Category Archives: Freedom

Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Nature

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It has been normal in philosophy and science for human motivation and behaviour to be conceived and explained in terms of supra-individual forces, sometimes called drives. Drives are a kind of compulsion, often only semi-conscious or even unconscious. Compulsions for food, sex, shiny baubles, or power are common examples. Drives are impersonal and generic, even though, as in Plato’s conception of a three-part subjectivity (consisting of appetites, competitive spirit, and contemplative (passive) rationality) individuals display a distinct personal prominence of some over others. In any case, motivating drives are not creations of an individual intelligence, but instead derive from something outside and prior to the individual. In modern culture, such appetites or desires are assumed to derive from biological structures, to be ‘hard wired’ and so manifestations of a general human nature which is ultimately inseparable from the rest of what might be called the laws of nature. There are debates about a hierarchy of drives, about which is more powerful, the drive for pleasure, for power (the will to power), or for meaning (echoing Plato’s three-part structure). Drives for power or meaning are less plausibly derived from simple biological mechanisms, but they have been interpreted as expressing some physically based compulsion toward general self-interest (more or less rational), self-gratification, self-preservation, or self-advantage. In that vision, intelligence or rationality is conceived as a biological mediating mechanism translating the primordial compulsion into actions adjusted to a particular environment.

The idea that human behaviour and motivation are explainable in terms of impersonal compulsions comes from visions of determinism, usually materialist or economic determinism, which is to say, conceptual systems which ignore or reject profound individual freedom. The impulse of determinists is to complete a picture of the total world in terms of pre-determined laws of motion, and so human motivation and behaviour have to be kept as simple as possible to be fitted into that picture. However, there is a clash, a mis-match or discontinuity, between the conception of human behaviour as determined by impersonal drives, and the identification of humans as performers of certain acts of thinking, such as a kind of philosophical thinking. For example, it was a basic understanding of the nature of philosophy, as early as the Iron Age, that it was individual intelligence contemplating its own interiority. That historical observation is documented in The Shape of Ancient Thought*, by Thomas C. McEvilley, most explicitly in the chapters on Plotinus, especially starting around page 558. Ordinary knowledge comes from an outward gaze (science), but ultimate knowledge is the same as profound self-knowledge and comes from thinking inwardness. The subsection “Knowing the One for Plotinus” (p. 560) includes references to Aristotle’s idea of “thought thinking itself”. Identification of that philosophical act as characteristic of human individuals, an inclination to explore self-identification in the way required by that conception of philosophy, reveals humans as a sort of entity that can and does contemplate and question its own self-identification, from a basic curiosity.

That clash highlights the need for a paradigm shift in human self-identification: the difference between thinking of behaviour and motivation in terms of drives (instinctive, biological, or metaphysical) as conceived by Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Freud; as opposed to conceiving behaviour and motivation in terms of an individual’s questions that set bearings for personal orientation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness” that illustrates the difference. Roughly, any person will learn best what he or she is already wondering about from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. The pre-linguistic nature of curiosity, wonder, or questioning means that it includes features that are often semi-conscious or sporadically conscious. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be, but can be re-awakened or re-discovered. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Doubt is an instance of this king of wondering, and doubt is often non-linguistic and distinctly individual, definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Each person’s wondering or questioning process could be seen as a peculiar creative force that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia. Questions are creations of a particular intelligence, and intelligence is the matrix of questions, of wonder, curiosity, a particularity of exploration. Having a question, an orientation that is sensed as peculiarly incomplete and so searching for something more or less indefinite but not entirely out-of-reach, is already the realization of freedom and self-direction. To have a question or a doubt is already to act autonomously.

* The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The reason for the seventeenth and eighteenth century efforts at Enlightenment was to unseat the entrenched top-down human-on-human parasites plaguing Old Regime society. Those parasites were disguising themselves as avatars (monarchy, aristocracy, and Church hierarchies) of a fictitious Supreme Parent (projections of the universally imprinted parent), and in that guise systematically curtailing the liberty, initiative, individuality, and material prosperity of the great mass of the population, with the intent to channel disproportionate wealth and privilege to themselves. The purpose of the Enlightenment movement was to improve the conditions of human life generally by dismantling the effects, material, cultural, and psychological, of top-down human-on-human parasites.

Orientation from Strict Rationality or Intelligence

In the work of Spinoza, one of the founding visionaries of the Enlightenment, there is a quite Stoic identification of philosophical thinking with strict rationality, such that a person is thinking philosophically to the extent that their thinking goes entirely beyond the influence of traditions, habits, imitations, the talk going around, commonly accepted assumptions, fads and fashions, the declarations of authorities, or any other cultural givens and influences, not to mention personal guesses and fantasies possibly expressing wishes and fears, and instead proceeds entirely on the basis of clear evidence and mathematical (geometrical-logical) rationality. On that view, l’esprit philosophique is a dedication to thinking rationally and to building a general orientation by a consistent practice of thinking rationally.

In his lecture series about Pre-Platonic philosophers*, Nietzsche focused on the novel kinds of persona constructed and projected by individual philosophers in their philosophical presentations. Spinoza’s strictly rational philosophical person belongs in that line of thinking. To take that line to a conclusion, it can be said that when any sort of person thinks philosophically about issues, they do so entirely as an intelligence. If a person presents claims from thinking as a representative of a particular race, gender, body type, social stratum, ethnicity, religion, profession, or even age, then those claims are limited, culturally biased, parochial, and special, in a way that philosophy needn’t be and shouldn’t be. To think philosophically is to act strictly as an intelligence, but philosophy as such is not the only way to express personal existence as intelligence. Acting creatively from any personal creative process also qualifies. So, to think philosophically in the tradition of Spinoza is to think from a self-identification as pre-cultural (innocent) intelligence.

*The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated from German and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Greg Whitlock, Published by: Urbana, University of Illinois Press. (2001), ISBN: 0252025598. See page 58.

In present circumstances, just as in the Old Regime era, the intent in developing a philosophical consciousness, a practical identification of personal subjectivity as innocent intelligence, is to re-model ordinary culture-influenced consciousness to remove the internal “receptors” that give human parasites the opportunities they need to trigger subordination and the whole system of false values that goes with it, and so to gradually dislodge the current collective of top-down human-on-human parasites, and eventually discredit the culture of parasitic will-to-power masculinity permanently. Getting beyond every vestige of the imprinted parent, probably the most important trigger of subordination, is an aspect of recognizing both personal freedom and the fundamental equality of intelligences.

This is not a move in an endless cultural evolution from one form to another, not a change of fashion resulting from some fundamental instability, dialectic, or taste for novelty in nature or human nature. There is a destination, an end point of this process, which might be described as the popular and widespread achievement of a philosophical consciousness, beyond all vestiges of the imprinted parent and the cultural tags of subordination.

