Category Archives: Hierarchy

Asymmetrical Dualism

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Fragment 199, word count: 534.

Tags: nature, metaphysics, ideality, Fichte, dystopia, patriarchy, property, hive-mind, sovereignty, self-possession, politics.

The Primacy of Ideality

The physical world does not care, respond, or prepare. It does not question or answer. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us, as Copernicus observed, but it also has no other accommodations for our sensitivity, desperate caring, freedom, or wishes and plans. Subjective ideality, which is to say, willful spirituality, does not determine objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. However, in a crucial sense ideality comes first because of its crucial evidentiary or experiential primacy.

When Fichte observed that the existence of the objective world occurs in a spirit’s positing (supposing) such a world, he has to be referring to the physical world as a conception of what is being received by a spirit, a conception created by a spirit in its quest for effective agency based in a sense of orientation. No matter what we receive via sensory stimulus we still individually have to make something of it in ideality, come up with a way of conceptualizing something as other than the excitation of a personal sensitivity. Reality is mutable because the structure of reality is crucially suppositional.

Even though ideality senses its condition as a receiver of a world it does not plan into existence on the grand scale, and finds itself placed within and dependent on the world of not-self so received, the primacy of ideality means that however anomalous and superfluous it might seem in relation to the vastness of not-self brute actuality, ideality does exist undeniably and exists in an asymmetrical duality of mutual influence and determination with uncaring actuality. The existence of ideality changes everything by adding a metaphysical principle to existence. It means that a certain sort of incompleteness and uncertain-anticipation is native to existence, to reality. Nature otherwise lacks any trace of anticipation. It’s just physics. With ideality, reality is no longer just fields of force occurring as they must, at rest in nature even when unfixed or unbalanced. Ideality, as metaphysics, is the world now making something of itself, planning out, searching out, and building a multitude of personal ways into the non-actual not-yet. Now the world is at risk and not at rest. It is restless, curious, and living.

The Dystopian Predicament

The human predicament is not metaphysical but rather cultural and political in that we find ourselves surrounded by ubiquitous and pervasive dystopian societies. Historically, dystopia forms as misogynist patriarchy, in which privileges have been seized and claimed along with property through violence and the threat of violence. Competitions for dominance create stacked layers of social stratification, a hierarchy of dominance in which each stratum prides itself on being a superior beings club with a cultured contempt toward the less wealthy and powerful. What often keeps the layers together as a functioning hive-mind, in addition to the core dedication to the language of competition and to accumulating trophies, is a universal orientation up toward a top layer asserting ultimate sovereignty. Deity (or Nature) serves as a cultural paradigm of sovereignty as all-powerful commander and judge with absolute ownership over the less powerful. The metaphysical situation means that this actuality is mutable and that self-possession is viable against hive-mind.

Embedded links:

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

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

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

How Reality Matters

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Fragment 197, word count: 596.

Tags: nature, hierarchy, politics, essentialism, spirit, perception, reality, time, Nietzsche.

The awesome weight and depth, the clear outlines and forces of resistance, the ‘thusness” or brute presence of Nature-at-large are considered by an essentialist sensibility as unassailably declarative of “what is”, or “what is real”. The essentialist sensibility attaches itself to apparent knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as definite and enduring. Moreover, what is striking in the structure of Nature to the essentialist sensibility is a Great (food) Chain of Being extending into the exercise of power among humans, into social and economic organization. Competitive hierarchies are at the core of this essentialism and competitive hierarchies encourage stark “us against them” conceptual dichotomies: master/ slave, predator/ prey, strong/ weak, victor/ vanquished. Nietzsche, for example, in his darker aspect, embraced this essentialism with enthusiasm, asserting that some people are really aristocratic, giving them the right to dominate, control, and loot the work of others. His view included the aristocracy of men over women. Such realist essentialism defines the political right-wing for whom Nature, understood in this way, is incomparably more important, more authoritative, than ordinary individual spirituality, whatever such spirituality might be. Essentialists assume that the categories of things that make up the world (male/ female, aristocrat/ worker, master/ slave) are predetermined prior to any creative work of ideation, which is to say prior to any application of the particular interests of caring drama-projecting sensibilities. The reason conservatives get so agitated about transgender people is that gender fluidity contradicts the basic conservative essentialism which includes that male and female are different Categories of Being, different substances, different materials or essences.

