The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

The Stoic answer is that individual freedom is achieved when a person cultivates and asserts his or her innate rationality. Rationality is difficult to define precisely, but there are fairly clear starting points. Rationality is linked to the quality of a person’s voice. A person’s voice is rational if it can be understood, matches norms of linguistic and logical competence, and shows a sense of relevance to the occasion. A person is rational when she can speak her mind and say what she means in a way others can understand. Rational thought can be spoken and understood by others. Existence in linguistic form gives it a kind of objectivity and graspability. It will hold its form while people reflect and evaluate. This is related to a broader meaning, something like “reasonable” or “in agreement with good sense.” Rationality stands up to reflective and collective evaluation and judgment. In addition, rational action, for example, demonstrates a functional awareness of the shapes, costs, and benefits in the natural and social environment. A person’s acts can be seen to have a reason.

Perhaps rationality is clearest in opposition to natural impulse, for example, an impulse to avoid working by simply stealing what you need. The account of Hobbes’s thinking in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era is exactly relevant to that point. ‘Will’ is the product of rational deliberation in evaluation of consequences, as distinct from merely following immediate inclination or impulse. Bestial reflex or impulse, pre-set by something like biological instinct, is not free, but acts of ‘will’ are discretionary expressions of deliberative calculation. Rationality empowers personal freedom by matching a person’s interests and expectations with the broader structures of the world and with verbal-linguistic accompaniments to acting in the world.

Stoicism was founded on experience of a personal force of mentality which can over-ride habit, appetite, first impressions, and impulsive passion or emotional response. Questioning those responses, delaying or denying action on them, magnifies consciousness of their force and of subjective forces which balance and modify them, specifically the force of rational intellect. That is strictly subjective virtue, a way to encounter subjectivity which bestows new meaning on appearances and objects.

Behind the common sense rationality of an efficient matching up of a person’s activities and vocal performances with features and occasions in their surroundings, there is a philosophical quest for a deep congruence uniting the objective world with the language which refers to its features and with subjective knowledge of the world. The Stoic idea of Logos was taken to imply such a metaphysical congruence or literal unity among matters of fact, knowledge as a mental state, and the linguistic presentation of knowledge. The logic of language was interpreted as the bridge, with rationality or intellect grounded in language. The inward mental activity of thinking was understood as linguistic and propositional, essentially the same in form as a conversation among a number of people, in writing or in speech. A rational self as the locus of thought, in the sense of knowledge of and practice of language, is a crucial piece of rationalism. On that view it isn’t only thoughts that manifest rationality. The objective world is also rational in being lawful, determinate, and predictable; and statements in language are rational when formed according to normal rules. Rationality is a characteristic of all three, just as Truth is. The idea of Truth expresses the fundamental unity of these three modes of being.

Virtue and Individuality

Stoicism was based on the idea of world-intelligence or Logos, which acquired the presence of a benevolent or providential God, identical with the whole of nature. Logos was an all-inclusive principle, completely pre-determining every detail of cosmic existence forever. Stoics attempted to identify some personal individuality within that framework of determinism, fatalism, materialism, and eternal recurrence of historical events. In spite of being officially materialist, Stoics emphasize a special ‘fiery’ nature in Logos. Stoics believed they were aware of that world-soul or ordering intelligence in microcosm in each person’s power of reasoning and choice. With events unfolding according to Nature’s Law the individual could control nothing but his or her own thinking, and could find freedom only in choosing to accept Nature by achieving as broad and inclusive a perspective as possible. Divine Providence determines human circumstances and behaviour to such an extent that the best a person can do is to love his or her fate, but individuals have the power to choose for or against assenting to and loving their embeddedness in nature. However, Stoicism was not mysticism. The desirable condition for Stoics was emotional aloofness from surrounding conditions and events, achieved by awareness of cosmic order and especially by self-control.

The metaphysics of world-Logos, the divine Word or Command, established a heavy framework for the very limited freedom or divine spark of each person. The fundamental insight is that Logos is experienced in two ways, both externally as objective nature, and internally as personal intelligence in which an element of freedom is exercised. Basic to Stoicism is a great divide between the outward world that is beyond the control of any individual, and the inward existence which is entirely under each person’s individual power. There was a core teaching dealing with the individual’s identification of and exercise of freedom. Their teaching was to minimize attachment to the external, and maximize subjective control. In order to develop mental skills, thinking, they used thinking to control attachments to external goods, properties, prestige, reputation, trophies, wealth, and even health, values arising from appetites and ambitions. They emphasized that even when worldly rewards and reputation are taken away, the dearest value remains.

Rationality against Passions, Immediate Impulses, and First Impressions

Stoics identified freedom with ‘reason’ and contrasted it with ‘passions’, and that can be taken as a higher vs. lower distinction. They came to identify abstract reasoning or calculation as the inward spark of divine freedom-fire. It tended to set up an identity between reason and order, law, rules, formality, and control. The focus of Stoicism turned to preventing or controlling flights of passion. Virtue was acting from a practiced process of reasoning. There is ‘pure-reasoning’, such as logic or mathematics, and also ‘practical or moral reasoning’ in decisions about action and behaviour, but on the Stoic view virtue requires a practice of mental calculation, application of principles to particular situations. Passions vs. intellect is an inner conflict. Thinking can achieve control of passions but the outer world is entirely the expression of Logos and beyond the control of any individual’s thinking. Rationality distinguishes between what can be controlled and what not, and highlights the indifference of everything that is beyond control, externalities. The higher vs. lower conflict translates into an inner vs. outer conflict. There is an absolute limit to determinism in Stoicism and that limit is the individual’s intrinsic power of will, understood as an executive expression of rationality.

Ancient Stoicism was officially empiricist. Knowledge was achieved from sense-experience, from the impressions made by sensations on the ‘blank slate’ of individual consciousness. Long before John Locke, Stoics understood persons as ‘blank slates’ onto which impressions were left by the sensations of the body. Sense-experience was the source of truth and knowledge, and not a realm of illusion as it was for Plato. However, since individuals could keep passions in their place by developing a practice of reasoning, the ‘slate’ of individual consciousness could not have been completely blank. A blank slate does not have the ability to reason, nor does it have forceful passions which compete with reason to edit and organize impressions of the body.

It would not be accurate to say that Stoics hated and feared nature at large, and yet they hated and feared nature in the passions of human subjectivity. Stoic acceptance of Logos meant that nature at large was a manifestation of divine providence, and a great accomplishment of thinking was to understand this sufficiently to accept acts of nature as providential. Although social and political role-fulfillment was considered necessary, Stoics practiced non-attachment, indifference, to events, objects, and conditions in the world, and that indifference has much in common with a rejection of ‘outer’ nature in favour of transcendence via a particular power of subjectivity, the inward spark of intelligence.

Intelligence as Virtue

Hellenistic Stoicism and other philosophical sects of that period attracted an important following, even though the world people faced then was hardly more horrifying or discouraging than what most people throughout history have faced. It was a creed that appealed to the powerful classes in the social order of the Roman Empire. Stoicism was widespread and influential in Roman culture during the period when Christianity was developing within the Empire, and made important contributions to Christian thought. Stoics approached ‘religion’ as a mental exercise of rational thinking, rule-governed calculation. The life of freedom based in rational thinking was considered happiest. Mental exercise was their portal to freedom, intelligence, and virtue or authenticity as humans, as well as their personal contact with the spark of divine Logos.

For Stoics, virtue was a focus on what is completely under the control and authorship of each individual, contrasted with ‘external’ conditions which the individual can never fully control. Stoic virtue was precisely subjectivity itself, aloofness from the effects of external objects and circumstances, and instead a concentration on subjective control in personal acts of thought. It was supposed to make a difference and accomplish something crucial for Stoics to do the small personal act of taking hold mentally of their own virtue by thinking about emotional reactions, impulses, and habits. No claims to surpass, defeat, control, lead, or exploit anybody else are involved. You recognize what is most certainly and undeniably your own, your intelligence, and give it a chance to exist. What can be completely authored by each individual is exactly what is most important and fundamental, an inward act of self-realization.

Freedom

Ancient societies were slave-labour based, and there was a very clear and immediate sense of freedom as not being controlled by a master in daily life. However, that common freedom was not the whole story. There were three levels of freedom: 1) not being controlled by a master, 2) strategic rationality overriding “knee-jerk” impulses in pragmatic situations, and 3) mental transcendence of nature. The most important freedom was conceived as freedom from nature itself, especially as represented in the body, associated with privation, suffering, illness, unquenchable desire, and mortality. Stoics can’t transcend all inclusive Nature, but they transcend the least fiery aspect, the strictly determined external aspect of Nature. Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics thought rational thinking was the route to that greatest freedom. Philosophical sects of the Hellenistic period all shared a program of development of personal rationality with a transcendent purpose, to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. In that state of developed intelligence an individual rose above the suffering of ordinary body-centered ways of life. It was a deliberate way of “being in the world but not of it”.

