Category Archives: Hierarchy

Contesting the External Almighty

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in Class War, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 167, Word Count: 3,113.

Plato’s External Almighty

Plato’s metaphysics is an example of an idealism determined to think of ideas as things, in Plato’s case as magical objects. Including magic was Plato’s way of making use of the specialness of ideality (not reducing everything to measurable lumps) but without admitting the full specialness as evident in the direct personal experience of ordinary personalities. Plato’s account was still quasi-religious as an elaborate speculation on occult structure to the world, featuring the dominance of a super-intelligence remote enough to be convincingly transcendent: One Platonic heaven to rule them all, a deliberating universal source. The master tenet of Platonism is a model of existence with Ideal Forms as magical objects near the top of a cosmic hierarchy. The magical objects are immaterial exemplars, eternally immutable but creating all existence below them on the hierarchy of existence by each reproducing images of itself, less stable or exact with every iteration. This is Platonic essentialism, in which the ultimate divisions and categories of things in the entirety of reality are externally given forever in a way that happens to be apparent to human perception. The Ideal Forms are near the top of a structure of descent from a divine oneness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Unlike the constant change of things experienced by human senses, the Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the time, place, and gross materiality of the day-to-day world, and associated with a divine super-intelligence.

Plato’s conception of reality also included other occurrences of intelligence, specifically in the human experience of personal interiority, the soul (ideality, personality). Plato’s model was a three part soul: appetite, competitive spirit, and rational cognition. The soul conceived by Plato was preset with those particular sensitivities and postures toward temporally fleeting appearances, a reflector from within of the world descended from remote Ideal Forms. The three Platonic postures of the soul corresponded to three distinctly unequal categories of people, implying a kind of government in which sovereign power is properly performed in accord with the innate quality of class membership (still going strong and dystopian now as it was then). The personal Platonic soul as an exemplar of ideality was incomparably less important than the originals of things in the apparently objective world, the Ideal Forms, which were distinctly separate from ordinary souls, in no way commensurate.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, from Republic, Book VII, we see Plato’s version of something else of importance in the relationship between the individual human soul and his prime exemplars of ideality. In the story, a crowd of people is watching shapes move about in front of them. They do not know they are in a dark sloping cave, and they are looking at a wall at the bottom of the cave. There are people outside the cave, near the entrance, carrying cut-out images, models of objects, back and forth in the direct light of a fire beaming down into the cave, so that the cut-out images cast shadows all the way down onto the wall at the bottom. The people in the cave believe they are perceiving real objects, when in fact they are seeing shadows of cut-out images of objects. One person in the crowd at the bottom of the cave, presumably thinking philosophically, separates himself and turns away from the wall of images, and sees that he is in a cave with light streaming down from above. He makes his way up the slope and reaches the top where he sees the cut-out images being moved about, casting shadows down into the cave, which the crowd at the bottom mistakes for reality. The story describes allegorically the profound relationship between the individual interior ideality and the truly transcendent Ideal Forms, such that the rational-cognitive aspect of individual interiority has the power to come to know, to behold intellectually, the eternal and immutable core of reality, and that is Plato’s vision of the great drama of human existence, the achievement of philosophical insight.

[Fragment 130, July 4, 2018, How Aristotle Placed Personality (word count: 1,368)]

Plato’s Ideal Forms were one depiction of the transcendence of ideality (intelligence, spirituality, abstraction), but conceived in a way to completely avoid the play of capricious divine personalities familiar from tales of Olympian gods, but also to avoid the reality of human level spiritual autonomy (always worrisome to community-minded aristocrats such as Plato). The association of Plato’s Ideal Forms with intelligent personality is so far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some have imagined as divine intelligence that what remains is merely a transcendent or magical power of self-reproduction, self-image projection, that defines this set of objects. Platonic idealism has been the most influential metaphysics by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the conception of reality at the core of European high culture. With the rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire, from beginnings among nomadic herders in the arid regions adjacent to the ancient fertile crescent, Platonism collided with the dominance of a new orientation, but being so well established in the Hellenistic cultural region it was largely incorporated into this upstart Christian Monotheism. In Plato-tinged Christianity the God on high did His work of creation in stages plausibly beginning with Platonic Ideal Forms. Christianity was also a strictly top-down vision with assumptions of an immutable hierarchy of worldly power and wealth, this time with an omnipotent divine surveillance-agent, score-keeper, and executioner at the top, intent on interfering in human affairs to maintain the chain of subordination, an all powerful super-parental watcher and controller, the mere presence of which immediately defines ordinary human existence as victim-existence. Such a conception of humanity is the matrix of dystopian societies. In Christianity, the capricious divine personalities familiar in Olympian gods were reduced to a single capricious divine personality, the one God of Abraham, but in the process a bit more of the richness of ordinary ideality was returned to the conception.