Fragment 196, February 1, 2023, Spirit is Reality (word count: 283)

In our world in which spirit is reality, though, in which spirit exists as a busy multitude of localizing and personally dramatizing principles of world organization, the general authority of any essentialism is impossible. Meaning, relevance, and portent have to be conferred by acts of a spirit onto the structures and forces that are given in nature, and no kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, holds a monopoly on the power to do that. It is the dramatic conceptual work of individually embodied ordinary subjective spirits. Nothing experienced is or can be beyond the creative work of ideation. Perceiving is part of that creative work. Spirit is the questioning push directing any perceiving gaze to keep opening the world in its dramatic flight, never finished. For living spiritual agents, time is a personal future opening by the power of skills learned in the work of aging and by inherent creativity. These busy personalizing principles of world organization warp their vicinity of objects and events toward some kind of suppositional best case among multiple alternative and variously improbable futures, all non-actualities, separate from the brute actuality of nature. The existence of spirit manifests an unfinished world, always being created, a world new and indefinite in a passionate embrace of time.

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

If the truth of metaphysics can be spread about, the truth that there is no Great Chain of Being (that idea being an article of class propaganda) and that in fact the world, especially the social world, is mutable because every individual person is a source of creative power (transcendent opening of possibilities for the shape of things in an otherwise inertial and entropic world), then political essentialists lose their legitimizing ideals.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Spirituality of the Left

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Fragment 195, word count: 474.

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

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

Materialist Marx

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

Unpicking the Violence-Based State

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

Embedded links :

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Fragment 193, word count: 1,093.

Tags: culture war, property, spirit, time, metaphysics, violence, sovereignty, creativity, self-possession, values, ideology, power.

There has been a cultural uprising raging in the Euro-American social system from the time of the European Enlightenment (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and even well before that, with, on one side, a culture with property possession as its prime value and, on the other, cultures emphasizing the primacy of spirit at the level of the embodied individual, often with an intellectual focus. This opposition is the deep foundation of the political division between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing political conservatism is the champion of property possession as primary value and is anti-intellectual because intellectual achievement has threatened the cultural primacy of property possession. The political left and the political right are not equivalent in the culture war because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has not yet managed to be clearly specific about its prime value, but a good characterization would be something like: spiritual self-possession. History includes many examples of artists and ‘thinkers’ who overtly value personal creativity more than possessions. The real prospect of universal literacy was the fundamental dignity conceived by the Enlightenment, developed out of Wycliffe’s project of having everybody capable of reading the Bible in vernacular translations.

Trophy Property is Core Conservative Value

Property possession as a means of self-definition and personal evaluation is ideologically foundational for political conservatism, and property possession is meaningless without institutional readiness for violence to protect it. Possession of property is inherently precarious, vulnerable to the point of being socially destabilizing. Private property owners are terrified their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Property can be taken by force or trickery, and so requires a vast system of protection involving personal weapons, organized readiness for violence, an ‘us against them’ conceptual system, elaborate legal/ police systems, and overemphasis on authority and forceful sovereignty. Property owners assert the authority, through police and army, courts, prisons, and the hangman, to protect their possessions. The “haves” project their obsession with property onto everyone else and are terrified of losing their stuff to the underclass. The more property a person has, the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of loss, which means they depend on as much as can be arranged of the power that comes from the barrel of a gun, the machinery of armed violence in the form of the “right hand” of sovereign government: police, military forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as sovereigns always do. Law and order is so prized by conservatives because it is the only way to protect the security of property possession. Such sovereignty also implies the whole dystopian apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of mass subordination to patriarchal power. From that stream of cultural tradition comes the demand for everyone to conform to a strict set of beliefs, behaviours, gender and persona types. Cultish hive-minds of patriotism are a social construct for the protection and enlargement of the value and privileges of property possession. Conservatism is based in an essentialist and violence-ready fear and outrage at the arrogance of anyone meddling with the traditional hierarchy of wealth and privilege.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with the conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant system. Right-wing personal interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego representing sovereign authority.