Time is the Form of Freedom

Notwithstanding the spectacular advances of science and technological engineering, the enduring relevance of philosophy derives from its specific orientation to the questioning in any human gaze, and especially to freedom in that individual gaze. Without the question, there is no gaze, no perception, no knowledge. The freedom in that questioning is inseparable from teleology, from futurity, the construction of time. Time is not a substance, nor substantial in any way. No theory of substance, not even the single substance of Parmenides or Spinoza, will help with understanding time or teleology, because teleology is a construct of what does not exist. Time is interior to each individual questioning gaze, and in fact, time is nothing but the question in the gaze. Time is not a dimension of objects (or of nature) except insofar as objects are identified by an intelligence in its building a life.

Empiricism, a strong feature of Spinoza’s vision, depicts an impossibly passive intelligence, and does its best to diminish and marginalize the questioning in the individual gaze, attempting to construe knowledge as if it were entirely a product of sensations. Empiricist knowledge, on that view, is merely an effect of non-intelligent givens, of natural causes. However, contrary to strict empiricism, before an intelligence reacts to its surroundings, or even receives effects, it questions, reaches, searches, selects, and makes some kind of sense of what it finds. There is always an indispensable contribution to what is perceived made by the perceiver. Some conceptual form or sense must be applied to givens, and such conceptual form is a creation of intelligence and is not a sensory given. (That is a version of Kantian idealism, an interpretation of rationalism.)

Nature Excludes Teleology (Freedom)

It would be difficult for anyone to disagree that there are events in the world, such as one’s own deliberate actions, which can be understood properly only as teleological, the results of purpose, aspiration, intent, or the prior conception of future goals in the context of building a life. Yet it is also evident that not all events are teleological. Nature is indeed a completely non-teleological realm. There is no teleology in strictly natural processes, in the playing out of natural laws in the cosmos as a whole or at a local level. However, since we began by recognizing teleological events, that we create them, it is difficult to avoid envisioning a system of two different but interacting sets of events, one of which consists of the deliberate actions of humans or generally intelligent beings. There is nature and additionally a complex category of teleological non-nature. Teleology is temporality, futurity. Orientation toward a future constructed of intelligently conceived but strictly non-actual possibilities, negations, and estimated probabilities is the framework of freedom. The category of non-nature includes both the population of individual (embodied) intelligences about whom it makes sense to talk about teleological freedom, and the cultures which that population has created. Culture is the creation of the population of individual embodied intelligences engaging with one another exterior to exterior, making use of nature to do so. However, the longstanding success of certain factions of humans at being parasites on other humans, and in that effort constructing culture as a mechanism of inequality in power and control, makes culture inextricably coercive, which is to say, political.

Culture as a Parasitic Weapon of Mass Disempowerment

It is not difficult to see how religion, managed by a faction with large-scale parasitic intent, works as mass disempowerment. An organization or person can play on the pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, some parental-type authority and the superstitious expression of that conditioning in beliefs about all-powerful free-floating parental-type spirits such as a father-god in the sky. Such an organization or person only has to pull off a convincingly theatrical assertion of receiving divine revelations to establish themselves as the chosen prophet, the messenger, the instrument of the invisible Supreme Parent, and suddenly the mass of believers is at their mercy. The Old Regime parasite factions had succeeded in contaminating western culture with superstitious myths of omnipotent disembodied avatars of the Supreme Parent, an ideology which allowed them to carry on brutal parasitism with nearly complete impunity. It is crucial that they based their legitimacy on metaphysics, the metaphysical claim of an omnipotent disembodied super-intelligence, because it turned out that a more plausible metaphysics (and only that) could reveal the falseness of their claim to legitimacy. That was and still is a stunningly surprising vulnerability in the operating of human parasites. Human parasites always appeal to metaphysics, such as cosmic intelligences or materialist determinism, to proclaim the ultimate necessity of human subordination and hierarchy, the institutionalization of parent-child type inequality; and so metaphysics is the first and crucial place they must and can be discredited. That is the enduring relevance of metaphysics. Only a philosophical consciousness (l’esprit philosophique as it was named in the eighteenth century) as distinct from a consciousness projecting and accepting Great Parent avatars of the internally imprinted parent, can think beyond the myths of power entrenched within prevailing culture. A philosophical consciousness implies bottom-up rather than top-down access to reality in the power of critical and creative thinking inherent universally in individual teleology.

So consider, what metaphysics would illuminate the conditions for general human happiness and well being? What is the metaphysics of universal human rights, democratic equality, and individual freedom of thought and expression? In other words, what metaphysics would discredit and remove from the great mass of humanity the burden of top-down human-on-human parasites? The Enlightenment idea of a philosophical consciousness was indistinguishable from the emerging scientific consciousness in which disembodied teleology and parent-type omnipotent teleology were removed completely. Spinoza’s materialism was understood to discredit the pretensions of reigning violent families to be legitimized by divine determination of human affairs because with materialism there could be no divinity distinct from determinate nature to intervene in human affairs. In the vacuum left by the destruction of that traditional authority, the importance of every person as a rational being, and the general will of the collective of all people, emerged as the only plausible foundation of authority. The power of individual rationality was combined with the consequences of materialism for myths of the great unthinkable parent. That was l’esprit philosophique emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The same pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, parental-type authority still exists in mostly unidentified obscurity. The old father god is still widely taken for granted and, even without that superstition, the idea of parental-type sovereignty of the state is still largely unquestioned, as is hierarchical subordination generally, structured by competitions for recognition, rewards, and upward advancement for those proven most pleasing in the calculating gaze of some great parent avatar. The competition to reach the top in business organizations or professions has a semi-unconscious, unstated, informal, agenda. Just below the surface, the competition is about projecting a sustained impression of masculinity, a culturally stipulated masculinity as the systematic invulnerability to empathy. To be chosen for top positions, females would have to be the most masculine candidate in the competitions, but not many women can do that.

The condition of adult orientation in which no vestige remains of an imprinted parent would be a philosophical consciousness, recognizing bottom-up access to reality, since individual intelligence is what remains when authority vanishes. It was already clear to Enlightenment activists that the crucial means by which to get beyond the universally imprinted parent at a broad cultural scale was to identify, clarify, and distribute l’esprit philosophique as individual empowerment. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now should include awareness of the fundamental importance of l’esprit philosophique in the Enlightenment effort for universal equality and human rights, the unique historical precedent of accomplishing a large-scale cultural movement to get beyond the effects (inequality and subordination) of the universally imprinted parent which has been fundamental to entrenchment of human-on-human parasites.

The Question of Enlightenment Individualism

One of the limitations of Enlightenment materialism with its shift of sovereignty from divine Providence (as expressed through Churches, aristocracy, and monarchy) to the general will was a certain lack of attention to human individuality. The principle of the universality of human rationality did serve as a grounding for universal human rights and individual freedom and dignity, but the tendency of strict rationality is generic, and the more creative aspects of human individuality and freedom were not clearly founded in Spinoza’s monism. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now must include awareness of the real foundation of universal human rights and equality, which is to say, awareness of individual intelligence-as-such, innocent teleology, the fundamental humanity which eliminates all the culturally determined tags of subordination, alienation, and de-humanization which work as barriers to universal empathy. It should also include awareness of the cultural mechanisms and techniques of the parasite faction to present and preserve inequality as a positive value, and that the crucial challenge of philosophy in the twenty-first century is to repudiate the claim of parasite factions to be justified and legitimized by nature as represented by science.