With Hellenistic Greek thinkers there was a rise of the individual as author of deliberation and strategic resistance to natural impulses. With Epicureans, the individual was also the sufferer of pleasure and pain. The individual as such was emphasized more than previously, so much so that this is perhaps the historically crucial conception of the dignity of the individual person which is definitive of western humanism. Classical Greece and Rome had strong literary depictions of individual personality in gods and heroes. Thinking sects of the period might be described as developing heroism turned inward.

See also the posting of October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Transcendence

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Considerable portions of the history of philosophy can be interpreted as answers to the question, “How can freedom be possible?”, especially two particular versions of that question. There is also a third version which makes a perfect series with the others and is freshly relevant in the current political and commercial-industrial situation.

Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

After Alexander (the great) of Macedon (previously tutored by Aristotle) conquered the known world of the eastern Mediterranean between 334 and 323 B.C., there was a penetration of Greek culture throughout Alexander’s area of influence, and a reciprocal opening of Greek culture to influences from the ancient east. Those events and cultural developments are invoked by the term “Hellenistic”. Answers to version 1 of our question were created by Hellenistic thinking sects: Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Their answers can be generalized as humanist rationalism, a philosophical version of transcendence. Stoic rationality was meant to be a portal to freedom in the teeth of miseries and passions arising from the body’s life in a hard indifferent world. It is not a solution to misery, but it is not useless.

Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

A short history of freedom in philosophy is that it was mainly focused on freedom from misery (notwithstanding a long quest for freedom from astrological demons of the zodiac) but eventually altered to a focus on freedom from scientific determinism. In facing the challenge of determinism, it was necessary to respond to a double attack since humanist rationalism had been called into question both internally and externally. The external challenge was the hypothesis posed by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) that every detail of existence is logically necessary and pre-determined. Remarkably, Spinoza’s work was very close to a modern restatement of Stoicism but with a removal of emphasis from individual inwardness, so that the external determinism of God-or-Nature (logos) loomed in everything. Even more difficult was David Hume’s (1711-1776) Calvinistic attack on the power and integrity of subjective intelligence itself.

Version 3: How can freedom be possible in a world of scientifically engineered psychological manipulation conducted on a mass scale, where people around you, without being aware of it, might be under the influence of secretive powers? How can freedom be possible when modernity is a cultural milieu of fierce ideological intent to negate freedom through mass persuasion, often using emotional manipulation by pervasive media imagery in stealthy applications of cutting edge behavioural science?

Critical thinking skills and a skeptical turn of mind may not be strong enough defenses against advertising media and incentive/ reward packages, because you may conduct such thinking within a set of assumptions that serves the purpose of diabolical powers which want to use everyone, or at least disempower us from interfering, so that wars may still be arranged and conducted in murderous ordinariness.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Theological Black Holes

15 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Martin Luther’s interpretation of the leap of faith went beyond divine Grace into individual creative power. Familiarity with the Stoic idea of freedom is plausible groundwork for Luther’s conclusion that you can’t be certain of anything except your own internal act of self-creation, self-determination, self-declaration. Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” is a slight recasting of that insight. Luther’s finding internal power to experience transcendence, overcoming the oppressive gravity of original sin and the taint of nature, showed a way for Descartes and other Baroque era rationalists to abandon the age-old terror of nature and apply rationality to understanding the laws of a merely clockwork nature. It also enabled Jean-Jacques Rousseau to experience a new kind of love of nature, initiating an important thread of romanticism in philosophy. The beginning of the change in the cultural attitude to nature was Luther’s overcoming original sin in human nature.

However, there were still tenets of religion, deeply rooted, that contradicted the tendency from Luther’s work to ascribe freedom to individuals. The natural progress of philosophical thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built on increasing appreciation of fruitful subjectivity, responding also to the increasing esteem for individual minds as literacy became more universal. For several reasons, however, philosophical discoveries about subjectivity did not have their natural consequences in the Euro-American cultural system. Instead of having a balanced understanding of subjectivity and objectivity we have totalitarian objectification.

Two metaphysical propositions of mainstream Christianity stand as barriers to progress. The first is the view, from Augustine, that human nature is so weak and prone to evil that it needs continual supervisory repression and intimidation to achieve a semblance of good. With original sin corrupting the inward person, individuals cannot be trusted to themselves and there is no basis for inward values such as creativity, which genuinely define individual persons. All virtue must be objectively defined and enforced with authoritarian systems of incentive, reward, and punishment. That ancient prejudice was re-invigorated in the backlash against the French Revolution of 1789, and has endured at a semi-conscious level as a bedrock justification for inequality and supervisory control of “the masses”. It has also served as an excuse for the powerful to torture, murder, and enslave. In addition, there is a bit of Christian theology or metaphysics common to monotheism, claiming creativity as a special and definitive attribute of divinity, so only God is capable of creativity. That rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In a cultural system still quietly dominated by Christian metaphysics there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. So, what prevents us from embracing the transcendent gusher of subjective originality, the real guarantor of freedom, is scraps of old culture such as father-in the-sky-religion which insists that only the high God is creative and good. In a culture still permeated by Christian assumptions it seems impossible to abandon the (only semi-conscious) theological principle that creativity is an attribute of God alone. The concept of God can be stretched and molded but not easily replaced by creative individual subjectivity.

Although Augustine’s Christianity still has a strong grip on western supervisory practices, its cultural dominance was affected by market-commerce and science. The transition to science was easy, as celestial father-god religions share with science a strong outward focus on eternal cosmic forces and principles. Reverence and deference toward external gods was so entrenched at the root of the Euro-American cultural system that this orientation imposed itself onto all new developments. Science became so prestigious in its mathematical precision and its rigour of measuring observations that physics and chemistry came to represent the ideal of intellectual power and legitimacy, and inspired imitation in all intellectual culture. Subjectivity, as the blind spot of science since questioning has no appearance, cannot exist officially. The consequence of scientific inability to comprehend a fruitful and complex subjectivity, in combination with the military and commercial success of science, is that modern culture is under the enchantment of an ‘objectivity fetish’ in which anything subjective or mental/ internal is suspect, and so the very reality of thinking as an individual process has been marginalized and ridiculed. Distrust of the non-rational or ‘lower’ impulses of subjectivity moves by easy extension to mistrust of subjectivity in general. Individuals have to be supervised in their obedience to military nation-states and market-wealth, the modern gods, and institutions representing those gods have much in common with ‘old regime’ patriarchies.

Market-commerce represents, in part, a revolt against the self-denial imposed by old-style Christianity. Everybody is gratified to some extent by having stuff, and after centuries of denial and an ongoing threat of denial, the glamour of consuming and having stuff became frenzied. Yet, market commerce shares with science a profound objectivity. In the market-sphere values are: accumulated property, status in corporate and professional hierarchies (quantified in money), and the glamour of trophies from competitive victories. Although these are gratifying, they are also self-denying in their own way when made dominant.

Another obstacle to recognizing creativity as the core of personal existence is the common observation that by far the majority of individuals blend perfectly into a crowd. That can be shown to be compatible with individual creativity by a study of culture and its suppression of some crucial individuality. The portal back to individual creativity is exactly to by-pass all cultural knowledge and sophistication with the goal of achieving a state of creative innocence. There is an echo here of the myth in which eating fruit from the tree of knowledge caused humanity to lose its glorious natural existence. The portal to innocence was pioneered long ago in Luther’s personal use of thinking.

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

01 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom

Christendom existed as a pan-European theocratic practicality from the time of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 A.D.. The centralized Church hierarchy based in Rome exerted senior supervisory control (more or less) from then until Henry VIII’s separation of the English Church in 1534: 734 years. Medieval Christendom began as a society fallen from the glories of the Roman Empire. The economy was subsistence farming characterized by tenant families bound within feudal contracts to specific pieces of land under the control of a military-estate family or a Church foundation. There was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the ‘second sons’ who could not inherit the family’s noble title and lands would often go to school for a good education and then into the Church hierarchy. The rural-subsistence economy without much money was based on contractual and traditional obligations. Peasant farming families were at the mercy of wild nature, disease, and marauders, and nature was considered to be personified by disembodied spirits who might be anywhere, unseen and yet powerful.

Christian Relics

Ancient investments of effort in monument-creating, such as construction of the Egyptian pyramids, came from ideas about a supernatural stratum of existence. The pyramids were acts to connect with such a stratum, and they illustrate an economy of the supernatural in which earthly wealth is founded upon gods and spirits and the qualities of their world. That conception of wealth was still important in the European middle ages, during the construction of the Gothic cathedrals. Those magnificent fortresses of the faith were built in part to house, in suitable glory, bones of a saint or a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, considered to have supernatural power and influence. Something of the spirit of the dead saint was supposed to reside in the material remnant. Just as a reason for achievements in cathedral architecture was to house relics, the Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth in the form of relics from the holy land. Christianity was, at one level, a cult of relics, thought to be radiant with supernatural energy. Relics were high-status luxury goods and there was a lucrative commerce supported by the demand for them. Such were the treasures of those times.