The Primacy of Spiritual Self-Awareness

Spiritual self-possession involves, as a matter of metaphysical knowledge, self-recognition as spirit. Spirit is the personalizing principle of world organization, a questioning push directing a gaze at the world in aid of acts which are effective personal expressions of a caring, knowing, and supposing intentional agent, continuously creating a specifically relevant suppositional world that is opening in time. Spirituality is the sense of time passing in this embodied life, featuring fear of the future. Time is the active existence of creativity. Creativity is impossible without a reality which is profoundly incomplete, with time into which to suppose possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Without a supposition of the absolute vacuum of futurity then creativity is impossible. Without creativity there is no time. Meaningless Being exists without time, with only a warp of instability, its instant of momentum, falling. The awareness of time is not a perception, not passively receiving the imprint of a stimulus. Sensing the passing of time involves active suppositions and abstractions to fashion a framework of bearing into the empty opening of a future, searches expressing curiosity as well as desperation, and questions that reconstruct a framework of directional orientation. There is an interior suppositional sense of active positioning relative to the shape of exterior surroundings, updated continually in detail by perceptions of features: ground and sky and passages of accessibility with dramatic portent. The dramas of personal agency integrate learned expectations with a poise for interventions that actualize previously conceived and presupposed acts, new reality in the opening of time. Any gaze of consciousness is a gaze at nature from a particularly embodied drama, and also a creative act in the drama, a move forward that matters personally, integrating personal purposes and questions, suppositions (knowledge), and an arc of interventions.

Spiritual Self-Possession

The spiritual value orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. In this understanding the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a situation in which the best case is as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence) and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Embedded links:

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

Fragment 172, January 7, 2021, Dissent by Metaphysics (word count: 680)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

What is Real?

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Fragment 192, word count: 537.

tags: dystopia, oligarchy, metaphysics, nihilism, drama, meaningless Being, acts of spirit, teen angst.

Every person reaches a moment of recognition and decision, as a teenager usually, when they have learned enough of the world to assemble the complex fact that the society in which they live is a dystopia. In dystopia the economic and cultural systems are dominated by a parasitic wealth oligarchy which brandishes bogus metaphysics as proof that oligarchic social organization is inevitable. Dystopian metaphysics asserts the realty of primordial commanding heights: willful divine spirits, eternal templates of form, or necessities derived from physical nature, imposing hierarchies which inevitably replicate themselves everywhere including as biological, economic, political, and social systems. The individual’s moment of recognition that, as metaphysics, this is self-serving and wildly implausible fantasy, is a shock of personal isolation because great public media effort is devoted to evading and disrupting any such recognition. At that moment of facing the darkness of the cultural and economic superstructure with which we must live and somehow work, most of us see no alternative but to submit to oligarchic metaphysics and devote ourselves to the values, symbols, and competitions for its markers of self-worth. The choices are stark: first, submit to the oligarchy as we see people doing all around, to enjoy if you can some of the pleasures it boasts of. Alternatively, espouse a resistance or revolutionary ideology which is likely another oligarchic system based in equally bogus metaphysics, or become a nihilist and live entirely through unprincipled impulses.

The question: What is real? is typically a search for a world of stable and measurable forces and structures that exist whether or not they are engaged and interpreted by any limited and ephemeral subjectivity. However, what is undeniably real in the context of this or any question is subjectivity itself, the spirit of questioning, searching, learning, and the personal assertion in every tilt of curiosity. The reality of this spirit is personal uncertainty of survival, the inescapable anticipation of a future reconfigured constantly by loss and a rain of novelty, with personal harms and benefits always at stake. As such, the realities of any such spirit are dramas of caring agency that creatively appropriate the forces and structures at hand, binding them within this spirit’s orientation and bearing in a world now furnished by this work with ground and sky, water and forest and growing things that can (and must) be consumed for pleasure and power, a world with crowds of other embodied spirits, among whom are closely attached family and friends, expressing their own questions and dramas. This individually embodied questioning, interpreting, and intervening is no cosmic commanding height. Meaning, relevance, and portent do have to be conferred by acts of spirit onto primordial meaningless Being, the structures and forces that are simply given, and it isn’t any kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, which does that work. Rather, it is the dramatic conceptual agency of individually embodied subjectivities.

The first philosophical act is to recognize dystopian society as a reality-distorting cultural force field. The next is to abandon dystopian metaphysics, along with oligarchic markers of merit, through direct acquaintance with personal creative power, recognizing the transcendent reality of spirits moving through the uncertainties of their time as effective intervening agents.