The Christian External Almighty

Christianity was another idealism, with contributions from Platonism. The world as a whole was perceived as a living Being, fundamentally personified. The innermost reality of all existence was an expressive and creative teleological will, an ideality. In the culture of feudal Christendom, intelligent consciousness (personality) was indisputably the crucial presence in and of the world, but it featured a grotesque bifurcation with two starkly different versions and placements: divine personality and then its creature, human personalty, initially created as very imperfect images of divine personality (sound Platonic?). In Christian idealism, the divine personality’s core creation was the great drama of human souls and their journey. There was a recognized sameness of transcendence between human and divine personality since both produce coherent utterances and acts expressive of the ideation of caring, knowledge, and intention, quite unlike the lumps of inanimate nature. Only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the essence of creation. Teleology anticipates conditions and objects which do not exist except in personal ideation, but which might possibly be made to exist if a specific anticipated agency is exercised through an increasingly remote and improbable future. This is living as enacted and experienced by human persons all the time and, supposedly, also for the power which created them and their entire world. This teleology of creation is the crucial identifier of personality, expressed as curiosity, caring, questioning, learning (accumulating orientation or sensibility), and expressive voice or agency, all teleological postures. In Christendom, the whole meaning and drama of existence as a whole centred on the relationship and interactions between the divine personality and human personalities as both individuals and collectives: the great drama of human salvation from inherent guilt, of earning a return from exile (Eden) back to a close presence with divine personality. Concrete nature was a trivial backdrop, merely a platform or staging, with no importance in itself, in which the drama of personality could play out. This was a strong idealism. There was no clash with Platonism in that, since in Plato’s idealism the eternal Ideal Forms were real, but the ephemeral objects experienced by humans in time were just shimmery images and appearances.

The Roman Church hierarchy was certainly committed to the idealism of teleological persons, with divine personality as the sole source and final destination of everything. Voices promoting Christianity expressed hatred for Epicurean materialism, for example. For Christians, of course, all interior souls had to be punishable for breaking God’s commandments, so they had to be understood as having some moral judgment and choice. That was an upgrade from Plato’s conception of humans as rational beholders of eternal Forms but a small one since, on the Christian conception, original sin almost always determined human choices to be bad. As such, people had to be forced into submission by the religious and civic authorities established by God. That patriarchal conception inspired and sanctified the very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical top-down societies of feudal Christendom, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic personality to tilt benign. Feudal Christendom was a grossly dystopian society.

The Contestant

The Spirit of Protestantism emerged around the fourteenth century associated with the countercultural movement for universal vernacular literacy to give everyone private access to reading God’s words in the Bible, so, remarkably, assuming an ordinary personal interiority of sufficient gravitas to interpret the most profound Divine message without mediation or guidance from the Church. That was a profound upgrade over both Plato and Roman Church conceptions of the individual soul, so much so that now the conception of human interiority as the exemplar of ideality became more important by far than some speculative prototype of worldly objects, which anyway were only staging for the great drama of existence: the moral journey of the individual soul. The experience of locally embodied individual personality, neither external nor almighty, is always the personally original example of ideality and ideas, and so of transcendent creativity. This was finally having a decisive influence on how ideas were conceived. Then came Martin Luther (1483-1546) as a living example of autonomous moral judgment and Biblical interpretation. Luther’s autonomous gravitas went as far as facing down the entire edifice of the Church hierarchy. It was crucial to standard divine-drama idealism that nothing could rival the overwhelming fascination of the unitary divine personality, the external almighty, and that is where the contradiction with Luther and his spirit of Protestantism arose, because by the time of Luther’s expression of individual humanity, the most ordinary human interior ideality was credited with power to posit reality, as, for example, in choosing or not choosing faith. This recognized a moral journey created moment by moment by the individual person, and approached the independence of agency conceived for divine personality. Such a power implies that an individual is inherently more faceted and with greater capacity for a variety of orientations than anything proclaimed culturally as a collective reality and identity. This was a more advanced humanism than anything from the ancient schools. It was still Christianity, but a version in which the power of individual inwardness was a more active focus of interest and discovery than even the remote and speculative external almighty God. Luther’s vision of autonomous individual interiority, an idealism focused on a primary ideality unlike Plato’s, brought official Christendom down on it like an avalanche. Outbreaks of Protestantism were viciously assaulted in the French Wars of Religion (1562-98) and in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) in Germany, and in many other times and places. The key idea of Protestant idealism, that the inward experience of individuals is the important exemplar of ideality, and so of transcendence, was effectively driven underground, only to emerge very tentatively in Leibniz’s monads, then more boldly in Kant.

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

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

Luther was never a political disruptor but always supported the institutions of political sovereignty he found in place. His focus stayed on Biblical interpretation as a guide for living a Christian life. However, this was somewhat inconsistent with the general spirit of Protestantism. As early as Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, there was an association between the movement for popular vernacular literacy and the English Peasants’ Revolt (1381), just as Luther’s religious movement was associated with a German Peasants’ Revolt (1524-25) against which Luther wrote viciously. Protestantism survived, obviously, but in many different expressions, some apparently radical, and some very much under the thumb of aristocracy and monarchy, the sovereign institutions as they existed in Old Regime Europe. Lutheranism was one of the latter, muted in its disruptive potential by dependence on the protective power of state institutions. The Calvinist cluster of sects could be politically radical, but with divine predestination as a central article of faith, they offered no confrontational upgrade to the conception of ordinary human interior ideality.