The Will to Power vs Empathy

The idea that a “will to power” is the core of all vital force, all vitality, an idea from Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) as interpreted by Nietzsche, is just another expression of the persistent culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, and as such narrowly biased. Another philosophical expression of the same culture can be seen in the idea Hobbes had of the state of nature, a war of all against all, quite accurate within the dominant culture of masculinity. Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all childless males with few profound attachments beyond a small cohort of male peers. The theory of the will to power is properly appreciated as a revelation of their culture of masculinity, what could be called will-to-power masculinity. The overwhelming predominance of males in academic professions, all immersed in that culture, still enables the theory of human nature as will-to-power to be pervasive and persistent, for example in contemporary deconstructionist theory. It dovetails with the legacy of Augustinian Christianity, declaring human nature universally to be the unalterable source of injustice. Such a bias obscures the very possibility of progress (illustrated by Foucault, for example) and also blocks identification of the culture of will-to-power masculinity itself as the historical, and very alterable, source of injustice. Culture is mutable even if nature isn’t.

Empathy

The parasitic culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, cowboy masculinity, works by exploiting opportunities presented by the universally imprinted parent to disable universal empathy. It is difficult to imagine eradicating that whole poisoning culture, but what it comes down to is whether or not it controls you personally, and there are ways for innocent teleology to cultivate its self-possession. Beyond the imprinted parent lies a truly empathic philosophical consciousness. Only when you strip away from personal definition everything except bedrock innocent intelligence (and you can) do you escape the prejudicial tags used within cultures to mark out constructs of superiority and inferiority, tags such as race, gender, ethnicity, abled-ness, body-shape, size, strength, wealth, extroversion, and so on. Those tags are cultivated by the culture of will-to-power masculinity specifically to obstruct any straightforward empathy with other intelligences (people) universally, but when the cultural tags are discredited and ignored what remains is innocent teleology which is discernible, although individual, in all individual eruptions into nature of intelligent animation. Nothing but a philosophical consciousness, which is just self-consciousness as creative teleological freedom, innocent intelligence, can disempower the controlling effects of culture poisoned by the ethos of human-on-human parasites. This all points to a metaphysics that can reboot the Enlightenment movement to dismantle the material, cultural, and psychological effects of top-down human-on-human parasites, and that metaphysics is not any form of deterministic monism.

Beyond the influence of myths and projections of a universally imprinted parent (a dominating super-intelligence or institution of subordination) dawns the recognition of a large number of individual intelligences, each with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other teleological individuals. (Self-consciousness as intelligence includes awareness of both inertial nature and human culture as external to personal innocence.) The same empathy that empowers individuals to sense teleological behaviour, intelligence, outside ourselves also empowers us to sense the effects that inter-intelligence parasitism has on its victims, and so reveals such parasitism as categorically immoral, ugly, vicious, and repulsive.

This is Not Theory

Personal cultivation of that kind of philosophical consciousness (self identification as teleological freedom, without parental-type authorities) is distinct from ideological sophistication, religious faith, speculation, or theories of anything. We don’t need revelations, faith, ideology, or theories, because we can know personal teleology or intelligence by immediate acquaintance, achieved in a process of letting go of cultural influences. Transcendence (freedom) is thinkable and clearly defined without appeal to occult or obscure forces or powers, hidden principles, aliens, or magic. However, there certainly is a contribution to be made by self-directed education in support of sophistication about history, culture, and ideas.

Metaphysics of Freedom

The most important challenge and purpose of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was disputing the metaphysical claim asserted by operators of systematic Old Regime lethal power (Churches, aristocracy, monarchies) to be justified by divine intervention, by Providence, in their violently coercive social supervision. However, the crucial program facing philosophers of every era is to understand individual human freedom (the questioning in the gaze) in the face of so many clearly controlling and determining forces. The roots of a metaphysics of individual freedom go deep in the history of philosophy. The discovery by Martin Luther (1483-1546) of an interior power of teleology to take a creative leap (of faith for him personally) was the breakthrough in modern thinking about individual freedom. Luther drew on ancient Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism which he encountered in his humanist education. The Stoic version of individual freedom was much more limited. Stated strictly, it was just a freedom to assent to the universal Logos in every detail of reality or else to dispute or resist it internally. The personal interiority from which that Stoic freedom emerged included deliberate rationality interacting with emotionally charged appetites and competitive impulses, for example, and the power or freedom of rational deliberation was considerable in that interior context. Luther’s identification of the creative leap was an interpretation of that Stoic interiority, but also a crucial creative leap beyond it.

Luther, Kant, and Freedom

A form of Luther’s idea of the individual leap of faith became fundamental to Kant’s self-legislating ethics, and in fact to his whole kind of idealism as sketched above. Peel away Kant’s technical terminology and the fundamental insight underneath is the personal creative leap that Luther made famous. Fichte’s self-positing ego is yet another expression of the same basic insight. It is no great surprise to find such a Lutheran grounding, since the religious upbringing of both Kant and Fichte was Lutheran. Kant’s contribution was to recognize the broad personal freedom implicit in the power of an intelligence to take creative leaps, that if an intelligence could take a leap of faith then it could take a multitude of different kinds of leap, and so Kant de-coupled Luther’s insight from the conceptual universe of Christendom and Abrahamic monotheism generally. In Kant’s work the leap became an individually created rule or conceptual pattern for structuring personal orientation within phenomena. Still another step is required to de-couple that basic interior creative freedom from the conceptual universe of sovereignty and sovereign rules in which Kant was still immersed.

Kant did not specifically relate his rationalist account of freedom with his recognition that time is contributed to experience by the experiencing intelligence, but he should have. Both the subjectivity of time and the individuality of freedom become clearer in that combination. Time, teleology, is the form of freedom.

The tradition of metaphysics recognizing a plurality of embodied teleologies with individual creative freedom is the philosophical legacy to draw upon to support human rights and freedoms far better than materialist monism or any other kind of fatalist determinism. The Lutheran line of freedom philosophy provides the matrix of an understanding of teleological freedom and the transcendence of intelligence.

The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment attempted to replace a Christian ideology sanctifying arbitrary oppressions exercised by institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and Churches with ideas supporting democracy and the global equality of all people as individuals, requiring the abolition of slavery, torture, serfdom, and the oppression of women. However, the weight of opinion within the politically engaged public was always skeptical about the competence of individual rationality and generally supported traditional religions and institutions of wealth and subordination, probably out of fear of the unknown, of unpredictable social change. Consequently, strong democracy and global human equality have still not been accomplished, but they are ideals still inspiring many people and having unpredictable political consequences. The forces of top-down human-on-human parasitism have always been winning, most recently since the suppression of the anti-war and counterculture movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s which blossomed around the early cultural impact of television. (The only intensively televised war, the most realistically communicated and the most popularly questioned and hated by spectators, was the American war in Vietnam 1965-75.) Here in 2014 the top-down forces are winning spectacularly, although there is also surprising new resistance.