Christians, like Stoics, believe the world of bodies manifests a providential divine will. Stoics considered the world to be eternal and uncreated, identical with Logos, whereas Christians believe nature to be the creation of a separate deity. For both of them, the common world of natural bodies has much to love, distinctly unlike the visions of Plato and ancient Zoroastrians, for example. Yet there is still a crucial transcendence in the Christian vision, since God’s separateness from His creation is exactly transcendence.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)

Medieval Christianity was by far a darker, harsher, spookier world view than that of the modern Roman Church. Catholic Christendom was characterized by a human-hating obsession with hereditary sin and an imaginary after-death world. The influential writings of Augustine of Hippo asserted that human nature is essentially evil because of Adam’s original sin, and the only way people can be good is by being forced to obey the laws of God and secular authorities. Virtue is obedience and self-denial. There is in Augustine’s view a form of anticipation of Freud’s theory of the superego, that moral behaviour originates outside the individual. In Freud the superego was internalized authority figures. For Augustine, the relevant authority figures were officials of the Church. Officials of religion believed that overpowering impulses to individual self-gratification were continually pulling social attachments apart, and any loss of a popular fear of hell and satan, or supernatural powers generally, would result in uncontrolled female sexuality leading to general social breakdown.

Confirmed in Dependence on the Church

The Church was happy to encourage most people to “be fruitful and multiply”, even though human flesh and its pleasures were considered tainted, because it confirmed the sinfulness of people and their resulting dependence on magical sacrament-performing priests. Strong institutional supervision of adults was required by Augustine’s assertion that people are normally vicious and/ or weak and so can behave virtuously only by means of strong and often harsh control by a powerful hierarchy of the religiously and militarily sophisticated. From roughly 800 A.D. to 1534 the Church’s claim to legitimate authority was persuasive to most people. The influence of Augustinian Christianity went well beyond religious practice as such. It pervaded the culture of western society generally as the common-sense idea of human nature and value. The resulting fear and gloom achieved a firm psychological grip. Soaring cathedrals of stone and glass were fortresses of the doctrine, intimidating symbols of wealth and dominance, presiding over the pessimistic gloom of Christendom. Eventually the Holy Inquisition (1233) was created to exterminate people with unorthodox thoughts.

Transcendence is the link between philosophy and religion. In Christendom the culture of transcendence, which had been a minority report in ancient Greece, was made into a legal obligation by the theocratic Church of Rome. In that sense philosophy as ideology of transcendence had taken control of society, but Christianity removed the decisive power from individual intelligence at the same time as it reversed the philosophical project of understanding nature as an impersonal system. The Church taught the best way to live based on a claim of divine revelation to officials, but the work of rational proof was also considered important to confront heresy and convince the skeptical. The literate class, especially within the universities, were dedicated to recapitulating ancient achievements of rational sophistication. In the panorama of ancient and medieval thinking, a tainted nature was an enemy with humans firmly in its claws. Christianity deified cosmic evil in the demonic figure of Satan, the devil. Whereas the philosophical portal out was transcendence through a non-mystical form of individual mental focus, the Christian transcendence, greatly influenced by Augustine, was collective and corporate, a merging with the body of the Church in return for an eventual transcendent afterlife.

Individualism, Original Sin, and Augustine

The idea of original sin is profoundly anti-individualistic. It means that all human beings share in the same single, sinful, nature. Individual persons are not original on this view but merely new eruptions of one nature. So, in spite of Augustine’s Confessions exploring individual psychology in an original autobiographical way, the effect of Augustine’s teaching was not individualistic, but the opposite. His conclusion was that, although an individual might be able to figure out what is right and even want to do right, rationality is never powerful enough to overcome original sin, appetites, and selfish ambitions of the passionate and lower part of human nature. People will want to do right, but never just yet.

In the Christian tradition the individual is a bearer of generic original sin as well as bearer of responsibility for moral choices in day to day life. If there is no person there is no local sin, no specific responsibility, and not much justice in punishment or reward. So, although the Church emphasized generic human nature and the human collective, the individual could not be completely negated because reward and punishment applied at the level of the individual, and reward and punishment were core values and instruments of the Church.

In the Christian world view, the after-death world was more important than the tangible world, and the reflective sense of individuality was not highly developed. Generalized ‘human nature’ was more in focus culturally, and it was considered tainted by the original sin which resulted in human exile from Eden. That is an echo of the pre-Christian sense of taint on the world of nature. The taint applied in Christendom mainly to human nature, from original sin, but the rest of nature did not escape. After all, the world in which humans find themselves is a veil of tears, a long way down from Eden.

Freedom

There was an ancient sense of taint effectively rejecting the world of the senses as pervaded by an evil power. Nature, represented by the human body and the impulses and pains of the body, was still effectively hated and feared in Christianity. In Christendom a conception of spirituality replaced rational thinking as the portal to transcendent freedom beyond demonic nature. Focus on the world to come after the death of the body seemed to offer the only such portal of escape. Official spirituality demanded blind trust in, and obedience to, the Church’s teachings on the rewards of the afterlife. Christianity also promised freedom from nature and the body through exercises which enabled a transcendent other-worldly spirituality. Prayer, penance, and various exercises could be practiced in the effort to invoke divine Grace. Once again, as in ancient thinking, freedom and experience of a higher state of being were a glorious possibility for people, but achieved only through special and arduous efforts and trials, removed from ordinary day to day living. Connecting with eternity was still a crucial achievement.

Among the educated in the Church, knowledge was thought to be mental illumination from God, the revelation of something like a Platonic Ideal Form uncovering the character of something at a particular time and place. There is an echo here of Aristotle’s “active intellect”, a single divine entity which participated in the rational mental process of each individual. The Christian theory of knowledge required such acts of divine illumination, and it was the same with freedom. The Church taught freedom of the will to make moral actions, that is, actions which are ‘self’-denying or contrary to original sin or natural impulse, but it was freedom by divine Grace. Humans were made ‘in God’s image’ by a broad original act of Grace, but some extraordinary intervention was required for a specific act of real ‘self’-denial, real freedom from tainted nature. In general people needed the grim guidance of Church authorities displaying their use of the scourge, rack, and stake. In this context freedom of the will was a weak flame largely overpowered by original sin.

Christian Collectivism

The hard-won classical advances in honouring individual subjectivity, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism, stood as a dangerous threat to the totalitarian ambitions of the Church, and the Church devoted considerable resources to burying them. When rules of living are dictated by an omnipotent god, being ethical depends entirely on compliance with the god’s dictates. Treatment of other beings is unimportant in itself. During the Theocracy of Christendom the Church claimed special possession of God’s truth and exclusive ability to teach and evaluate everybody’s compliance. The Church promoted an “other-world” focus which incorporated misery in “this world” into its myth. The other-world focus and the doctrine that human nature is intrinsically evil, condoned gross social injustice. The Catholic God was seen concretely in the feudal social order just as much as in the images collected in or carved into the structure of churches. The message was that the feudal order had to be accepted and preserved as it was, and hope placed in life-after-death. God supposedly acted through the Church to enforce the social order. The Church thus enforced a collectivism around its sacraments, rituals, art, architecture, and hierarchy. The doctrines of the Church transformed the internal individual-to-god connection characteristic of Stoicism, for example, into an external and objectified individual-to-Church-to-social-order-to-god relationship.

John Wycliffe (1328-84) and Vernacular Literacy

The Universities of Christendom, beginning from Bologna around 1088, did not monopolize literacy in Latin, partly because they did not confine their high-end scribes within their walls as monasteries did. Universities projected Latin literacy outward into their communities in the form of graduates: lawyers, medical doctors, (Latin) grammar teachers, and theologians. It is still remarkable that a European movement for popular vernacular literacy began even prior to the invention of the printing press. The beginning of the movement seems to have been the campaign by John Wycliffe, based at Oxford University, for universal vernacular literacy and translation of vernacular Bibles. That was to be the foundation of a world-changing ideal of equality in the European cultural system.

The modern notion of equality has much to do with the medieval European institution of social class (aristocracy, clergy, and peasantry) which looms as a spectacular paradigm of inequality. It was a set of laws and customs which institutionalized systematic and random insults and injuries to the peasantry, who became increasingly alienated and resentful of them. In medieval society land ownership was the main foundation of inequality, since aristocracy was defined in terms of military culture (Chivalry) and land ownership. As mere labourers in the economy of agriculture, peasants were treated as property also, attached to the land. Another crucial feature of medieval inequality was the special power of priests of the Roman Church. Since the Church owned keys to the divine realm and eternal life, there was a set of critical ‘check-points’ in every person’s life, such as joining the community as an infant, coming of age, marriage, and death, which had to be sanctioned by the presence of a priest performing the appropriate sacrament, specific bits of ritual magic. The ability of aristocracy to acquire religious relics, sometimes to donate to the Church for something like naming rights to a chapel, made them participants to some extent in the exclusionary economy of the supernatural.