External Almighty Restoration

In the cultural turmoil after the European wars of religion, the work of Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) combined materialism with a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance: Church, Monarchy, and Aristocracy. Materialism certainly undermined claims by upper levels of the social hierarchy to be directly appointed agents of divinity, since it eliminated an interventionist divinity. It based its political claims on conceptions of what a primordial state of nature would have been, unspoiled by false assertions of exceptionalism through divine intervention. (Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) used the same approach.) On Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are the attributes of a single external almighty “God or Nature”. He presented it as a universal substance transforming along strictly pre-determined patterns, and yet there is a non-mechanistic aspect embedded since this is a substance with innate aspects of intelligence (hylozoist), necessary to account for the human experience of intelligent questioning and teleology. This subjective force in Spinoza’s world is the uncredited magic in his disenchanted system, yet Spinoza’s hylozoist materialism did not raise the profile of the individual person’s interior ideality. Spinoza presented a monist world of God in Nature, with a conception of individual ideality only sufficient to account for rational engagement with the world, driven by preset postures, specifically drives for self-preservation and self-advantage. This is not so different from Plato (but without defining essentially unequal categories of people). Human experience and action were conceived as just more mechanistic structures. On Spinoza’s view the drama of human existence is a petty thing, a scrabble for dominance against all contenders. This view persists in much contemporary science and economics, presenting the drama of human existence as biologically driven conflicts to select the fittest for dominance. On the cosmic scale there is no drama, only an entirely predetermined tumble through an inevitable sequence of events.

[Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (word count: 3,287)]

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

The drama in Spinoza’s work is political, involving the vision of a primordial state of nature contrasting mightily with the sovereign institutions of the Old Regime as Spinoza found them. On such a view, there must have been at some point a dramatic fall from the state of nature, but, with everything predetermined, that should not be conceivable. Spinoza’s authorship was an attempt to begin a reversal of that inexplicable political alienation from nature. In taking the lead in a radical critique of existing hierarchies of power, Spinoza’s materialism occupied the vacuum left by the brutal suppression of Luther’s implicit idealism. Spinoza’s materialism accorded closely with the rising tide of mathematical and materialist science in intellectual networks, the Republic of Letters, which prominently included embattled Calvinists already committed to metaphysical pre-destination, a view which minimized the autonomy of individual interiority as much as materialism did. In this way an ultimate contest with the dominant cultural proclamation of an External Almighty was avoided, but at the cost of conserving the dystopian consequences of that tenet. On the Spinoza/ scientific view, God in Nature was the External Almighty, a match in cosmic importance with the God of Christendom. The existence of the individual as ideality remained well bounded and clearly subordinate. Spinoza was far more interested in the external almighty, what appears under the aspect of eternity, than he was in anything essentially engaged in the movement of time, as ideality is. To construct a conceptual system of reality “under the aspect of eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis), as Spinoza laboured to do, is to embrace the very opposite of the life of intelligences. Objects can be defined by measurements from an instant, but ideality is one of the two vectors of time, specifically the creatively aspirational vector. Ideas and ideality are essentially temporal, searching and opening future-ward.

[Fragment 166, July 28, 2020, Time is a Dual Instability (word count: 417)]

Here’s The Thing

The values which challenged and began to disrupt the long entrenched social dystopias forged by aristocrats, monarchs, and the Church represented the quest for a post-dystopian society featuring equality, universally distributed dignity and rights for individuals, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and democracy. That aspiration for a post-patriarchal future followed from the idealism of individual interiority at the core of the spirit of early protestantism, the authentic heart of Enlightenment. No kind of materialism, not Spinoza’s hylozoist materialism, not the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, not scientific materialism, can be tortured into being the source or guarantor of such values. Materialism excludes teleological personality, leaving a strict determinism and unfreedom, and the disappearance of transcendence into meaninglessness. Any form of determinism will cash out insisting that everything must be the way it is, sanctifying tradition and ever recurring cycles, the core position of the dystopian preservationists, the political right-wing.

The political left-wing, as the conceiver of a post-dystopian future, must be a party of idealism, because it must elaborate the idea that humanity keeps revising its conceptions of reality in such a way as to live better. That is impossible unless the genius of humanity is a creative freedom at the level of the embodied individual to re-conceptualize itself moment to moment. With the idealism of individual interiority, there is no external almighty proclaiming a cosmic drama. Drama is the creative fabric of every living individual.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Self-Thinking Idea

15 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 164, word count: 553.

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

Vedanta is an Idealism

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Arc of the Monad

09 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 158, word count: 803.