The Enlightenment is not yet a story from history with beginning, middle, and end. We and our times in culture and politics are still very much part of the ongoing struggle of ideas and social arrangements at the core of the Enlightenment movement. The cultural and social transformations effected by rationalist philosophy, especially as presented by Spinoza and his eighteenth century French materialist interpreters, notably Denis Diderot (1713-84) and (Baron) Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723-89), who worked to define and communicate l’esprit philosophique, defining the categorical criminality of torture and slavery, for example, unquestionably earn the radically bottom-up political philosophy of the Enlightenment a central place in modern philosophy. It is remarkable that the mainstream work of contemporary philosophy shows so little vestige of that legacy.

The reflections here on Enlightenment history, Spinoza, and in particular l’esprit philosophique, have been informed and inspired by:

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Freedom and Time

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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De-Legitimizing Human Parasitism

Posting 53, January 31, 2013, The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism, is a statement of basic political consciousness. It describes the results of a cultural history far more sinister than any mere conspiracy. There is room for optimism, but not in denying or attempting to evade the malaise of the culture or the difficulties for individuals in attempting to live in freedom and justice (equality). Bottom-up human parasitism, petty crime such as theft, has never been legitimized, is always recognized as vicious and criminal. However, top-down parasitism has been completely distorted by the most gifted apologists for oligarchy, distorted into appearing as a contribution to the human community. That is why top-down human parasitism merits special deconstruction and the strongest condemnation. If there were to be a collective institution established to protect the human interconnectedness, its purpose and function must be to disable top-down parasitism, to de-legitimize it, expose the viciousness of its many forms, dismantle it, prevent it from re-emerging. That would be the decisive force for justice, and the necessary focus of any authentic democracy, any institutional and political representation of ordinary people.

Freedom and Time

Political consciousness needs to be combined with consciousness of basic personal interiority, the elemental source of freedom and equality. Since one crucial intent and effect of top-down parasitism is to externalize reality, a required part of any defence is to prevent that with an effort to rebalance, to internalize reality with attention to interior powers, indeed to the transcendent freedom of interiority.

Time is a crucial issue with respect to freedom. Past and future do not exist in nature. All there is to nature is the strictly exclusive actuality of an infinitesimal present. Time as complex structures of a past aligning with future is entirely a feature of the interiority of particular lives, of individual intelligences, each surviving by projecting creative aspirations constantly onto the mutability of their future. Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, (innocent) inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Freedom (transcending unfree nature) is in the mutability of an individual’s future, under the force of inspiration, curiosity, and questioning from that interior horizon. Freedom depends entirely on a person’s self-adjusting his or her orientation by means of judgments of the probabilities of various events and developments in future time, judgments of a variety of personal powers and possibilities, and judgments of means for projecting aspirations onto actuality in the future. There can be no freedom of nature since nature lacks the past and future of intelligence. Every human intelligence is, therefore, an autonomous interiority of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. This freedom-unfreedom dualism is humanist dualism, basically the same as what is often called “Cartesian dualism”.

Humanist Philosophy is the Assertion that Thinking Matters because Freedom Matters

To say that the poisoned culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism has not pervaded humanist philosophy, is to say that it has not pervaded the experience of freedom available to every individual in his or her own interiority, which is the focus, the subject matter, of humanist philosophy: the freedom of the interiority of intelligence. Philosophy isn’t the source of that freedom, but only a record of recognizing it, a reminder of that recognition. It is also to say that the innate freedom of intelligence is an innocence which is never completely muted by an ambient culture poisoned by legitimized top-down human parasitism. In its innocence, intelligence is always free, and in its freedom, intelligence always transcends the poisoned culture.

Humanist philosophy is thinking about the encounter between freedom and unfreedom. “Interiority” is another word for thinking. The case could be made that philosophy is an effort to understand and practice freedom, and that thinking is the crucial act of freedom. Philosophical humanism is an assertion of the force and utility of individual thinking. If subjectivity or interiority has no innate force or foreseeable effect then thinking can’t be decisive in creating the future and doesn’t matter.

When someone suggests overcoming “Cartesian” dualism, the question that must be posed is this: Does this overcoming of dualism preserve individual freedom or exclude it? It is difficult to conceive an alternative to dualism that does not exclude individual freedom. People who are anti-humanist are, on the face of things, devoted to the idea that individual thinking as such has no original force and doesn’t matter. Thinking as an act of freedom is completely different from thinking as unfreedom (say, passive spectator consciousness). Moreover, such exclusions of individual freedom have been construed as justifications for oligarchic human-on-human parasitism.

There are only two historically familiar ways to evade humanist dualism: materialist monism and idealist monism. Materialist monism is the option illustrated by communism, for example, and is typical of science. On that view, all events are pre-determined by eternal laws of physical nature. In fact, dialectical materialism is an attempt at a science of history in which material laws of nature, including biological (Darwinian/ Freudian) drives, determine, in a dialectical causal chain, the formation of every economic system and institutional state, and drive the formation of ideas and ideologies. Individual thinking is not a force in the historical process, nor in creating personal biographies, in the view of materialist monism.

Idealist monism is illustrated in a philosophical tradition that could be called Fichtean Romanticism, in which the existence of “things in themselves” is denied, and all existence is a vast intelligence (an interiority of non-actuality) or some aspect of intelligence such as will (a will to live, to become self-aware, a drive to reproduce, the will to power). However, on that view, the force of the grand-scale cosmic interiority reduces the force of individual thinking to triviality, to merely a local eruption of cosmic Being, a conduit for messages from a strict singularity such as God or Logos, messages sometimes delivered through specially “chosen” individuals or groups. Again, individual thinking as such is not an effective force in the historical or personal life-building process.

Both of those exclusions of individual freedom are used to legitimize top-down human-on-human parasitism, in support of the poisoned culture, and neither one is any good on the issue of time.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Transcendence

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The history of crime-family culture, especially within classes who live from ownership, cashed out in three important results. The first is perpetual class conflict with a very heavy propaganda effort to justify social inequality and the arrangements which emphasize inequality such as scarcity, competition, and conflict. The message of the propaganda stream from the ownership class is this: The God (or nature) given world is a binary system of predator and prey, and if you are not an effectively practicing predator, you are nothing but prey. That legitimation and glorification of large-scale human-on-human parasitism is the poisoning of culture. The complex of masculine pride in leisure based on control of slave labour, killing, and looting is in it. Cruelty and malevolence are structured into all concepts which link languages to social practices devised in that culture-system. To think and reason with such concepts excludes any possibility of reaching beyond the injustices, distortions of reality, the poisons, they carry and perpetuate.