The drive to make the Voice of God, as manifested in the Bible, available directly to each individual was based on a notion from humanist philosophy, now translated into a ‘proto-protestant’ attitude, in which every individual on his or her own was considered competent and worthy to understand the Voice of God and be elevated by it. Given the importance of the Bible in that culture, access to it was a profound equality and dignity that would influence every other aspect of culture. Suddenly all people, each individually, could have a really transcendent mental power in literacy. Writing is an engraving of voices, and widespread literacy vastly enlarges the cultural presence and weight of individual voices, and with that the recognition of personal intelligence. The movement was recognized as revolutionary by the Church at the time and was violently resisted. The Church restricted both vernacular literacy and direct popular access to Bibles because of the emphasis on original sin injected into Christian culture by Augustine: that individuals have such evil within them that they cannot be trusted to themselves and can be saved only by institutional supervision and control. However, in spite of official resistance to vernacular literacy, important progress was made and soon aided by the spread of printing technology, and then by protestantism.

Movable Type

Johann Gutenberg ( c. 1398-1468) of Mainz, Germany, introduced the printing press into Western culture in the 1440’s. Gutenberg’s major printing project, a Latin Bible, appeared around 1455. It was printer/ publishers trained by Gutenberg who first published vernacular Bibles, a German translation, in the 1460’s. It was duly banned by officials of the Church in 1485, but it illustrates the spread of the movement for vernacular literacy across the European cultural system. The printing press enabled a culture of written conversation outside churches and universities and independent of them, the ‘Republic of Letters’. Universities are often conservative places, as the term “scholastic” has come to mean, preserving an elite orthodoxy. The influence of church schools and universities was important, but widespread literacy outside institutions was the crucial novelty. The emergence of newspapers and a book press outside church, state, and university expanded the consequences of literacy in all aspects of society. People who read, write, and think about profound questions can do so as independent adventurers, under no authority but their own. The Republic of Letters was and is a voluntary and informal communication arrangement, carried on in writing. It wasn’t middle class literacy which ignited the fires of modernity but proletarian literacy, aided by the printing press.

Martin Luther (1483-1546): Doubt and A Personal Leap of Intelligence

Until his break with the Roman Church, Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order, and that grounding persuaded him that humans have no power at all since the exile from Eden, and are absolute slaves to the devil except by God’s whimsical Grace through which some are predestined to have faith and virtue. Both Calvin and Luther show strong Augustinian influence. Calvinism emphasized the intrinsic evil of people, as Augustine’s Catholicism did. However, Luther’s Protestants combined humanist beliefs with the acceptance of original sin and distrust of the body. Luther’s published statements about the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524-25) make it clear he was no crusader for full social equality, and it was not his intention to interfere with the other-world focus of theocratic society. Like most philosophers, Luther’s messages were inconsistent and many of their consequences were more or less unintended.

Luther had the ancient teachings of Hellenistic philosophical sects to draw upon, the Stoics and Epicureans already mentioned, and was proud of that humanist education. He applied the basic humanist insight of self-possession to the credibility of religious claims. The humanist competence of self-development revealed a special importance in the context of those most profound questions of knowledge. Luther discovered that the competence of self-development included the power to make creative leaps, which did not turn speculation into knowledge, but rather revealed God’s image in the leaper.

Christianity as a Mental Process: Luther and Doubt

On October 31, 1517 Luther posted a list of 95 theses on his church door in Wittenberg, Germany, including a defense of “justification by faith alone.” Luther’s emphasis on faith is often put in the context of a removal of emphasis from good works, but a better way to understand it is to put faith in the context of doubt. Luther’s doubt was based on courageous honesty about the impossibility of being certain of the teachings of Christianity, among other knowledge claims. Christian certainty was breaking down, and in the process preparing the way for the breakdown of Christian gloom.

Luther became a new model of the mental process of being Christian. In public debate with Church authorities 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.” For Luther the mental process of being Christian was an intensely personal struggle against anguished uncertainty, against doubt and the dread that comes from it. For Luther the internal focus and struggle was an obsession. He confronted the impossibility of knowing human and individual destiny, even in the light of the divine revelation of Christianity, and his response pioneered an alternative to skepticism, namely a personal leap of faith. If I take the leap of faith in full rational awareness that it is absurd, it is a declaration of my freedom from ‘laws of thought’. Manifesting that freedom is actualizing human life in the image of God since God’s image is precisely freedom.

Luther’s inner struggles with doubt in the face of desperate need for certainty introduced a thread of ‘existential’ subjectivity into the culture of intellectual debates. Personal doubt and anguish are markers of a thinking and emotional entity, a subjective intelligence with powers of acting from judgments of probabilities, extending into the increasingly remote future. Luther had faith in Truth, but was convinced that Truth could not be known with certainty, so individuals must get along with what innocent subjectivity makes available to them. Basing a sense of identity on knowing, on certainty, makes individuals passive and it loses something crucial in Luther’s inward faith, which is not a knowing and must be active to be authentic. Exactly because it is not knowing, faith is distinctly a person’s act, a personal self-declaration and self-creation, something like “I choose faith, so I exist in the freedom which is the image of God.”

Luther’s relationship with the university at Wittenberg was an important part of the framework of his work. His writing expressed the role of a university scholar at an advancing edge. In that context it is remarkable that Luther’s thinking was personal in contrast to Medieval scholastic logic. Luther’s mental condition as a Christian defined a profoundly individual subjective (existential) state. At the same time, Lutheran inwardness was not mystical, not an abandonment to cosmic wholeness or to the love of a God who is a person. Mysticism is never individual, but instead all encompassing. Faith for Luther was a personal and reasoned decision which removed magical, cultish, and mystical features of religion.

Protestant Christianity offered a model of inward subjective value by emphasizing individual piety, ultimate justification by faith. Faith, and so virtue, is a personal, inward accomplishment, available equally to all and not just the gifted, privileged, or heroic. The thrust of Protestantism is strong and equal individualism, justification by an internal accomplishment which is socially invisible. You cannot tell who is ‘in Grace’ by social position, property, family, cash flow, physical beauty, or overt giftedness of any kind. That was the Lutheran revolution, an overthrow of “establishment” control and supervision by discovery of elemental value in individual subjectivity. Freedom of conscience placed emphasis on a personal inward process of decision. Subjectivity is the ultimate revolutionary force because it bypasses all incentives and rewards under the control of a supervising elite or an ideology. The Church became irrelevant when each individual found direct personal communication with God through his or her own competence.

With Protestantism there was a radical change of what counted as moral action, away from “good works”, which normally involved a transfer of wealth to the Church, to private grace in exercising freedom. Faith for Luther was in contrast to payment of money to the Church for certificates of forgiveness (indulgences) with specific expiry dates. So the nub of Protestantism was a rejection of overt, outwardly observable accomplishments and a concentration on individual inwardness: faith. Luther’s essay The Freedom of a Christian emphasizes a distinction between individual mental “inwardness” and “outward” appearances. That was an essentially Stoic distinction. Morality and sin no longer had to do with observing the sabbath, priestly sacraments, dietary laws, formal sacrifices and prayers, or performing correct rites of purification or charity, but with realizing God’s image in freedom of the individual will. Since God’s relation to his creation is exactly transcendence, that mental process, which recapitulates the image of God in a creative act of freedom, is an experience of transcendence.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes was an amateur genius in mathematics who had been spotted as gifted as a child and educated to be a lawyer. Next after theology, law was the most esteemed of the university faculties. Descartes never worked professionally as a lawyer nor as a university professor, but sometimes as a military aide. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) started the year Descartes turned 22 and continued until he was 52, merely two years before his death. The war raged along during all but a tiny portion of his adult life, and so military work was widely available. When Descartes was a child of 4 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed in Rome. Bruno’s execution by burning alive, by order of the Roman Inquisition, had a profound effect on subsequent generations of philosophers, Descartes among them. Bruno was savagely executed for nothing other than his philosophical thoughts and writings, and far more brutally than Socrates had been. Bruno’s killing clarified the Roman Church as the mortal enemy of philosophy and inspired a fierce determination in an underground movement for “freedom to philosophize”.

Descartes liked to get lost, and found, in thought, and became active in the republic of letters, writing in academic Latin. Descartes’ thinking was moved by doubt, as Luther’s was, and doubt was a crucial act of intelligence for Descartes. For Descartes, doubt was the matrix of personal freedom in thinking. Descartes’ “thinking substance” and “extended substance” follow fairly closely the inward-outward dualism presented in Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian. Luther had no influence on Descartes’ mathematics or science, but the philosophical side of Descartes’ work fits perfectly into the cultural context created roughly a century earlier by the existential doubt explored and made famous internationally by Luther. The demystifying force of Descartes’ science was also in the tradition of reducing magic advanced by protestantism.