Embedded link:

Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

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

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Nietzsche didn’t do anything like revalue all values, and it is revealing to consider what values he did not question: namely aristocratic superiority within the social hierarchy of wealth and power. Nietzsche was retreating into a strong cultural current from feudal Christendom, namely the ‘feudal’ current: aristocratic crime-family culture, derived originally from patriarchal dominance in herding culture: men with weapons on horses. Nietzsche loathed and worked to discredit the other cultural current from Christendom, namely Christianity, because it promoted an otherworldly (heavenly) focus that gave priority to “selfless” values. He dismissed altruism, selflessness, meekness, and turning the other cheek, which he thought of as slave values, feminine values, and nihilistic, in favour of ancient and traditional masculine dominance values, as exemplified in ancient Greek warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, dominance, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Nietzsche despised and blamed the victims of conquest and oppression. He gazed upon the same European history as Rousseau and Marx but did not fault the crime family aristocracy for being parasites on the subsisting majority, but instead accepted their claims of nobility (projecting onto them the nobility he experienced in his own creativity) and admired their viciousness. He blamed the oppressed for being weak. Their weakness made them deserve whatever oppression they experienced. Nietzsche gave the crime family class credit for whatever he found positive in European culture. As historical fact, European aristocracy could not have established the wealth and power it did without the senior partnership of the Church of Rome promoting its elaborate religious ideologies. In a superstitious age, it was the religious culture of desperate fear and hope that utterly subdued resistance and solidified mass resignation. Yet, Nietzsche blamed the Church for proclaiming a set of values that persuaded the weak and oppressed to find meaning in their oppression and de-valued the manly military values of aristocracy.

Within the legacy of Zarathustra, to which Nietzsche was drawn, the world where we humans live is irredeemably abysmal as the creation of an evil god, the lesser of the duality of high gods. Rejecting any heavenly escape, Nietzsche found himself faced with a choice between utter nihilism or the Stoic (and Romantic) determination to prove personal transcendence by a supreme act of will to accept existence as whatever it is, and even to will its eternal recurrence in every ugly detail.

Embedded links:

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

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Metaphysics is You

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Fragment 185, word count: 505.

tags: philosophy, metaphysics, dystopia, embodiment, personality, reality, politics, culture, nature, freedom, Plato.

Rarely does an individual have much control over the evolutionary momentum of multigenerational cultural entities such as religions, sovereign states, cities, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a well contextualized sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink, as we transform through the life cycle of a human animal. This combines with generational amnesia, the personal-level, deeply experienced knowledge lost with the mortality of each generation, and also with the new-generation’s  innocence and its inclination to have a joyful life in a joyful world. Biologically, our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for some unthinkable duration. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. It is not surprising then that, socially, accommodations are made for whatever activities and systems of relationship are practiced at our moment of intervention, even if they have a dystopian core, because often enough that seems to make it easier to find some joy in being alive. This makes a certain sort of philosophical work almost impossible.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of a fixed and eternal structure of existence, are always canonized in dystopia to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. For example, the commanding heights of Plato’s conception of metaphysical reality, typical of dystopia, exist somewhere on the invisible far side of objects, a substrate behind the impersonally given world of objective things. They are meant to make sense of how the never-ceasing fluidity of familiar things can be connected to a stability profound enough to count as essential reality. On that view, the situation may be tragic, but it is nature and you can’t change nature. Things are what they must be, manifesting an existential bedrock of categories and laws. Although canonical, this is only wild speculation.

There is an opposing metaphysics of primordial existence, a conception that denies any categorical commanding heights. In the most straightforward way, you are the metaphysics in your world, the living ideality here on the near side of phenomena. All forms of ideality occur in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. Ideality is always personality, the creative transcendence of ordinary, individual-level, temporal agency living a creativity that transcends nature and makes what sense it will of the physical or divine givens of nature. There may be a system of stark givens, but it has no intrinsic purposes, doesn’t matter to itself and cannot care, and that system has no immutable grip on the conceptions of us agents of temporal ideality. Social systems derived from this metaphysical source can be perfectly free of any influences from the patterns of organization in brute actuality.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

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Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

tags: existence, metaphysics, time, creativity, freedom, caring, drama, agency, empathy, science, religion, politics, patriarchy, civilization, malaise.