Camouflaging the full malevolence of crime-family ownership culture is the propaganda stream from the liberal mediating class. The alpha-trophy-looting oligarchy has found it convenient to partner with and shelter in the shadow of a middle class of organized, educated, scribes, who have some credibility as a meritocracy in their control of working classes. (In the European Medieval period the organization of the Roman Church served that function). There is a great effort to present radical inequality as meritocracy, even when it is based on mere heredity and privileged opportunities. Inequality is often justified by appeal to (the “noble” lie of) the inscrutable judgment of God. The message of modern propaganda to the working proletariat from the business and professional mediating class is that you are an economic atom (worker – consumer), motivated, gratified, fulfilled, and controlled by economic incentives and rewards such as the adulation of peers (and tokens of such adulation), from winning competitions.

The second result of the malevolent control culture is gender conflict, specifically a male culture of alpha-trophy-looting values suppressing the natural influence of the ongoing female culture of first-language-nurture, building interconnectedness in the conversation with children. In crime-family culture, acquisition and conflict are respected indexes of personal worth but nurture and empathic interconnection are not. That is a clear exposure of a poisoned culture.

A third effect of the history of crime-family cultural dominance is the radical externalization of “reality” and a corresponding suppression of awareness and exploration of the interiority of intelligence, suppression of the meaning of the interiority of intelligence. That includes enforcement by the dominant crime-family class of a pervasive externalizing orientation both in its propaganda and in material incentives and rewards. The political and social propaganda is produced with an intent to neutralize individuals as creators of our own alternative systems of value, and to use and recruit us into established systems such as military recruitment pools, religions, and labour pools for the economy of scarcity and competition (money) which channel benefits upward. Myths of disembodied intelligences (demons, spirits, gods, ghosts) are used as a technology for training people to look outward for transcendence, and to accept (inappropriately) a family-type emotional bond to collective entities which are neither family nor friend but rather a control mechanism for a malevolent political force.

Varieties of Control

The control achieved by the oligarchy is not only immediate agenda items such as arranging wars, supported by propaganda of various sorts, but the presence of parasite/ predator culture in the very concepts of property, ownership, employer-employee supervisory relations, executive and sovereign power, personal worth, social hierarchy. That is a poisoning of the cultural conceptual system which makes it very difficult to conceive of any other personal or collective way of life. The brutal prejudices of the predatory and parasitic herder life are enshrined in the language and conceptual structure of what we accept as civic society, as well as in journalism, entertainment, and academic research. That is the worst kind of cultural mind control, poisoned culture, difficult to identify as such because it is familiar and almost all pervasive.

However, it is not quite all pervasive, and is recognized in its cruelty in the conversation with children, and in humanist (elemental) philosophy recognizing every individual as a transcendent force of freedom, with a mark to make in building a life, uniquely mutating futurity in doing that. What elemental philosophy has in common with the conversation with children is access to innocence, the only recourse from poisoned culture.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Freedom against Power: An Historical Precedent

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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In previous postings there has been an identification of certain poisons in human cultures, namely legitimized violence, especially in acts of war, and radical inequality. Based on that, another way of identifying the poison in currently dominant cultures would be with the concept “power”, which is inseparable from inequality and violence. The most blatant mechanism of power in the world today is the government of the USA. Its public record of violations establishes unmistakably that what that government and its vast military and covert agencies are protecting is not the rule of law, responsible government, human rights, or anything based in bottom-up political power such as democracy. The only alternative seems to be that those institutions are projecting the will of an obscure but effective oligarchy which has nothing but contempt for such things as bottom-up politics, thus revealing a core malevolence. Malevolent oligarchy, corporatocracy, organized wealth, patriarchy, all refer to that same feature of modern social organization. As a whole, that oligarchy is not tightly enough organized to be a conspiracy, but it carries a certain cultural sense of predicament and entitlement, and a shared culture of dealing with its predicament. One way the oligarchy succeeds at controlling the levers of profound meaning on a mass scale is by constantly broadcasting the message that everyone benefits from accepting “noble lies” (rarely named as lies publicly) about a caring god with a divine plan for everyone’s life, about a meritocracy, a beloved leader, a beloved nation or tribe (usually under threat). However, the only real lever of profound meaning is the interiority of individual intelligence.

The idea of the transcendent interiority of individual intelligence enables a kind of Copernican revolution, since all human projections onto nature and culture originate as somebody’s individually dreamed up non-actualities. There certainly are plans, but all plans are the products of perfectly ordinary humans. There is no single centre, source, or foundation of meaning. From awareness of the interiority of intelligence we learn to look inward instead of outward for transcendence, meaning, and grounding. There is an intrinsic power of individual intelligence to critique the foundations of power and to construct an alternative elemental orientation. (Hegel and Nietzsche both wrote about a moral duality between master-morality and slave-morality, but there is a point of view which is neither master nor slave, namely the elemental orientation, which philosophical deliberation achieves. Living from a contemplative grounding is the alternative to the moral duality of master and slave.)

Christendom to Modernity

The claim that the interiority of intelligence (a rich subjectivity) can be effectively asserted to transcend or go beyond a poisoned culture and conceive a new culture is especially interesting and plausible because there is a precedent in history for the effectiveness of philosophy acting against propaganda streams promoting radical inequality and issued by the groups exercising power in society. The really dramatic social change that is closest to us in time, culture, and geography is the transition from Christendom to Modernity. That change is exactly the historical precedent for the culturally transformative force of rethinking Stoic interiority. The concept of innate deliberative power, a specific power of interiority, was dramatically effective, during the historical period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1650-1789) in changing the culture that was Christendom, and leaving things somewhat better. A cultural background of humanism, classical Greek cheerfulness, especially in the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters, also contributed to those transformative effects.

Philosophy in a Historical Context

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a coherently structured and regular nature, Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. The experience of intelligence as transcendent was a powerful incentive and reward for the study of Stoicism and philosophy in general in the Hellenistic era. An interiority within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated by that.

One link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on interiority is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. The humanist philosophies were already somewhat familiar. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written near the end of his life during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. It is still being read, and is peculiarly appropriate for consideration of freedom within a culture poisoned by legitimized violence.

One principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective is the one in The Consolation of Philosophy, namely a Stoic or Cynic indifference to outward circumstances beyond personal control, and concentration on inward mental conditions, powers, and operations which are (more) under personal control. Innate powers of deliberation are involved in achieving such consolation, and a rich and powerful subjectivity is affirmed. Humanist Stoicism is the best candidate as the eternal philosophy, and Stoicism is founded on an idea of interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the world of nature which is beyond control, entirely predetermined. Stoic philosophy includes the application of deliberative thinking to truths about the objective world and especially to self-knowledge and self-possession.