Doubt is distinctly individual, in fact definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Descartes’ presentation of his method of thinking was a demonstration of the freedom of thinking. Descartes conceived ‘thinking substance’ as individual thinking persons: “I doubt, therefore I exist.” That discovery was fundamental for Descartes, so he intended no scientific dismissal of thinking. The thinking illustrated by Descartes was propositional reasoning, the action of an enduring self with a continuity of language competence, mathematical competence, logical competence, and of voice. In Descartes the “I” or subjective entity of intelligence encounters extended substance, nature, and exerts power in discovering the laws and shapes of nature. So Descartes extended Luther’s vision of subjectivity in a secular direction, but Luther merits considerable credit for beginning the progress of modern philosophy. There is much of Luther’s specific influence in Descartes’ work, as well as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Luther had a strong focus on individual mentality, of which faith was one feature and doubt a closely related feature. According to Luther, people had the mental power to make a creative leap in the absence of sufficient reason or evidence. Western people had gained intelligence in a new cultural way on the basis of Wycliffe’s campaign for popular literacy focused on reading the Bible. The value so placed on mental processes was a foundation on which Luther built. Following Luther, reading the Bible was a requirement for normal protestant piety, and so literacy spread with protestantism. Literacy brings the power to write, to invent original communications and self-expressions, as well as the power to gain awareness of the voices of others. Vernacular literacy, the printing press, and the protestant reformation raised the profile of personal intelligence in the private lives of an uncontrolled portion of the community. Broadening the base of literacy enabled cultures of written conversation, the republics of letters, to develop outside institutions, and subsequently enabled the ‘Enlightenment’ in eighteenth century Europe, when the literate portion of the population became the majority. That rationalist enlightenment was directly inspirational for the American and French revolutions, the most effective events of a spiral of revolt that extended back 400 years to Wycliffe’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Great Plague. When literacy is a minority skill it can be an effective technique of domination by a ruling elite. Universal literacy has been a profound inspiration for equality.

Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Transcendence

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Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, and Benedict de Spinoza, would be my picks to represent Baroque rationalism. They all loved geometry and mathematics generally and judged it to represent a fundamental structure which also underlay nature, thought, and language. Language and mathematics belonged together as logical structures which extended into nature and into rational thinking. In fact it was unity with the logical structures of nature and mathematics which made thinking especially powerful for those philosophers. Language competence was inseparable from logical competence, and logic was a foundation common to extended substance or nature, as well as rational thought, mathematics, and even music (music of the spheres). However, language competence and the voice it enabled were also inseparable from an enduring and individual thinking entity, a person.

Although Baroque rationalists worked to undermine or overthrow the power of Christianity, they retained a basically Christian world view which included the dualism of body and soul. None of those philosophers would have questioned the presence and power of a bestial aspect in human motivation. The bestial was considered to be both compulsive, slavish, and urgently self-interested, without any sense of bonding to a collective or to mutual relationships. These impulses endured as the lower aspects of human nature, but they were not the whole story. Mathematics, and especially geometry represented a higher level.

There is very little sense of human freedom rising above nature in the work of Baroque rationalists. The effect of philosophical rationalists was to push thinking and objective nature closer together. These philosophers did not doubt the existence of the ‘spiritual’ entity assumed to be the individual human person or subject, and they did not doubt the importance of thinking and individual intelligence. They were professional practitioners of higher levels of human nature, and respected those powers. Yet, they did not have a profound sense of the transcendence of intelligence. They sensed that nature was flexible enough to include intelligence, and so they made efforts to describe how that might be conceived. These philosophers make an interesting contrast to the Hellenistic humanists (Sophists, Epicureans, Skeptics), also a variety of rationalist, since those humanists were achieving a mental state of ‘being in the world without being of it.’ By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people were much more interested in being in and of the world, and they weren’t convinced that intelligence could do much more than engage with nature, figure it out, and create a better life by controlling and exploiting it.

Nature as Clockwork

For rationalists, nature was no longer spooky and frightening but possibly rewarding. It was no longer a realm of spirits but merely extended substance, dead clockwork, and as such measurable, chartable, available for painstaking study. That created an urgent need for “freedom to philosophize” which was not available under Christendom.

The Baroque and Enlightenment sense of philosophy was the application of individual thinking, modeled on geometry, to achieve an accurate understanding of nature which would exclude beliefs inspired by superstition and fear of the unknown. That was different from the Stoic tradition, although still based on the power of rational thinking. Baroque philosophers aspired to transcend nature not through indifference to it but by understanding the principles of its determinism. The old philosophical idea of a separation of eternal reality from ephemeral appearances was evolving into the relationship between natural law and particularity. An intense gaze into the clockwork of nature, a calculating and measuring embrace of nature, would enable human control. That aspiration to control nature at the foundation of science was another transcendence of nature by intelligence, and yet it was a vision in which humans belong in nature instead of outside it.

There is still a whiff of transcendence in the Baroque attitude to math, especially geometry, a sublime realm available to pure reason. Yet that transcendence is relevant mainly in the service of science. There is also a whiff of the taint of original sin on human nature, seen as mainly selfish appetites and ambitions. For Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), humans are selfish atomic egos in a war of all against all. Hobbes envisioned a distinction between that “state of nature” and the social contract, which shows awareness of cultural contributions to individuals in everyday activities, especially from institutions of sovereign power: law enforcement and courts, and also other symbols of national belonging including warfare. Hobbes understood culture, in the form of enforceable law, as a gift from secular sovereign power, and so represents the movement away from Christian theocracy.

Both lower and higher natures are clearly present in Hobbes’ account of civil society. The innate force of natural self-preservation or self-interest acted as a centrifugal force that tended to prevent formation of, or to break down, social attachments. This is very similar to Augustine. Hobbes gives the impression that social attachments are fragile and difficult to achieve, “unnatural” in a certain sense and so not to be engineered into experimental forms once civil society is established. Hobbes did not deny the importance of rationality in these self-preserving atoms, and argued that rationality enabled people to agree to a contract to create civil society by establishing a sovereign with the power of life and death over his subjects. The egoistic force could be controlled by a rational fear of death imposed by a sovereign. Rational self-interest was taken seriously because rationality could be conceived as the region of self-interest which searches for relevant facts, and judges their strategic meaning.

Philosophers have always been dealing with the agonies of being in a life in the world. (Agony and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must supply his or her own way through.) The world is dangerous on a biological/ natural level, a political/ cultural level, and on a conceptual level. In the history of philosophy, concern over the misery of the objective world was gradually replaced by concern over nature’s brute determinism. Development of science in the seventeenth century contributed to a shift from the focus on misery to a focus on determinism, and the Baroque rationalists were part of that. It makes a difference because to transcend misery you seek tranquility and calm, you rise above passions which are the turmoil of experience, and in doing so establish a more authentic self-possession. In the struggle against misery, calm and strategic rationality look like transcendent freedom. By contrast, to transcend determinism you need a richer sort of freedom. Stoic rationality was not free enough to transcend scientific determinism. To transcend determinism, freedom needs to be conceived as unpredictability or whimsy as it is in romanticism.

No Stinking Badges

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Proposition One: Philosophy of a Voice

An intelligence is more like a voice than like a face, shaped through time rather then in space. Objects which are shaped and extended in space, and as such have an appearance, can display their image, a distinct force of presence, in a flash. Without an appearance, intelligence has to intentionally construct itself by exercising agency through a lifetime. The shape that a voice inscribes through time has to be assembled from memory by other intelligences. It exists nowhere in nature since nature is limited to the timeless actuality of the instant. Since intelligence has no flash-image as a bounded, continuous, and exclusive entity, it is vulnerable to acute self-uncertainty within a world of things which have appearances. Ever since the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is famously quoted as saying of his thinking “I have searched myself”, a recurring intent in the personal use of thinking has been discovery of, or encounter with, the self-who-has-no-appearance, subjective questioning and intent in-the-blind-spot of day to day activity. When Heraclitus went searching within himself he found a river which was always different from one moment to the next. A river is a force and a voice.

Proposition Two: Politics and the status quo ante bellum

The private international banking system failed in 2007-08, and in failure was revealed as viciously addicted to ‘investment’ gambling, deeply fraudulent, and alarmingly immune from accountability of any kind. (The Occupy Wall Street Movement of 2011 marked widespread outrage at these revelations.)

In the wake of that failure (the metaphorical bellum of the title), current political agendas divide into two categories: 1) business as usual, with a little tinkering and tweaking to restore the 2007 status quo ante bellum, and 2) radical change offers the only hope of controlling the value-sucking gambling addiction, fraud, and criminal immunity which have created extreme social inequality. The media divide along similar lines, with the large-scale advertising and entertainment media covering events from the point of view of investors and financial markets who dream of having the pre-2007 world returned to them; but with internet media frequently interpreting events from the point of view of the victims of investors, banks, and financial markets. This division illuminates something else.