The difference made by recognizing a bit of metaphysics, specifically a certain conception of ideality, is a much needed and long overdue disruption of two canonical but failing universal explanations: religious personification of nature and the materialist fatalism of science. Thinking of ideality as embodied (discontinuous and discretely located) points and arcs of creative intentionality* opens a way to recognize human-scale freedom and creativity as real without wildly speculative and implausible personifications. Human reality is a beach where a personal interiority of ever-reshaping dramas made of caring and ideas (expectations and hopes, questions, aspirations, and intentions) gush out in deliberate activity and wash actuality. Features of brute actuality can be shaped into culture by these actions. Culture in this sense is any product of intentional craft, any effective application of purposive ideality to the merely natural material of actuality: the carved wood, the ploughed field. Freedom is real in this tumbling co-existence of gushing creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of existence (both ideality and actuality) as witnessed in the endless passage of time. Any serious conception of freedom requires enduring points of ideality actively living, forming actuality, at the incomplete edge of existence, continuously actualizing a stream of spontaneously invented intentions within a personally learned and learning context of expectations. Knowledge is always an elaboration, specification, and development of personally created dramas of caring.

Since the European codification of mathematical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after nearly a millennium of theocratic Christendom, the most innovating civilizations have been stuck with a dysfunctional codependence of scientific materialism and immaterial angels and demons. Both religion and science have ongoing appeal, science from rapidly developing commercial applications, especially communication and data processing technology (innovations in entertainment with advertising), vaccines of course; and religion from a most primitive reflex to personify the world, which is to suppose that purposive intentionality creates everything. But the binocular culture which perceives with the materialist lens in one eye and the world-personifying lens in the other is spectacularly unsuccessful delivering peace and justice in its political and governance arrangements, and no wonder. Science and religion have in common a fundamental legitimation of patriarchal hierarchy as core social organization. To be clear, this is top-down human-on-human macro parasitism, various forms of the master/ slave relationship. Religious personification asserts that such organization is the eternal divine plan (divinity is the primordial master), and scientific fatalism that such a food chain is made inevitable by immutable forces of nature. These are both conceptions of existence as profoundly complete, without any possibility for the creation of real novelty. In that context governance is a matter of imposing on everyone an orientation up the hierarchy for a sense of direction derived from an overarching culturally stipulated drama.

Culture in this sense is the complex system of imitative, repetitive, and normative human activity that expresses and sustains a collective’s sense of unity and identity. This is the sense in which culture, in the context of patriarchal parasitism, imposes a hive-mind on its participants. This has produced and maintained dystopian political regimes poisoned by the history of war culture abetted by religions that demand irrational credulity and fervent expressions of reverence and supplication upward, situating deity at the apex of human hierarchy. Outsourcing the determination of reality to a God, impersonal Platonic Ideas, or even just nature denigrates human ideality by alienating the creative work of conceptualization actually required and accomplished by individuals orienting ourselves in the world. It represents human interiority as a passive recipient of a pre-completed world, including the social and political world, and has the effect of cementing individuals into a mass mythology of inadequacy and dependence. Science further denigrates personal interiority by reducing it to biologically pre-determined lusts and reactions to external stimuli, and religion denigrates it as an engine of error and misery, completely hopeless without the controlling intervention of some more perfect and powerful personification.

Individual ideality, however, is profoundly more active and creative than religion or science can recognize. The primordial act of self-creation by every ideality is the supposition of time. Ideality is the non-actuality which supposes. Every ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating time-wave, living in and through a constant flight through time. A time-wave is a dramatically-propelled progressive change of suppositions. One vector of this flight consists of things slipping by and falling away, and the other vector is a dramatic personal leap into a supposed future. Time is a personal dimension of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality in which, oriented with knowledge, expectations, and questions abstracted from a supposed ephemeral past, an intelligence creates specific intentions to project itself with a degree of creative freedom into an ever-newly-opening not-yet or future. This being-in-time distinguishes ideality from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the opening of freedom-from-nature at the edge of existence and as such the transcendence that spiritual interiority brings to the beach of reality. With an appropriate sense of this interiority the personal importance of competitions and appearances falls away. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles, personal hero story) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant conceptual system.

The political difference made by recognizing persons universally as metaphysical engines of spontaneous creativity, exploiting a precarious position at the edge of existence by improvising a desperately caring drama of sensitivity and personal expression, is a flattening of the political landscape. There is no justification here for master/ slave social organization. There is no general disrespect or denigration of humanity/ personality inherent in this conception. The political imperative changes from imposing control via belligerent us-against-them hive minds to cultivating and encouraging autonomous creativity and person-to-person interconnections shaped by empathy.

The often lamented malaise of civilization is the result of extreme cultural denigration of humanity/ personality combined with a romantic overestimation of the explanatory power of mathematical science. These have killed off innovative thinking involving metaphysics, but only a certain metaphysical reconceptualization can amend the currently toxic cultural legacy.