Another principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective, emerging especially after 1600 in north-western continental Europe, is “Rationalism”, an assertion of the power of individual intellect to observe and think out the truth about the world, founded on the idea of an elemental congruence (Logos) between the natural world and individual mentality. The core idea of that rationalism is not innate knowledge but innate mental power to distinguish truth from falsehood by systematic observation and logical thinking, such as with the recognition of natural causation as sufficient to account for events and conditions in the world, aided by use of such logical devices as Ockham’s razor, and valid forms of inference. However, those native powers and abilities can be repressed, twisted, or ignored by cultural and social forces. For example, consider Freud’s observations of the effects of cultural attitudes toward innocent sexuality, or consider the influence of various religious beliefs about the causes of events in the natural world. “Philosophy”, then, has been mainly either the exercise of native intellect in comprehending impersonal nature, or thoughtful self-possession of a personal intelligence that is crucially discontinuous from ambient nature and culture.

Critique of the Malevolent Christian Oligarchy

The crucial force in the change from Christendom to Modernity was the rationalist critique of Christianity as the foundation of all-controlling sovereign power. The Consolation of Philosophy was one crucial link between ancient humanism and Wycliffe’s movement of proletarian empowerment through universal literacy and vernacular literature. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity, a chain of Stoic/ humanist influence, was continued in Renaissance humanism (individual self-development for literary and artistic accomplishments, or for power politics and business ventures), then in Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the rationalist enlightenment, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but the dualism inherent in the discontinuity between nature and the interiority of intelligence runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

Next: Finishing the Job of the Enlightenment

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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Violence and radical inequality (practices and justifications) are cultural poisons in the human interconnectedness. The glorification of violence is a main poison permeating existing cultures, but it is not the only one. The notion of radical inequality and the normal violence of dominance and control (ultimately by a semi-covert oligarchy) is a more inclusive identification of the poison. Carriers of those cultures are malevolent forces which practice manipulation and control by (among other ways) emphasizing the continuity of individuals with groups or collectives they are connected to, and even with unalterable nature. To exercise full human competence and freedom in that situation, it is necessary to counteract that influence by coming to terms with the discontinuity between the interiority of individual intelligence and the common world of nature and culture (as identified by the whole humanist movement of Hellenistic Greece: Cynics, Skeptics, and Epicureans along with Stoics).

If ordinary thinking is systematically impaired and distorted by every individual’s ambient culture (culture constructed in a combination of historical accidents and strategically deliberate programs) can any way be found personally to resist and transcend that influence? Even as a thought experiment, the possibility that human unfreedom is created by a pervasive culture being deliberately poisoned continuously, more or less covertly, raises an important challenge for philosophy. The question could be framed this way: In the situation of living in a culture that is pervasively poisoned, is it possible for an individual, by personal efforts, to achieve unimpaired or fully functioning human existence, to find grounding in undistorted reality? The answer is: Yes, with a combination of responses.

Two Main Points of Personally Strategic Orientation

First: Equality and the Discontinuity of Subjectivity

The ordinary sense of “subjectivity” is a declaration of the peculiar interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality. It assumes a radical discontinuity between subjectivity and the world of pre-determined nature. Something is called subjective to stipulate its non-actuality, its disconnection from the measurable actualities of objective nature. The interiority of intelligence is exactly subjectivity. In ordinary discourse the non-actuality of subjectivity is held in a negative light, as a failing. However, it is exactly the non-actuality of subjectivity that transcends the brute actuality of nature. The non-actuality of subjectivity includes personally dreamed-up visions of the future, selections of which will be deliberately projected, by effortful bodily acts, onto the actuality of nature. The future does not exist in nature, but exists emphatically in the orientation of intelligence. As reviewed in the posting Rethinking Stoic Interiority, subjective non-actuality always includes variant personal scenarios for the non-existent future, experienced as a steady approach and arrival of, framing an intentional shaping of, decreasingly remote and improbable expectations and deliberately intended accomplishments, including surprises at the point of arrival, but also including, increasingly with remoteness from that point: contradictions, negations, probabilities, possibilities, speculations, fantasies, questions, and doubts, over which subjective intelligence deliberates and designs (and none of which exist in the measurable actuality of nature).

Art, Representation, and Interior Sensibility

It would be difficult to make sense of art without some conception of the interiority of subjective intelligence. There is a kind of art which is crafted representations of the appearance of things in the objective world, but representations suffused with the sensibility of the crafting artist, (sometimes of a character, point of view, imagined by the artist). The tension across the gap between ideals of exact representation and subjective sensibility is highly valued in that art, and qualifies an artifact as art. The advent of photography presented a challenge by seeming to remove the human interior sensibility from representation. Photography inspired a shift away from the traditional representational practices of painting and sculpture, for example, and placed greater emphasis in those forms of art on presentations of pure subjective sensibility, manifestations entirely of the interiority of subjectivity, often emphatically emotional. However, it was soon understood that the placement of the camera and the conditions of the chosen moment of image capture, for example, all communicate subjective sensibility in a photographic image.

The rich interiority of subjectivity is the basis of equality. Inwardly, every intelligence is a universe of creative non-actuality, with its own centre to find and own, discontinuous from the actuality of nature. Consequently, everyone has his or her private interior grounding, a separate universe. (Philosophers who assert that cultural artifacts, text or varieties of sign, are all that philosophy can clarify or conceive refuse to have any notion of powerful individual subjectivity.) Every individual’s interior wealth and power can serve as the portal to reality unspoiled by a culture twisted by malevolence. That is the spring of clean inspiration and questioning curiosity that can liberate every individual from cultural poisons. Therefore, when living within a poisoned culture, be aware of your personal discontinuity from nature and culture. Own and assert the discontinuity between your subjectivity and everything else. You are, as a human, a transcendent creative force, ultimately incomparable to any other. Own your interior surprise horizon, and its creative power of orientation. The journey there is solitary, private. No one is competent to judge a universe they cannot know, and incomparable entities cannot be ranked.

Second: The History of Cultures in the Interconnectedness

The interconnectedness is the product of a peculiar history created by previous humans, limited and desperate. As already mentioned, the glorification of violence and war is a main poison permeating existing cultures within the interconnectedness. The notion of radical human inequality, and the violence of dominance and control that results from that, is another concept of the poison. In the human interconnectedness, there are slavers, enemies of human equality, self-possession, and autonomy, so that, within the interconnectedness, individual self-possession, dignity, and autonomy are constantly at risk and must be personally protected and cultivated at all times. In aid of being appropriately sensitive to that, keep building an awareness of cultural history within the interconnectedness, and construct it by reference to the actual conditions around you. Be assured that violence and inequality are not pre-determined or necessary in the human interconnectedness. The interconnectedness itself is the most magnificent creation of multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), and it still needs a lot of work. From the history of the dominant cultures in the interconnectedness, it becomes clear that to prepare for construction of a new culture we must finish the work of the enlightenment, as will be explained in postings to come.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Poisoned Culture

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The human interconnectedness has been poisoned by a violently rogue cultural faction, resulting in endless wars among communities, and violence between classes, genders, and individuals. That poisonous faction, which imagines that it benefits from controlling and perpetuating violence, has been successful in convincing everybody that violence is simply the working of nature, and so inevitable, pre-ordained, and ultimately good and wholesome as an ultimate test of health, fitness, and value. The deception works by misidentifying culture as nature, and very much which is presented as nature is merely human cultural conventions, and as such replaceable. That is the context in which the rich interiority of individual subjectivity (Stoic interiority) is of crucial importance. The human interconnectedness has been so poisoned by deceptive culture that there are no trustworthy foundations of profound meaning available there. Science, engineering, art, music, architecture, literature, religion, business, journalism, institutional research and teaching, the professions, and government are all infected by and carriers of the cultural poison. However, the intrinsic transcendence of individual interiority means that there is no need for external tests of value, meaning, or fitness. Deliberate individual innocence, strategic innocence, is a potent corrective force available to everyone. The ultimate dignity of knowing and feeling the human situation is available directly to every individual, experienced inwardly.