This is the story of a crucial modern rethinking of human nature. The monad is a conception of the organization of ordinary human consciousness presented by Leibniz in 1714. There is no hardware in Leibniz’ vision of the world formed of monads, only individual instances of ordinary consciousness having coherent experiences composed of images and other impressions of a world that does not exist in any other way. In this conception, the world is the setting of some vast number of these subjects having experiences. This world of monads is entirely a world of ideas, a strictly idealist world. In Leibniz’ vision the monads, even though not anchored to a concrete material world, were not self sufficient because the entire content of their consciousness was supplied by an omnipotent deity who had pre-determined everything, every event and change in exact detail, at the moment of creation. Although the monads are “windowless” with no personal agency in constructing knowledge of anything, experiences are coordinated among the monads by the deity to simulate a coherent unity of shared surroundings, in which they seem to engage with one another. Later in the century (1781), Kant’s idealism was a development and modification of this legacy from Leibniz. It focused on understanding instances of ordinary consciousness, but introduced two structural changes. Kant removed the deity as the single supplier of experiences and added hardware in the form of the external “thing in itself”, a surrounding objective world which was not reducible to ideas. Kant’s monads had something like windows onto the external hardware, but their transparency was far from perfect. The “thing in itself” could never be known directly, but Kant was convinced that it must exist as an influence on, and partial source of, the coherent impressions and images that are the content of experience. Following Kant closely (1795), Fichte also engaged with this legacy of ordinary consciousness idealism. His innovation was to remove Kant’s “thing in itself”, the hardware, from the conception of reality, and he didn’t bring back the deity. So, by the end of the eighteenth century with Fichte, the deity was gone along with the hardware (the thing in itself) leaving only truly self-subsisting monadic subjectivities each structured as a distinct “I”. In Fichte’s work these subjectivities are independent sources of suppositions. Each “I” posits, creating the ideas of itself and its entire world from its own interiority. Fichte’s vision effectively eliminates the fundamental distinction in Christendom and creationist monotheism generally between human and divine personality. This is not a declaration of the death of God, but instead a reconceptualization of the place of creative transcendence in human experience.

These are conceptions of idealism in which ideality is always personality, in which all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of some personality, structured as an elaborate “I”, the subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s life in the world. In the case of Leibniz, one of those personalities was unique by being divine. This idealism (conception of ideality) is special in the history of philosophy as a sharp contrast to more familiar kinds such as Platonic or Hegelian idealism in which the primary ideas are remote, impersonal, and cosmically scaled drivers of nature and history. Monadic idealism is much more compatible with the spirit of science than is creationist monotheism which includes disembodied angels and demons, and it makes sense of the claim that human nature is inclined and competent to conceive questions that enable discoveries and scientific knowledge, which mechanistic science itself fails to explain. (It isn’t enough to stipulate that knowledge comes from experience without accounting for questions.) Monadic idealism did not permanently imprint popular or intellectual culture because it is politically problematic: it does not denigrate human nature sufficiently to support existing political and other hierarchical institutions of social control. Any aspiration for cultural, social, and political change must be founded on idealism of some non-Platonic and non-Hegelian kind, and so such idealism will be feared and loathed by forces of conservatism.

This developmental arc of the conception of monadic ideality marks out the tendency of post-reformation Lutheran-stream Protestant idealism to retain a sense of transcendence (the creative freedom of ideality) but increasingly to relocate the occurrence of transcendence from a remote central deity to ordinary individual human personalities. The influence of Martin Luther (1483-1546) is behind the whole stream, with his conception of spiritually capable and independent individuals like himself, Bible readers, doubters and questioners, takers of mental leaps. The monadic idealism that emerged from Luther’s influence plays a crucial part in the spirit of protestantism that decisively shaped Euro-American Enlightenment along with the spirit of science, each protesting against authority. Modern people expect to be treated as Kant/Fichte-style monads without grasping the concept.

Note: The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Max Stirner (1806-56), Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Gratification

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Fragment 152, word count: 296.

Any politically left view must express a recognition that the most important human gratifications are not from things gained in competitions, so not property, and especially not scarce types of property, not trophies of any kind. Since the normal and traditional concept of sovereign government is a set of institutions for the preservation and protection of property ownership and the rights of property ownership, there is a discord between leftist politics and normal government. Truly leftist politics is inherently antagonistic to traditional sovereignty’s structural focus on protecting property possession. There is a politically crucial division between the class of people in possession of sufficient property to provide them with significant income and the class of people without income-providing property who must sell their work, skills, or knowledge to support themselves. The propertied class always imagines that the unpropertied seek to take possession of their property for themselves, to replace them as the propertied class. That is the interpretation of “revolution” in the propertied hive mind, but it is not a truly leftist aspiration. Competitive hierarchies need stark “us against them” conceptual constructs: master/ slave, predator/ prey, victor/ vanquished, but those dichotomies are foreign to the leftist outlook, just as envy is. The desperate force of envy and avarice is seen in eagerness for competitions and trophies. The leftist aspiration is to delight in gratifications which fountain up from the interior of personal intelligence, creative impulses of all kinds, often expressed in an interplay among different voices, and to celebrate impulses to nurture, to become skillful, and to expand knowledge and understanding. Progress for the left is a reformation of attitudes and experiences of gratification at the level of every individual, a disengagement from the cultured hive mind of dominance, and a discovery of self-possession.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Free-Agent Idealism