A vast class war was exposed by the failure of the banking system. Study after study has detailed the disproportionate and illegitimate political and media control practiced by organized wealth, of which the banking system is an important part. The radical enrichment of a tiny minority achieved by the policy reforms of Ronald Reagan (US President 1980-88), Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom Prime Minister 1979-90), and their followers, enabled organized wealth to fund political parties, ideological lobbyists, and mass communications enough to gain effective control of taxes, laws, administration of justice, environmental exploitation, and wars, the faculties of sovereignty. Organized wealth has repeatedly used war both to drive pervasive social control and as a private money spinner in support of its own power. War is the ultimate destroyer of broadly distributed agency, self-possession, and personal freedom.

Can The Personal Use of Thinking Make Any Difference?

The self-uncertainty that is perfectly normal for an entity that has no appearance can be exploited by bullies, the greedy, political adventurers, as well as by enthusiastic people absorbed within supra-individual collectives, to sell their version of false self-certainty. They will give out money, things to do, special clothes, hats, badges, names, marks of rank and position, to convince you that you are something definite: tinker, taylor, soldier, beggar man, on a hierarchy of inequality. Distracted from personal agency, people can be quite willing to accept those role-play characters assigned from a script made by outside interests, instead of self-inventing avatars in their personal creative process. That is how we are persuaded to submit to wars and to be silent about collective crimes.

An attachment to practicing freedom through a personal creative process does reduce vulnerability to that kind of psychological manipulation. The subjective river of intelligence is a power for self-agency in uttering a voice through day to day life.

The Two Traditions

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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There are crucial differences between each individual’s situation as understood in transcendental dualism (the posting of December 15, 2011, “Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy”) and the individual’s situation as understood within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. To clarify the differences, it is helpful to refer to a summary of the religion of the God of Abraham provided by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) (1138-1204), generally recognized as authoritative on this issue. Based on Maimonides’ summary, all the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely meriting and commanding worship and obedience from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and will reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. Instead of direct general Revelation, God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth.

That set of beliefs situates every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, authority, an axis of deserving reward or punishment, grace or disgrace, in a way that is alien to transcendental dualism. It suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among the herder-nomads represented by Abraham was childhood fear and awe of the typical father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is a father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, but unreliable, quick to anger, and inclined to terrifying violence. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a profound sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

500 B.C.

If we imagine the cultural geography around the eastern Mediterranean in 500 B.C., we encounter a rich variety of ethnic communities. In Egypt, we see a culture focused on the gods of ancient Egypt. In Palestine we see the religion of the Old Testament, the emergence of the God of Abraham, with influence in the surrounding region, perhaps especially in Arabia. Further east in the highlands of Persia, we see the emerging dualism of a religious innovator, Zoroaster, self-proclaimed prophet of the ancient Aryan god Ahura Mazda. Looking west, we encounter ancient Greece with the Olympian gods and Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. Farther west again, the city of Rome had its own pantheon of gods. These communities were known to one another to various degrees, but beginning with the Persian assaults on Greece from 490 B.C. until around 449 B.C., there was increasing contact, especially at first between Greece and Persia.

The religion of ancient Greece was focused on a set of gods with close similarities to humans, including bodies like humans, although with powers to transfigure into whatever they wanted, and who were in close, easy, and frequent contact with humans. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi was a popular institution and the initiative lay with ordinary individuals to present specific questions to Apollo’s Pythia. There was no place for divine prophets. Orphic mystery cults were also active and had common assumptions from transcendental dualism, perhaps accounted for the exile of human spirits within physical bodies as punishment for transgressions in a previous existence, but they did also include promises of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. In a contrasting cultural development, it was characteristic of Greek philosophical thinking to remove disembodied spirits and divinities from an account of the world, to value scientific instead of narrative explanations. For example, Plato’s philosophical work completely abandoned the Olympian gods. In the work of Socrates (possibly) and of Plato there is a development of a non-mystical, non-religious ethics inspired in part by the widespread myths of transcendental dualism. It seems to have been the encounter with Persian dualism which jolted Greek thinking to a new profundity, which we see in the philosophy of Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.). However, the version of dualism that penetrated Greek culture as transcendental philosophy retained not a trace of the prophet Zoroaster, or any personified divinities such as Ahura Mazda. The resulting philosophical form of dualism spread widely in the classical Mediterranean world and then later endured a long competition with Abrahamic religion.

Plato’s Cave Parable

Plato’s parable of the cave, from Republic, Book VII, shows that he drew much from transcendental dualism, but removed the battling gods of good and evil in such a way that completely eliminated subordination of individuals to divine command and with it the importance of prophets, the psychological control of divine reward or punishment, and of divinely sanctioned sovereignty in general. It highlights the difference between acting from an imperative for obedience, for example in matters such as diet and genital mutilation, and acting from the personal impulse to find your way home. That reveals an historically important liberating force from the philosophical tradition. Plato’s hierarchical conception of thinking ability, noted in a previous posting, was a weakness that fortunately does not undermine that liberating force.

In primal dualism the world of ordinary objects is the creation of an inferior and jealous rival of the authentically creative god, and so is tainted by a mocking intent as well as by shoddy design and craftsmanship. In Plato’s vision there is a parallel to the idea that the world of bodies is flawed and deceptive. In the cave of the parable, perceived appearances of things are shadows of passing images of eternal Ideal Forms, and so they are a false appearance of reality, a mirage. As in transcendental dualism, Plato’s emphasis was on the assets and liabilities of subjective intelligence in finding a way to go from appearances to reality. His particular description of metaphysical Reality is less important then situating the individual on a personal arc of transcendence. Plato’s Ideal Forms were a specific interpretation and elaboration of a previously broadly familiar idea of “logos” which was thought to underlay the mysterious unity of words, thoughts, and things. Plato’s approach wasn’t religion, and it wasn’t science either. Although his theory of Ideal Forms is a kind of metaphysical speculation he was not basing his claims about personal transcendence on speculations about a supernatural world or stories about what might have happened at the origins of the world. Instead, he was describing the immediate situation of subjectivity in general, immediately available to anyone. He was in the tradition of the earlier Greek sage Heraclitus (“I sought myself.”) which marked out a distinctly philosophical questioning. Plato was writing about thinking in its overall relationship to nature and to culture. In that specific way he was different from both scientists, spiritualists, and religious reformers.

The Third Way

In Plato’s vision, accepting ordinary appearances as reality is encouraged and sanctioned by belonging within a collective. The hero of the parable is among a crowd in the cave, encouraging and cooperating with one another in the pretense that shadows are substantial properties, but when the hero goes out and experiences reality he goes as an individual. Perceived appearances are permeated by cultural influences, and objects of ordinary perception are inseparable from culture. Channelling culture, imitating social and cultural models, being immersed in the language-games of a community, these conditions solidify a cave of certainties which imprisons the mind. The parable of the cave, in combination with the beginning of Book X of Republic, indicates that culture itself, myths that poets and storytellers, or priests, kings, politicians, or advertisers make popular, is a cave of delusion. That is highlighted by Socrates’ declaration in the Apology: “I know only that I know nothing.” To escape from the cave you have to abandon the knowledge that culture has provided, that is, to think independently of the language-games of any society. You become a philosopher when you think without language and exercise innocent subjectivity. Socrates did not claim revealed visions of gods and their purposes. He was no shaman, mystic, or prophet. Socratic inwardness was not mysticism. One of the crucial points about the originality of Socrates and his legacy in Plato and others is that he is exactly not mystical. Socratic innocence was a contribution to the civilization of the west which provided a genuine alternative to mystical religion as ultimate value.

Transcendental practices which originate outside religious organizations divide into two main streams: a mystical anti-individual stream, and a non-mystical individualistic stream with a lineage through ancient Greek philosophy. The purpose of intellectual or mental activity was very different in the two streams. In the mystical stream the purpose was loss of individuality through union with the largest and most all-embracing force of divine nature: the great power “behind” the world of appearances. For the non-mystical stream the purpose of mental activity was often individual happiness through self-knowledge and self-realization, virtue, authenticity, self-possession. For example Stoics considered rationality, reasoning, as the most worthy feature of a person, the feature by which individuals realize freedom, and as such the only portal to virtue. They reached for truth as individuals, and thought that rational processes could find it.

Plato’s parable of the cave is a narrative of climbing out of darkness into light and grace, a narrative of transcendence. Transcendence has dualism built-in or pre-supposed. If there is to be a ‘rising above’, there must be something below from which to begin the ascent. The higher-lower dualism can also be seen as an inner-outer dualism such that inner (subjective intelligence) is higher and outer (the objective world of bodies) is lower. The profound promise of that philosophy was freedom from slavery to nature and culture through the practice of rational thinking. That was the craft of living the life of gods. Plato’s parable of the cave is the exact reverse of the biblical myth of Adam’s and Eve’s exile from Eden, humanity’s fall from grace.