There are groups who believe their best interests are secured by taking advantage of the helplessness of others to control them, which is an incentive for those groups to do as much as possible to create and maintain widespread helplessness. Those groups conceive the advancement of their own interests in doing all they can to weaken individual autonomy and then making use of that weakness to exercise control over community events and developments. In support of their malevolent cultural program, those groups have encouraged development of cultural messaging over the vast infrastructure networks of television, radio, movies, religion, and education, that are powerful influences on popular behaviour and thinking. With the most sophisticated science supporting them, they are completely confident that anyone and everyone is being controlled using those techniques, combined with acts of violence for the broad manipulation of fear and trust, and the elimination of probable threats to their dominance.

Posting 48, December 19, 2012, Rethinking Stoic Interiority may make dry reading, but it is important because the interiority of intelligence provides the defence against, and a portal beyond, the streams of psychological messaging effectively distorting reality within the influence of politicized culture, and pretty much all culture is politicized.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Rethinking Stoic Interiority

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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

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Following-up the previous posting: Intelligence as a Creative Force

The Interiority of Intelligence

There is an old philosophical idea which is best identified as ‘the interiority of intelligence’. Ancient Stoicism was one of the first explorations of that idea, since it is founded on a peculiar interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the external world of nature which is beyond control and in fact entirely predetermined. What is entirely predetermined cannot be controlled, by definition, and therefore what can be controlled is not predetermined and as such offers the potential for freedom.

By “intelligence” neither I nor Stoics mean any special genius or even any specialized mental function, but just the ordinary engagement with life of an ordinary person. The interiority of intelligence is not sensitivity to the interior of the body. It is not a spacial interiority at all. It is strictly peculiar to intelligence, since it is an interiority of non-actuality (everything in measurable space is a brute actuality).

The ancient philosophical observation that “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist c. 490-420 B.C.) is another statement or declaration of the interiority of intelligence, because the measuring done by persons does not create or put limits on nature. Nature rolls along quite independently of being measured or not. However, “man” as a particular intelligence is the measure of things becoming internal to that person’s orientation or direction of force in the world. The action efforts of individual intelligences are a sort of sonar or radar which reflect back to intelligence a digest or construct of the shape and quality of the environment. That is the sense in which “Man is the measure of all things”.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is another statement of the same insight. The “eye” in which beauty has its being is not the anatomical eye but rather the interiority of the beholder’s intelligence.

As another example, the take-away lesson from Leibniz’ monadology is the interiority of intelligence. Although there are multiple beings in Leibniz’ vision of the world, he constructed a description of individual subjective experience as entirely self-contained as a windowless ‘monad’ with no access to other beings or anything but phenomena injected by God strictly for the interiority of each particular intelligence.

The Non-Actuality of that Interiority

A common concept of knowledge is one in which consciousness is a receptive slate upon which is stamped, little by little, an imprint of the world beyond the self, the features of objective nature. However, perception exists within an individual’s taking action in constructing a sustainable life; for example, speculating on probable futures, imagining, remembering, searching and selecting, feeling gratification, irritation or desperation, and striving to make some imagined possibility into reality. There is vastly more to learning than soaking up data and facts about the world. Every individual’s innate mental process or intelligence radiates curiosity, questioning, and changes of orientation. For choices of action, there is far more than immediate responses stimulated by sensory perception. Intelligence has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions or pretended scenarios and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents such as elaborate memory constructs and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its orientation, its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote and improbable future, intelligence has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations, none of which are present in the strict actuality of nature. Temporally remote events do not exist in nature, but are inseparable from the normal orientation of an intelligence. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions by fragmenting and isolating pieces of the deluge of sensuality, and re-connecting selections of the fragments by various principles of relevance, involving conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern fabrication and projection, and extrapolation, for example. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing, and questioning: the need and readiness for knowledge. Action does result but skepticism does not apply.

Rather than merely opening to let the world in, a person executes a process of construction that relates brief and fleeting sensory stimulations to more enduring mental expectations, patterns, dreams, and narratives which are simple, schematic, and ideal. You search for dandelions in your grass and you don’t see any, and don’t see any, and then you see one and then another and then lots that must have been there all along. A curve drawn on paper does not have to be perfectly round and regular or completely closed to be seen as a circle. An observer will ‘fix’ imperfections, and see a circle. We ‘read’ that mark drawn on paper on the basis of the briefest possible encounter, the quickest impression, and read it as ‘meaning’ a circle. No one is ever aware of nature or culture except as sampled, probed, filtered, and then re-constituted, remodelled, or re-mixed by their struggling intelligence in desperate flight. These are normal operations of subjectivity. Each individual is a source of selective questions and structuring creativity in combination with a specific and limited capacity to sense and make sense of externally supplied data. Awareness of limitations is part of the ‘desperate flight’ of intelligence.

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

The Non-Actuality and Transcendence of Interiority

Freedom is specifically not a feature of the actuality of nature, and so freedom is one way of defining the interiority of intelligence. It was the Stoic way of defining that interiority. The transcendence of us entities of intelligence is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within our interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and bearings away from dreaded possibilities. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (past and future) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of creative discretionary construction, for example. The intelligence entity that continuously re-orients itself is also a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The freedom and creativity of such monads is in being outside actuality in their unique interiority. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any intelligence constructs and continually refreshes its bearings, orientation, or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking.

The interiority of intelligence is invisible to scientific measuring instruments because it is an interiority of non-actuality. Since we are dealing with a kind of interiority that is not in the space of the common objective world, an interiority which is discontinuous with the space of actuality, we have to describe each intelligence, each orientation within a life, as its own separate universe of non-actuality. Each intelligence is a universe of non-actuality in relationship with a common exterior world of strict, non-intelligent, pre-determined actuality, the world of nature. An intelligence can never be specified as a particular determinate thing (nor as a cluster of “objects of consciousness” as hypothesized in phenomenology) because its essential nature is an interiority of incomplete and continuously renewing non-actuality.