16 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 149, word count: 635

Plato made philosophers the kings of his ideal republic because he asserted an essential relationship between politics (community leadership, the proclamation and application of laws) and knowledge of a transcendent force creating fundamental reality. For Plato, there is a structure to reality that includes a crucial transcendence feature, immaterial Ideal Forms. Philosophers are specialists in transcendence, uniquely attentive to the transcendence feature of reality. On Plato’s understanding, philosophical insight into transcendence is the guiding treasure of any society because an ultimately sustainable political system must actualize an alignment between human lives, the structure of their relationships, and the transcendence that is crucial in creating reality. As specialists in transcendence, philosophers uniquely are in a position to conceive and communicate appropriate political arrangements, according to Plato’s Republic.

Plato’s idealism made transcendence politically conservative by removing ideas from ordinary personalities, in whom we are first acquainted with ideas: intentions, caring, curiosity, anticipation, aspiration, evaluation, and orientation, for example. Plato separated category ideas from the life of particular personalities and spun a very influential cosmic conception from that separation, but it was a serious violation of the ordinary experience of ideas. As far as our ordinary experience is concerned, all varieties of ideality occur together in the arcs of spontaneity and creativity familiar as embodied personalities. With Platonic idealism, although the Ideal Forms create reality in some sense, there is no profound spontaneity or freedom. Nature and everything within it is nothing more than copies of copies of the immaterial Forms. Although some serious instability and unreliability enter those copies the more removed they are from the originals, there is a core to everything, a structure of categorical types, that must be eternally as it is predestined to be. When idealism is construed as Plato conceived it, there is a rigid eternal pattern that everything follows necessarily, but idealism can and should be conceived otherwise.

Idealism asserts the importance of a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual and still indispensable in any comprehensive conception of reality. As an affirmation of ideality as supra-actuality, it is latently explosive politically as an assertion of something more important than (and with power over and within) whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world. Such supra-actuality is a conception of transcendence, and any strong idea of freedom (as points and arcs of spontaneous creativity, novelty, and indeterminacy) requires such a conception. Supra-actuality could be eternally stable as in Platonic idealism, or, far more plausibly, it could be free agency in time. In articulating the importance of this non-actuality, any free-agent idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with conceptions of idealism. (Consider the historical consequences of Hegel’s idealism.)

When the points and arcs of spontaneous creativity, of transcendent supra-actuality creating freedom, are not separated from the ordinary living of individual personalities, in whom we are well acquainted with ideas, then idealism implies a political situation which is completely different from Plato’s rigid hierarchy. With free-agent idealism everybody should qualify as a philosopher king. To align with ordinary embodied personalities as transcendence features fundamental in reality is to recognize every single person, every sentient being, every being who has a voice and breathes, as a creative agent, uttering a personal expression which cannot be completely pre-ordained or predicted. Such a conception implies protections, resources, and freedoms for individuals, and limits on what any power might legitimately claim from them. Plato certainly misconstrued ideas, but what he got right was that insight into transcendence is crucial for conceiving a sustainable politics.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Birth of the Left

22 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Fragment 148, word count: 628.

As long as the ubiquitous metaphysics in the European cultural system was creationist monotheism, there was a blanket sanctification for the rights and privileges (ultimately sovereignty) of the strongest, since they are evidently favoured by deity and typically partnered with priestly institutions dedicated to studying and proclaiming divine messages. However, that blanket sanctification was disrupted beginning as early as the later fourteenth century, gradually building toward the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789-99. Over those four centuries there was a convergence between two distinct philosophical streams in the developing culture of western Christendom, one stream focused on the nature and movement of objects and the other on the status and dignity of the subjective personality of individual humans relative to divine personality. The object-focused stream was mechanistic materialism (anti-Aristotelian) inspired by Lucretius (ancient Roman Epicurean materialist rediscovered in the Renaissance) via Spinoza (1632-1677). Such scientific materialism was used to undercut claims of the divine right of kings, aristocracy, and Church to dominate society, but it also re-conceived human nature as being inclined to rationality, with the inherent ability to reason mathematically and logically, to question, recognize relevant evidence, investigate and judge reality. In other words, it recognized humans as competent to acquire scientific knowledge of the natural world. This was a profound upgrade in human dignity compared with the Christian teaching of hopeless inherent sinfulness since the Fall from Grace. There was a serious effort in this philosophical stream to make human rationality consistent with a mechanistic universe. (Materialism always stumbles over an awkwardness to accommodate conscious ideality, intelligence.) The other stream was also a major upgrade to general human dignity. It was a stream of thinking about human spirituality, expressed in an early form in the remarkable work of John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), concerning the individual self-sufficiency to read and understand the Biblical word of God. This developed as the spirit of Protestantism, ascribing to individuals the inherent nobility to engage with deity directly, without interceding saints or priestly sacraments empowered by the institutional Church, along with the innate power to take a mental leap to faith (Luther), which is to posit conceptions of reality. Both of these streams of thought had philosophical force, and their combined history accounts for why the political left-wing is the party of philosophy: because the convergence of these streams of philosophical thinking came to conceive human nature as having the inherent dignity of rationality and creative self-possession, in the spirit of protestantism but also extending beyond religion into secular politics. Even the protestant stream contains an implicit politics: with God exercising sovereignty directly within every individual’s intelligence, there is no justification for any military commander-in-chief to exercise sovereignty as a local expression of divine will.