The Two Traditions

The two traditions have had an uneasy co-existence ever since an historical tsunami of Abrahamic theism from Palestine and Arabia washed over the classical Mediterranean world system. That is, since the Jewish diaspora, the spread of Christianity, and the conquests of Islam. The philosophical legacy of transcendental dualism had, for a long time prior to that tsunami, held the high cultural ground of the Hellenistic system and then the Roman Empire. It illustrates the changes to recall that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161-180 A.D.) was a Stoic philosopher. Stoicism represents the legacy of transcendental dualism in spite of the fact that it claimed officially to embrace materialism, a monism. There was an essential spark of freedom to subjective intelligence in Stoicism. However, by the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337 A.D.), Christianity was being recognized as the favoured religion of the Empire. The old spooks were back in power.

Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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There were two main bearings or vectors to ancient philosophy. The first was an aspiration toward transcendent experience through thinking. There was a sense that the life of the mind is the life of gods. The world-view in which transcendence was an urgent desire was nested in metaphysical or spiritual ideas elaborated in ancient Persia, concerning an ongoing war between the god of good and the god of evil. In that duality, the everyday world of tangible and visible events was seen as the creation and realm of the god of evil, the lesser god, the deceiver, the dark principle. Events in this world were completely determined by the dark god in league with some lesser demons. Stellar constellations and planets were among those demons and they controlled and toyed with the lives and fates of people on the earth below them. The very material from which bodies are composed was thought to be corrupt as the creation of a flawed and imperfect creator, and evidence of that corruption was change in the material world, things transforming into other things, becoming and passing away. Time itself was taken as a flaw in the created world. The natural appetites, sensitivities, impulses, and emotions of human bodies led to ever more flawed, fragile, and perishable bodies, often ill and suffering, and always in an arc of decay, putrefaction, and mortality.

Each human body was thought to be animated by a spark or fragment of the high god of good, recognized as each person’s soul or spirit. The relationship which the god of light and good had to the world of bodies was transcendence. Feelings and impulses closely associated with functions of the body were identified as the lower aspects of humanity, and experiences of deliberative intelligence and rationality were identified as the higher and transcendent aspects. The fate of the spirits within human bodies was often suffering and despair. However, the spirits themselves were parts of the high god, and so were ultimately immortal and joyful, as glimpsed sometimes in the innocence of childhood. In that way each person was understood as a local version of the duality of the universe at large, a microcosm of the war between good and evil. Human spirits, as sparks or fragments from the high god, suffered more than their eternal source. Imprisoned within bodies, human spirits were soon imprinted and poisoned by body, eclipsed, isolated, and alienated from their higher truth. However, their truth was still their truth and a person could, with an effort to disregard impulses and sensations from the body, regain some degree of higher spirit. Rational thinking, or some other mental exercise, was a way a person could move along an arc upward toward the perfect god and true self-possession. Concentration on pure mentality (Aristotle’s “thinking, thinking about thinking.”) would ultimately achieve transcendent freedom from the misery of the mortal life of the body and from the astrological demons in the sky.

In that primal dualism the inner vs. outer separation came before the distinction between higher and lower, since you can take the lower aspects of subjectivity, arising from the body, as the world of outwardness penetrating or invading the world of subjective inwardness. That world-view presented human life as exile, as not belonging in nature, as being alien in the world of time. This is a life of catastrophically injured dignity and energy, an inappropriate life, fallen, disgraced, and deceived. There are echoes of that in the Old Testament story of humanity’s exile from Eden. That world-view was broadly influential around the eastern Mediterranean in ancient times and still has some congruence with popular religious and metaphysical assumptions.

Early philosophers rejected much of the world-view of good and evil spirits, but intellect vs. body experiences could not be dismissed so easily. The pessimistic assessment of the body, and of the dangerous environment in which the body carries on its mortal life, was based on ordinary experience, always vulnerable to misery. Within that mortal misery of the body there was the life of subjective intelligence which seemed to have a degree of independence from the body and to represent different principles. Intelligence seemed already transcendent to some extent and so it inspired efforts to understand transcendence more fully and to practice transcendence in the delight of intelligence as such. The abstract projects of mathematics and metaphysics, for example, were connected to the practical project of living transcendence, experiencing mental release from the vile prison of the body.

Debunking Radical Inequality

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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Nihilism is a Bogeyman

Freud observed that humans are polymorphously perverse, meaning that if one method of erotic pleasure is made difficult then other methods will be devised to fill the void. Something similar can be said about the experience of meaning in life. When one framework of meaning is discredited then others are found. Ordinary people derive a sense of meaning from close loving attachments; from expressing an authentic voice in conversations, working and playing with others, helping and nurturing others (including plants and animals); learning and practicing crafts and skills, noticing the beauty of nature, craft, and art; polymorphous perversity; thinking about dreams; being creative without supervision, and having intelligent agency in making a life as well as marks on the environment.

Often the view from upper levels of social hierarchy is that inequality itself is the source of everybody’s meaning in life, so that questioning inequality amounts to “nihilism” which opens a terrifying abyss of meaninglessness. When celebrities of power feel their narratives and privileges being questioned they cry out, “Without us, the rest of you are nothing. …” (in the spirit of Atlas Shrugged) Leaders of the Church uttered this when the fear and gloom of Christendom lost its grip on the popular imagination. Aristocrats uttered it when the French Revolution tore at the old regime. Yet people generally still muddle along not especially worse-off then people were before. It would seem from this that meaninglessness is the recurring nightmare of “masters of the universe” who live off old myths of elite exceptionalism. Leaders of business and industry got worried by the flower-power counter-culture of the sixties, and especially by feminism. Their control of culture was put at risk by those movements and a counter-stroke was organized and executed using great wealth to increase control of news media, the selection practices of representative government, and judicial appointments.

That recent history was witnessed by the baby-boom generation and suggests that “capitalism” isn’t simply “private ownership of the means of production”, but actually the permanent control of key parts of an economy by particular groups which are motivated to retain control by an ideology glorifying their exclusive superiority. It would mean that the surface structure of capitalism conceals a deep structure dedicated to perpetuating radical inequality under the control of a self-appointing group aiming for decisive influence over taxes, laws, and war.

It isn’t uneven accumulation of property which is vicious, but rather the claims of a minority to have a mysterious right to control and supervise the whole collective. Uneven accumulation of property is simple inequality, but control and supervision is radical inequality. There have been theories of radical inequality since at least the time of Plato. Plato belonged to an anti-democratic aristocratic social pod and had a personal interest in legitimizing an aristocratic overthrow of Athenian democracy. He fantasized an apparently reasonable stratification of society and then imagined his model of stratification to be innate within the subjectivity of every individual. The three parts of subjectivity for Plato were appetites, competitive spirit, and abstract rationality. It is possible to interpret appetite and competitive spirit as motives for quick fix consumption and conflict which provide momentary thrills followed by deepening emptiness, the abyss of meaninglessness. Those impulses were the ones Plato claimed to dominate most people. Plato imagined the higher rational mind to be receptive to cosmic ideal forms, his ultimate source of meaning, but Plato gratified his class vanity by granting effective rationality exclusively to an educated and gifted few, so justifying control of the polis by the only social class with the leisure for higher education, the class of slave-owners.

The Medieval theory of social order in Christendom identified three functional groups which combined in a sort of human pyramid. Those higher in the pyramid had the right and duty to supervised and control those below. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and lowest stratum. Those peasant agricultural workers were identified as Plato’s appetite driven workers. Masters of war formed the next level up, were much fewer than workers, and held formal possession of most land and natural resources. That was the class of military-estate families, the aristocracy, identified as Plato’s spirited fighters. Priests and their organization, the Church, formed the apex of the pyramid. The priestly clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. The upper hierarchy of the Church claimed special knowledge of God’s will through divine revelation, and exclusive ability to evaluate everybody’s compliance. Augustine’s teaching was that ordinary people needed to be supervised harshly in order to prevent them from expressing their hereditary sin and intrinsic evil derived from Adam’s and Eve’s original sin and expulsion from Eden. That doctrine was exploited by the Church hierarchy, as well as by military-estate families, to depict themselves as divinely appointed supervisors and as such justified in their parasitic taxing of peasants. Of course, there was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the second sons, who would not inherit the family’s aristocratic title and estates, would often go to university and into the Church hierarchy. Peasants were not part of society as conceived by aristocrats, but merely parts of the natural environment to be exploited.

Both the class of military-estate families and the personnel of the Church were parasitic upon the agricultural labouring families. What those peasant families received in return for the labour and product confiscated from them as rents, fees, taxes, and tithes was very little, and it was meant to maintain a radical inequality between them and their lords. Often the rural labouring people had a status near slavery. Yet, they were not taught the skills of surviving from the land by the military-estate families or by officials of the Church. Those vital skills were part of the ‘folk’ culture of the peasants themselves, and they would have survived on their own using those skills. They did not need the social groups which taxed them.