Freedom Makes Intelligence Transcendent and Discontinuous with Nature

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the design and execution of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for their relevance to self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows intelligence with a unique public voice. A person must have a voice before acquiring language. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences. Intelligence manifests an individuating personal genius with deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Intelligence as a Creative Force

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The question presented in the comment to the posting Working, November 21, 2012, offers an opportunity to explore certain elements of a set of ideas I have been calling ‘transcendental humanism’, enough that an answer qualifies as a whole new posting. (Please read the entire comment attached to that posting.) The question is:

“Aren’t the “crime-family cultural values” you mention rooted somehow deep down in the fabric of human being?”

Answering the question can be approached with reference to a distinction made in ancient philosophy between nature and intelligence. Two vectors of ancient humanist philosophy were: 1) to remove gods, demons, and spirits (disembodied intelligences) from conceptions of nature, and 2) to understand and experience the ordinary intelligence of individual people as transcendent. There is no caring in nature, no reasons, no morals, no justice. Caring, reasons, morals, and justice are all peculiar to intelligences. Nature is not intelligent. The world of brute nature is not static, but its movement is only a continuous, pre-determined, kind of falling, just falling. Embodied intelligences, as bodies, are certainly falling with it, but by projecting outward from the subjective interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality, we can turn the falling, to some extent, into flight. Although there is no justice in nature, identifications of justice and injustice are important to many intelligences. Intelligences transcend nature and reshape parts of nature all the time, transforming parts of nature into culture, overwriting nature with culture. We cut natural tree trunks into timbers and build houses that are outward projections of intelligence, but which are not otherwise in or from nature. The individual creativity of intelligences makes nature fly instead of merely falling. Humans have created far more elaborated cultures than any other known species, which makes us more free of nature than the others. Human cultures have a history of restless transformation. Intelligences are among the forces that shape that transformation, and it is plausible that certain influences of brutish nature that have so far dominated cultures, such as crime family values, can be displaced by creations of more caring intelligences.

What Can Be Said

Explanations of things based on fundamental necessities sometimes include an unstated assumption that those necessities are the expression of a cosmic will and intelligence, a force that is dangerous and impious to question or resist. However, our clear and foundational acquaintance with intelligences is ordinary persons, embodied in very specific local structures. The analogy by which the cosmos as a whole is a person in a grander and more august form is so implausible as to be silly. All that can be said about the cosmos as a whole, other than strictly scientific measurements, is something like this: Inexplicably, there is something instead of nothing, and it seems that the various features and complexities of that something constitute a single whole in some sense. The anomalous feature is a discontinuity between the wholeness of beautiful but unintelligent nature, brute, predetermined actuality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the interiority of intelligences, each its own universe of non-actuality. In spite of that radical discontinuity, it is undeniable that actuality and those multitudes of non-actualities are profoundly entangled. The non-actuality of intelligences is routinely projected onto the shapes of actuality, and brute actuality contains materials that unreliably sustain and restrict the intelligences, who are otherwise discontinuous universes.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnecteness of intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendence of intelligence. This is one way in which it becomes possible to think that war and slavery in all its forms can be ended.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche: Class Conflict and Modernity

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

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We of Modernity

We of Modernity are different from people of Christendom, and from people of all previous societies. We have a far less spooky, less enchanted world. The gods and demons are more distant worries. We are less rooted at a piece of land among the family dead and local gods. Urban life, the anonymous urban crowd, is available and normal. We enjoy our urban detachment from fertile ground, replaced by attachment to a market system. In modernity mobility may be the reigning narrative. Class consciousness is less oppressive and less definitive (another aspect of mobility), leaving us less rooted within social hierarchies. Although we still live within a nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. These mobilities have realized a certain kind of freedom at the price of greater dependence on markets (money) and impersonal institutions. Our individuality looms much larger in our personal experience and we are more often adrift from collective narratives, more often in doubt, feeling the absence of certainty in institutional patterns of meaning.

Since modernity is the cultural sea in which we all swim, there are challenges to finding a critical perspective on it and on our individual relationship to it. Modernity originated in the same region which was for so long a poor backwater on a remote and isolated peninsula of the world, Europe. Modernity is the organization style of those societies which developed after the popular abandonment of European Christendom. Modernity is not elemental in any way, any more than Christendom was, and so there is no essence of modernity, even though a central principle might be identified as the middle class idea of meritocracy, inseparable from mobility. No ultimate divine mind or plan is depicted in the shape of history. History is not sacred or monumental as a whole because it is a haphazard collection of more or less randomly organized experiments by ordinary fallible and desperate human persons, each exercising some creative freedom from their interior non-actuality, in projections into nature and culture. Modernity is a partly random co-existence of conditions and cultural bearings.

The fact that the modern west now dominates the planet as a whole, for better or worse, raises questions about the origins of its peculiar power. The standard answer is that science placed unlimited power into the hands of western industries and militaristic nation states. Historians of science and of the material mechanisms of economic and social change point to the magnetic compass, the printing press and paper, guns and gunpowder as revolutionary forces for change in the old world. However, the west owes all those mechanisms and many more to the Mongol world system (largely based in China), often through Italian traders crossing the Black Sea to meet their Mongol equivalents, and so there is the question of why it was the west rather than the senior cultures of the east which transfigured into this brave new world. A case can be made for the decisive influence of Hellenistic humanism with its focus on individual intelligence, and the way that played out in struggles over thinking within the culture of Christendom.

Modernity and Class Conflict

It is not possible to understand modernity without some consciousness of social class plate tectonics. The beginning of social class structure was the launching of violent appropriation operations by extended family units with a cultural system typical of crime families. Class conflict is, therefore, along with the conflict of gender cultures, central to the political situation of people in all societies. Machiavelli and Nietzsche, for example, were both very clearly conscious of the identity between crime families and ‘sovereign’ power. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche, along with pretty much everyone, accepted a claim to legitimacy by the crime family class founded on its sponsorship of art, music, and large-scale architecture, generally called high culture or even just culture. The concentration of wealth and capital accomplished by crime family looting and exploitation of others enabled (still does) construction of large scale cultural monuments to beauty, eternity, to the thrill of power, and to the power-class which commands the construction. It is generally accepted that an essence of some mysterious elevating force called civilization springs from those monuments. However, accepting the legitimizing force of such things requires a narrowly selective editing of historical knowledge and requires discounting awareness of living through the work that accomplishes the actuality of culture. Nietzsche recognized class friction as a consequence of crime families and their exploitative ethos of control and inequality, but he admired the will to power, the will to be superman, that has always been characteristic of crime families. Nietzsche is, therefore, a model of the politically right-wing even without being interested in the spooks the Nazis emphasized, such as racial blood and the metaphysical bond between a folk-nation and the soil that nurtures it. Nietzsche was influenced by Max Stirner (1806-56) in asserting that any individual should, as much as possible in personal circumstances, embrace an outlook very close to the crime-family ethos as described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. However, Nietzsche did not believe everyone is capable of being superman. He believed rather that only special persons are capable of that.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.