Democracy is an expression of the political left-wing, an assertion (against the age-old dominance of the strongest) of the rights to political self-determination of the most numerous class of people who must sell labour for wages to survive because they possess little or nothing. It is leftist to derive inherent and inalienable rights from mere sentient existence, from the inherent dignity of life prior to any possession of property. Based on this philosophical convergence, developed over a long troubled history, there is no metaphysical justification for any claim that a collective can own anyone, or that anyone can own anyone, even on the grounds of being the strongest. No one has a metaphysical obligation or duty to submit to or be subject to the commands of a collective or individual, no matter how gifted. There is no metaphysical commanding height. The crucial freedom is the freedom to disbelieve the bogus metaphysics that sustains the dystopia: that rights belong to the strongest.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Frontier Freedom

21 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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Fragment 143, word count: 447.

The Franks, Goths, Angles, and Saxons and a number of other groups came overland into western Europe around the fourth century, colonizing and displacing indigenous peoples there who had previously been colonized and were now abandoned by the imperial Romans. Somewhat over a thousand years later, from the sixteenth century, descendants of those Goths, Franks, Angles, and Saxons, now fully Christianized European imperialists, subjected the indigenous peoples of America and many other places to the same assaults with new weapons. Deja vu all over again. There is an essential racism at the core of such violence, an idea of superiority which licenses any brutality. That idea of hierarchy derived from the macro-parasitism of herding culture on the Great Eurasian Steppe. Subjected people were perceived as livestock. In both colonizations there was a profound contempt for empathy which defined a (Kantian) lawlessness and ensured that the supreme value would be personal fighting ability and a culture of organized fighting which came to define masculinity. In that situation, it is the strongest who claim rights to anything that might count as a trophy, not just property but lives. Without empathy, rights (and everything else) belong to the strongest, and frontier freedom is the assertion of the superiority of the strongest and the unlimited rights of superior beings. Theirs is a parasitic freedom that creates and depends on slavery and murder. The American idea of freedom grounded in the freedom of the old western frontier is identical to a romantic idea of medieval feudalism in western Europe and expresses a cultural memory of that experience *. Frontier freedom (no taxes, no regulations, private guns) is the freedom of the marauder. This idea of freedom in which strength in combat and competition defines rights is still a living force in cultures of value and wealth based on consumption and trophy property, conspicuous in normal operations of corporations and generally in investor supremacist capitalism.

These cultural experiences have inspired a certain idea of human nature as a blank slate, an inherent problem (of non-existence craving existence) overcome more or less successfully by projection of a self-image using external consumables, properties, and the conflicts to possess such things. The strongest or fittest are revealed by the quantity and sparkle of the properties they conquer. This is the metaphysics of patriarchy, propaganda for the romantic idea that the strongest are legitimate sovereigns. However, human nature and freedom are really quite different. Human nature is the spontaneous creation of freedom at the level of the embodied individual, a creation that is interior to the individual as ideality. This universally inherent freedom of the individual is invisible to anyone conceiving psychology without conceiving ideality.

* Compare Chapter 8, ‘The Frontier’, pp. 103-117, in: A Vanished World : Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment, written by Christopher Lowney, Published by Free Press (2005), ISBN: 0743243595.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

 

The Most Important Event in History

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 140, word count: 1,077.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived as a living Being, personified. The innermost reality of all existence was sensed as an expressive voice, creative personality, willful teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the essence of creation. However, that conception of teleological personality was structured weirdly, as bimodal, with a divine version and a strictly subordinate human version. There was a recognized sameness of transcendence between human and divine personality since both produce coherent utterances and acts expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, unlike inanimate nature. This bimodal personality informs the religious view of the purpose and meaning of life and existence. (In Aristotle’s minority opinion there is yet another version of teleology, final cause, a minimalist bundle of impulses in every individual object, not so dissimilar from his stripped down conception of divine personality in celestial spheres. Aristotle’s instances of final cause are so minimal that they seem almost mechanical, lacking spontaneity. Remarkably, those object essences were incorporated into the Christian conception of nature through the work of Thomas Aquinas.) The point is: for by far most of human cultural history the foundational and clearest kind of existence conceived was the living of vectors of ideality, the teleological vectors of caring we call personalities, known primarily in everyone’s personal experience of caring and of familiar interactions with other beings who express caring. Caring is an ideality at the heart of the transcendence of personality. Things matter to personalities as caring beings. The conditions of our living within a variable world are important to us. Without caring personalities nothing has any importance, nothing matters.

