy (Kant’s universal maxims are formal expressions of empathy), getting beyond the rule of (Kantian) law, or taking up weapons to become the most effective force for looting trophies. Freedom is ideality, the existence of individual embodied personality. Subsequent to Freud, the scientific imperative is to create a psychology without ideality, but freedom is indiscernible to any such psychology.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Quick Notes on Nature

25 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 126, Word count: 229.

Merit

There is an equivocation in the word and notion “hierarchy”, especially in the combination “natural hierarchy”. This equivocation is often exploited by ideologues of the political right-wing. The fact is that ability ranking does not imply command or supervisory legitimacy. Neither competence nor merit of any kind carries special rights to sovereignty. Superior ability or giftedness does not confer any kind of ownership of other people or the work of other people. There is no legitimate way for any gradient of competences to become a chain of command, which morphs so effortlessly into a food chain.

Copernican Dualism

The Copernican Revolution highlights a basic dualism in experience. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us but it also has no other specific accommodation for our sensitivity, consciousness, freedom, or teleology. Objective actuality does not care, respond, or prepare. Subjectivity, which is to say, spirituality, is not determinative of objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. Considering the dire fears of social authorities at the time of the Copernican revolution, it is remarkable that it is no longer taken as a devastating idea that the objective world of actuality would roll along quite unaffected in the total absence of our presence as spiritual ideality. This highlights the transcendent peculiarity of caring sensitivity and consciousness and of the teleological freedom in our preparing and responding.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.