Note

* ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of pre-conceiving future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Christianity taught, and European Christendom accepted for centuries, that the human spiritual drama, our unique opportunity for ethical elevation by coming to know and align with the transcendent deity, is the purpose of all existence. Humans were thought to be the primary achievement of the all-creating God. Born as an exile into an initial state of disgrace within the lusts, pains, and thrills of a mortal body, each human is capable of recognizing its existence as more authentically one of transcendent spirituality and changing its way of life to express that spirituality. The worldly society of Christendom, controlled at all levels by the hierarchy and laws of the Roman Church in partnership with the secular military aristocracy, was accepted as the means by which individuals were guided to the spiritual life, a state of grace whose reward was blissful immortality. In the sixteenth century, within a broad advance of science, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered and revealed that the human home planet was not the centre of God’s cosmos, suggesting a more marginal status for human being. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin presented findings suggesting that humans are indistinguishable from animals, just naked apes, driven by instinctive drives and passions beyond individual control, with no qualitative specialness placing us in a uniquely elevated category. For much of the educated stratum of nineteenth century Europe, this apparent loss of human standing in the great scheme of things was a revelation of nihilism, a catastrophic loss of purpose and value. This was the context in which Nietzsche conceived his mission of thinking.

With God removed from the human situation, the Christian drama of existence faded out and with it the sense of meaning and purpose derived from that drama. Reflecting on human history soon reveals that no eventual outcome of biological evolution can give value and meaning to human existence, since it is unknowable, nor can the historical progress of human civilization do it since that reveals no verifiable arc toward a fulfillment. In the absence of these large structures as navigational guides the problem of meaning and purpose becomes entirely the individual’s problem and actually defines, on Nietzsche’s view, the monadic singularity of the human individual, the loneliest loneliness. As it happens, however, the fundamental nature or quality of individual spirit, the will to power, contains within itself a dramatic dynamic capable of achieving happiness, and so defeating nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the universal ethical and existential imperative for every individual is self-perfection, though that achievement is possible only for strong domineering spirits. Only the strongest spirits are capable of the happiness of self-perfection because only the strongest are capable of self-domination or self-overcoming by sublimating the instinctive animal impulses (Dionysian) into products of a dominant personal rationality (Apollonian), imposing a unifying form and style on all expressions of that sublimated energy. This Dionysian – Apollonian dialectic is the intrinsic dynamic of the will to power, the fundamental living force. Culture that is elevating to behold and appropriate is created from the sublimation of bestial impulses and instincts. Even though those impulses and instincts originate in and always declare the body, without them there is no energy to be sublimated into high art and culture. Strong and passionate impulses require an even stronger force of rationality to impose form and style on them. Artists and philosophers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, are typically the people who discipline themselves to sublimate their great passions into creative activities. Nietzsche calls such spirits ubermensch, higher men, the only people of value in his estimation because in the ecstasy of their original creation they uniquely manifest authentic individuality. Specimens of higher men are rare and occur unpredictably in various times, societies, races, and ethnic groups, and it seems that for Nietzsche they are “The Elect”, forever predetermined for blessedness. The rest of us are a herd of doomed beasts of no interest or value, sometimes spiritualized to some extent by encountering the achievements of the higher ones.

There are striking similarities between Nietzsche’s conception of the drama and tragedy of existence and the previously dominant one from Christendom. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. Separation of people into The Elect and the damned is one similarity. Both dramas involve a tension or dialectic between animal embodiment and some version of a transcendent spirituality which exerts itself against animality and offers a happier and more authentically meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s version, however, the impulses of the body are never left behind but always remain the source of life’s energy. In addition, Nietzsche’s spiritualizing, sublimating, force is militant rationality, giver of expressive form, stability, and style, replacing the poor Christian spirit of meek obedient submission, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, and altruism.

Such was Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. It is philosophically unusual in recasting the Christian drama by eliminate a commanding and controlling deity while still finding a way to divide blessed from damned. That vision clearly doesn’t defeat nihilism for everyone, only for the precious few his message was apparently designed to reach. However, if we discount Nietzsche’s peculiar aristocratic exclusivity, we can appreciate his “Yes” to embodiment as inseparable from the ecstasy of personal creativity, his close attention to the interior experience of creativity and its independence from any conformist herd mind.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.

Zarathustra’s Secret, written by Joachim Kohler, translated from German by Ronald Taylor, Published by Yale University Press (English edition June 2002), ISBN-10: 0300092784, ISBN-13: 978-0300092783.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.