So, considering the question “What should we make of the existence of personality (teleology)?”; we note that what religion makes of it is the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but most truly at home at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, part of a weird denigration of human personality by comparison, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of a cosmic master situated as divine judge and tester of all, a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over everything less powerful. That patriarchal conception of teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical top-down societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic teleology to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

The scientific Enlightenment pitched a new idea of fundamental reality, arguably the most important event in history, ridding humankind from oppressive superstitious dread and leaping beyond previous physical limitations through a deeper engagement with nature. It did this by abandoning personification in a transition to an inertial/ entropic conception of events, nothing less than the complete elimination of teleology from the thought of reality. What science makes of teleology, then, is nothing, proposing to interpret all apparent instances of teleology as mechanical structures, pre-set responses triggered by random stimuli. Note that this amounted to an even worse denigration of individual human personality than the weird bimodal religious conception. Materialist science claims the elimination of metaphysics since any idea of transcendence is excluded. However, science presents its ultimate mystery of space/ time/ mass/ energy, Nature, as a distinctly sovereign transcendence, omnipotent and predestining events forever in an extreme version of Calvinism. The novelty is that the scientific mystery is a dead thing, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in the absence of teleological persons, absolutely doesn’t matter. As such, the scientific revolution was the cultural expression of a metaphysical speculation which unfortunately served exactly the same sanctifying function for existing patriarchal political structures as the weird idea of divine personality.

Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics

An attack, widely considered persuasive, on the idea of personalities as coherent and fundamental realities is David Hume’s empiricist survey of his experience. Like the self for which Hume (no stranger to Calvinism) searched his subjectivity in vain, language competence is also nowhere to be discovered in the “bundle of impressions” that Hume identified. Introspection of the kind described by Hume reveals nothing like a sophisticated linguistic competence, elaborated over a long period of social interactions, but such competence is certainly and crucially present in the whole framework of adult orientation from which any individual makes sense of immediate sensations which arrive and pass as Hume described. Hume was skeptical of the continuity (and so the existence) of a subject, a personality, but linguistic competence does not flit in and out of an individual’s subjectivity like an atomic impression of red. It endures and is built upon, learned and reinvented over a lengthy and complex experience involving the creative arc of developmental continuity of an enduring personality making and integrating insights. Linguistic competence is also very personal, expressing a reading history, for example, as well as regional peculiarities of dialect. (Individual voices exist independently of language and always apply pressure on language-culture to suit their particular ideas of expression, clearly accomplished in the case of William Shakespeare.) Linguistic competence is a complex elaboration of an individual’s orientation in a life in the world, importantly different from a bundle of sensory atoms or impressionistic imprints.

General acceptance of the scientific metaphysics did not eliminate dystopian patriarchal societies devoted to war, but merely put stronger energies, more massively destructive weapons, into the hands of their controlling minorities. Those factions gained new entitlement as instruments of omnipotent nature, above reproach since morality and empathy do not apply to people as mechanistic structures. The root problem in both metaphysical speculations considered here, religion and science, is the perverse denigration of ordinary human personality. As untidy as it might be, the only hope for release from the straight jacket of superstitious dread and the straight jacket of nihilism in the face of all-predetermining Nature is a recognition of two coexisting mysteries: brute uncaring nature and, within it, a vast multitude of localized individually caring personalities of the ordinary kind, transcendent vectors of ideality, creative fountains of novel teleological ideas for their future in the world.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Why Politics isn’t Science

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 139, word count: 793.

Politics is the competition for power, for effective ownership and control of lives and property, but there is also a countervailing movement against power that is inherent in politics without being part of the competition for power. This countervailing force expresses the underdog side of the historical quarrel over transcendence. The dominant side of that quarrel is the idea of a cosmic teleological force to be feared and placated, an external sovereign transcendence who promotes local operatives to impose the universal structure of supremacy and hierarchy. That idea of transcendence is a sanctification of power, normally coupled with a depiction of ordinary embodied personalities as envious and grasping. These are in the background of every person’s upbringing. On the other side of the transcendence quarrel is the idea that the only transcendence is each embodied individual’s teleological processes, each individual’s ideas, ordinary consciousness itself, and that is the resistance to power.

There is a third option, a repudiation of any and all transcendence. Materialist science claims to assert this but presents its ultimate mystery of mass/ energy/ space/ time as a distinct sovereign transcendence, a dead one, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in itself, absolutely doesn’t matter.