In yet another version of radical inequality theory, right-wing expressions of Romanticism idolized special celebrity geniuses and understood them as incarnations of a supra-individual cosmic spirit. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great inspiration for such Romantics. The genius should be permitted to do whatever he wants and he must be forgiven. Napoleon illustrates the Romantic vision of how societies grow and develop. So could Hitler. Right-wing Romantics could see creativity only in celebrity geniuses. The contemporary cult of celebrity and the star system is a legacy of that nineteenth century Romanticism. The Romantic worship of celebrity geniuses contains a mixed message about individualism. It is the worship of certain special individuals only and includes a dismissal of “the crowd” which is assumed to consist of less than truly human specimens. Rigidly hierarchical social class was standard in Europe at the time, and inclined Romantics to think of creativity as a divine gift granted to few. They supposed that creative geniuses merited special treatment as “supermen” who were above the laws of society, not only because of their special contributions to art, literature, music, math, science, commerce, and government, but because they were uniquely animated by divine inspiration. Unlike the ordinary rabble they were incarnations of a feature of God or the metaphysical creativity which sustains the world. That was close to the idea of aristocracy which had endured since Medieval times.

The Economic Theory

The current form of radical inequality theory is an application of the idea that economic consumption, accumulation, production, and exchange express the dominant force in human nature. Every individual’s personal identity is culturally assigned on the basis of his or her way of making a living, both in terms of a specific purchasing power and a function or title in the system of production. In a market economy you can quantify the social esteem of each category of work by how much it is paid. The market price is an exact measure of its cultural value-assignment. Within that culture, people become their economic niche. Each individual is the inheritor of a unique kit of genetic and cultural characteristics, which then determine his or her personal economic place, each with a particular level of trophies, dignities, influence, and wealth from competitions for scarce resources. The consumer-competitor does not suffer the burden of work as punishment for original sin, but to merit a quantified license, in the form of money, to consume in pursuit of elusive happiness. Need and deficiency come first, and deficiency is the stimulus which drives productive labour. When economic accomplishment is the quintessential human fulfillment then subjectivity disappears into the objects it consumes and the trophies it wins.

There is a market incentive-and-reward system to motivate accomplishment, and placing high in that ranking is itself among the greatest goods. People choose professions, knowledge trades, partly to declare themselves as persons of substance and gravitas. Maintaining a high-volume cash flow, say by speculating on asset prices, is another means to the same end. Conspicuous distinction from less accomplished people, from “the crowd”, is crucial to the reward system. Stardom presents inequality in a positive light and glamorizes it as a creative principle.

In the economic system of stratification, just as in the medieval social pyramid, those higher in the system assume the right and duty to supervised and control those below. Hierarchical supervision in the context of knowledge or function-based division of labour might seem to be an instance of necessary and mutually beneficial stratification. However, these rankings are always overgeneralized. They are used to justify a general value assignment or value definition of each person. The value-ranking of individuals is always extended beyond the function that the division of labour is designed to achieve. For the vast majority these value assignments and identities are humiliating and insulting and based on an extremely narrow personal test, or none at all.

It is going to be unavoidable that a person must pick from a list of unsuitable ways of earning an income. An income is still a necessity. What is not unavoidable is social pressure on individuals to think of their means-to-an-income as representing their personality. People should not be led to expect personal fulfillment from what they need to do merely to pay the bills, to survive. Real self-expression is still a personal requirement and takes place outside the workplace and usually outside the market economy.

Leadership

In modern democratic societies citizens vote for representatives to speak for them in legislative assemblies. Political parties appoint party leaders. Somehow when the representatives arrange to form a government under a party leader, that person declares him or herself to be the leader of the people at large. A representative has transformed into a leader by some political alchemy.

Commercial culture has a significant leadership myth which looks like a recapitulation of right-wing romanticism. There is an assumption that important developments happen because of leadership. If you identify the budding leaders among the emerging generation, then you see the future of the society. This is odd with respect to declared democratic values, in which individual voices are supposed to count more or less equally and people are elected as representatives, not leaders.

There are indications that people high on organization charts actually consider themselves to be leaders and not just functional overseers. They believe people lower down on the organization chart need and search for leaders to teach them how to live and deal with problems. They believe people actually look up to them for direction and that they therefore serve a broader social function.

Commercial culture acts toward individual subjectivity as a bundle of deficiencies, needs, appetites, and a compulsion to self-assert, to win. Such an entity is fulfilled by being supplied with consumables and competitions, and the heroes are the few who win their way to the top of the ‘food chain” in the organization of supply. This view assumes that only collective projects and narratives lift individuals from insignificance and decrepitude and provide dignity and meaning to their lives. It supports the legitimacy of meritocracy, leadership, the star system, as if fulfilling purpose is a scarce commodity granted to the masses by special inspired geniuses. We now live within a cultural combination of the romantic vision of a meritocracy of celebrity geniuses mediated through the older system of estate-family hoarding of status, property, and power across successive generations. There is just enough opportunity for entrepreneurial geniuses from outside the permanent hierarchy to maintain the myth of meritocracy. It is taken for granted that the great productive and distributive operations that maintain the economic lives of modern populations inevitably lock people into a supervisory culture which determines how we define and experience our existence.

Dissing the Masses Culture

People in dominant positions encounter, create and participate in, to some degree, a culture of domination which accounts for and justifies their position. It is a culture with roots in Plato, Augustine, and right-wing romanticism. That culture teaches that the majority of humanity is more or less unconscious, stupid, and limited to primitive urges, that the masses are interested in simple forms of food, sex, glitter, other people’s misfortunes, religious spooks, daydreaming, and idle gossip. In their moments of highest alertness their world is full of superstitious terror from which they seek shelter. Since they contribute so little to the alleviation of their problems, help must come from extraordinary persons who conceive projects and arouse the masses to work in realizing visions. These extraordinary persons constitute a natural elite which has a duty to dominate the masses for their own good. This is the only way the masses will ever have a chance to experience something better than superstitious terror or semi-consciousness. The elite creates meaning for the masses, creates whatever small experience of the sublime is possible for them. Although leadership is a high honour and duty it is also a heavy burden, a sacrifice the elite makes for a higher good.

The dominating political group wants to believe that other groups are supervised and controlled for a good reason and not just for the advantage of the most vicious. Features of human nature which resist control, such as emotion or appetite, are marginalized and assigned to specific social groups to justify their marginalization and their being kept under special control.

Democracy as a Problem, Freedom from Control as a Problem

People have a problem with the idea of strong democracy because of mistrust of the majority, ‘the crowd’, a legacy of the long tradition of inequality and control theory. The majority of citizens is assumed to be ignorant, lazy, self-indulgent, emotionally flighty, thoughtless, forgetful, dishonest, and shallow. The idea of that lot being on the loose and possibly having political influence is a nightmare for many who see themselves as rational, acute, informed, and hard-working. Although that image of the majority is a gross exaggeration, it is true that we cannot assume some simple conception of good motives and abilities in human beings generally. This does not apply only to the undistinguished majority, however. Fluctuations in the stock market demonstrate the emotional flightiness of the investor class. Enron, Anderson Accounting, tobacco companies, asbestos companies, asbestos company doctors, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Roman Church protected pedophilia, and the laundering of tax evasion and drug money by mainstream banks, have all been tips of icebergs of organized criminal activity among the distinguished meritocracy. Criminals pass through all social filters purported to advance only the most worthy. They demonstrate that there are no trustworthy social filters and that bad motives and incompetence are prominent in the minority elite and are in no way especially characteristic of the majority. The meritocracy as well as the undistinguished majority is too often criminal and generally unworthy to rule.

The legitimate conclusion from general human fallibility and criminal intent is that absolutely nobody is sufficiently trustworthy to have power over others. The way to counteract faults and shortcomings of people is to restrict the control that some have over others and to give everybody the best chance to develop their own gifts and creative agency. No one is qualified or justified to keep the world safe from the masses by making sure we are all organized and supervised into corporate productive activity. That same activity is the inspiration for corruption. Still, we have to avoid somehow the tyranny of the most vicious, which is always the result of anarchy. The rule of law seems the most obvious way. The role of sovereign government must be protection and enforcement of laws against oppression. Acts of oppression and domination are exactly what ordinary people experience as crimes, the clearest cases of evil. Acts of oppression are those which situate people to be unable to proceed with their initiatives, enjoy the products of their work, make a distinctive mark, or be honoured. Tactics of oppression are confinement; corporal or verbal injury, insult, or threats of them; insufficient recognition, reward, or compensation for work or use.

Warnings of the terrors of nihilism exploit the fact that individual subjective intelligence has no appearance. That lack of appearance or substance seems to make it difficult to accept that subjectivity does have directionality and force. It speaks in its own voice. There is no abyss of meaninglessness waiting to swallow us up, because every subjectivity is a transcendent source of meaning. Fear no abyss, we are already soaring.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Freedom

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

Theological Black Holes

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era

No Stinking Badges

The Two Traditions

Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy

Debunking Radical Inequality