The reason that politics can never be science is precisely ideas and ideality. The past and present of political actuality, dominated by hierarchical power, do not determine the future because ideality is unpredictably creative and utters conceptions of change in social, economic, and political cultures. Such changes always face predictable efforts to stifle them by conservative factions dedicated to preserving systems of hierarchy by both lethal force and the grotesque ideas of sovereign transcendence cited above. The scientific attitude that everything is determined by inflexible law, and so must always remain much as it is (a metaphysical idea), is indistinguishable from the conservative effort. Science has no help to offer in our political predicament. However, realty as experienced has two foundational constituents. One is actuality and the other is ideality in the form of a multitude of embodied personalities fountaining ideas. Every individual is an idea, the self-thinking idea of a particular life in the world, a particular idea of freedom, and ideas are not intrinsically hierarchical. Ideality is the transcendent being of personality at the level of the embodied individual, and ideality can effectively override in actuality what may seem to be givens of nature. In our being as fountains of ideas, people impose original events on the brute fall-lines of nature. A fountain of ideas is an imposer of change, and not a passive receiver or victim of time. (Here is the teleological structure in the sense of the passage of time.) Materialist science is not equipped to conceive personalities as fountains of teleological ideas, but an understanding of politics must do so for the chance of improvement in our longstanding dystopia.

The Question

The foundational status of ideality in experience, that is, in the world that matters, lands us squarely in metaphysics rather than science, and the whole of metaphysics rests on a single question: What should we make of teleology? ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which we know as consciousness? It is standard to present teleology in a stripped-down form to make it seem consistent with a mechanistic stimulus-response model of behaviour, separating it from how it is encountered in ordinary experience, namely as embodied personality. However, teleology really is personality. There have been attempts to show that purposive action can be reduced to automatic mechanisms pre-set to be triggered by specific stimuli. Such attempts are thoroughly political because if people are mechanisms it doesn’t matter how they are treated since morality and empathy are inapplicable to machines. So, denying ordinary consciousness as transcendence, as a fountain of teleological ideas with a creative arc of developmental continuity, that is, as personality, has the intent and effect of legitimizing the deception and manipulation of groups and individuals by people in culture pods enacting a fetish for power and trophies.

Teleology isn’t as simple as programmes of specific pragmatic operation, but also includes various creative postures bearing into futurity including curiosity, wondering, seeking and discovering original ways to make sense of things, existential questioning, and expressing all this in a personal voice. As thinking beings who use ideality for freedom by anticipating and imposing the novelty of original ideas on brute actuality, we are all in an immediate position to know that the bleak conservative story of human nature as a pit of appetites and envy is false! Liberation comes simply from declining to believe the default cultural teachings because the truth is plainly different.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Underdog in the Transcendence Quarrel

13 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 138, word count: 560.

In the year 1277 the Bishop of Paris published a condemnation of 219 propositions being taught in philosophy classes at the University of Paris faculty of arts. In that condemnation the arts masters “are specifically proscribed from asserting “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy”…” *. Apparently the Bishop and his intelligence analysts recognized this proposition as an existential threat.

It may not appear so at first glance, but the proposition “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy” was and is incendiary for mainstream ideology. It denies the primacy of property possession, for example, along with the validity of the rights, trophies, and glamour of the strongest. It also asserts the underdog side in an ancient quarrel that was crucial for any Christian Bishop.

From ancient times there has been an ongoing quarrel over transcendence. On one side is the idea of an external sovereign transcendence to be feared and placated, a cosmic teleological force who chooses local agents to impose the universal pattern of sovereign dominance and hierarchy. On the other side of this quarrel is the idea that the only real transcendence is in each and every individual’s teleological processes simply as such. A case can be made that the transition from religion to philosophy is the movement from the first to the second. The mental movement that is philosophical thinking reaches a eureka! of self-recognition as a thinking being, as ideality, with a very special sort of absolute self-sufficiency in thinking. Martin Luther is an example of someone with a clear sense of absolute autonomy as a thinking being (in spite of his belief that the specifics of divine predestination cannot be known). For philosophy to be possible it is necessary for an individual to evade the default enculturation of a personal value-identity assigned by an ambient hive mind, and the norms of social pragmatism based on trust of authority, a superego, sovereignty. The act of philosophical self-recognition is always an individual’s questioning, searching on a principle of relevance intrinsic to a sense of wonder. The philosophical answer is the questioning itself: self-recognition as the sort of being who questions spontaneously, a fountain of original ideality. The way of being of personality is fundamental because that way of being selects and shapes any possible experience.

Thinking, Waking, Self-Possession

Fichte asked: How can an act of thinking wake you from pragmatic getting along to the discovery of yourself as ideality, a creative subject rather than an object? ** A related question is this: Is there some specific thinking that can reliably bring a person to self-consciousness as creative teleological ideality, or is it always just luck or an accident?

Having to make an effort to think about thinking means that pre-philosophical thinking activity is often performed un-self-consciously. To think about thinking is to direct a certain unsatisfied curiosity at curiosity itself. It is to question both questioning and intuitions of what is relevant at a certain moment, and to consider the spiritual condition of readiness-to-recognize something new, how something is learned, to wonder about acts of changing the sensed framework of orientation by which effort is exerted teleologically in a chosen direction. It is to wonder at the teleological structure of the sense of the passing of time.

Notes:

* The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, written by Jonathan Lyons, Published by Bloomsbury Press (2009), ISBN: 978-1596914599. (p. 195).

** Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4. (p. 42).

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.