Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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1517, 1789, Hegelian idealism, Johann Fichte, Kantian idealism, Martin Luther, Marxism, modernity, nihilism, Platonic idealism, Romantic idealism, Roy Bhaskar, spirituality, The French Revolution, the Kantian revolution, the mind of God, The Thirty Years War, the tragic sense of life

This is Episode 2 of The Tragedy of Romanticism

Tags: Spirituality, Platonic idealism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Kantian idealism, the Kantian revolution, Johann Fichte, Romantic idealism, Martin Luther, Roy Bhaskar, the tragic sense of life, nihilism, modernity, The French Revolution, 1789, 1517, the Thirty Years War, the mind of God

Informal Romanticism

The French Revolution of 1789 expressed a primal, informal, romanticism that was an inspiration for the philosophical romanticism that developed soon after. It was a projection outward of subjective aspirations, heroically, against the teeth of practicality and realism as defined by the apparent balance of forces and probable achievements. “This is what we want. I don’t care if dreams cannot come true. This expresses my (spiritual) interiority.” The romantic attitude is the opposite of “practical” and “realistic” as ordinarily used. Plans and proposals that count as practical and realistic always expresses a normative political force. In authoritarian cultures, any kind of change in the organization of wealth, power, or status, is considered unrealistic and impractical, and so romantic. That is core conservative political rhetoric and mind-set. In the conservative lexicon “romantic” means frivolous, trivial, crazy, dangerously destructive. Informal romanticism is an assertion of the power of subjectivity against objective actuality, a willing acceptance of the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, but still asserting its value and power. In addition to privileging subjective non-actuality over brute objective actuality, informal romanticism is also a certain characterization of subjectivity, emphasizing the creative, chaotic, emotionally expressive character of dreams in subjectivity. It doesn’t have to be a denial of the reality of objective actuality, only a categorical rejection of the sovereignty and sufficiency of actuality, a resistance to claims of such a sovereignty. The romantic attitude puts emphasis on the creativity of subjectivity, on subjectivity as lawless and capricious, and so on the removal of subjectivity from the pre-determination of both nature and the normative force of cultural models. (Every individual has normative social conformity requirements in addition to the fall-line of physics to limit the possibilities of overtly manifested creativity.) That removal from pre-determination is here called the spiritual interiority of subjectivity.

There was something wildly terrible, tragic, and beautiful (romantic) about the French Revolution, the doomed efforts of age-long victims of aristocratic macro-parasitism, risking their lives and a marginally viable way of life for a slim hope of justice and dignity. By the time of that revolution, Germans had long ago attempted their revolution in the form of the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and which eventually brought the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), down on their heads. That history left Germans pretty well intimidated, but still substantially Protestant (in very regulated forms) by 1789. However, it could be argued that the Revolution became necessary in France because the Reformation had been so quickly and brutally repressed in the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, soon after Luther launched the protestant movement. So, as a continuation of post-Reformation re-thinking of fundamental certainties and possibilities (the Enlightenment movement), the Revolution burst forth, and afterward the reactionary backlash inevitably followed, just as it had against the Reformation.

In yet another historical rebound of cultural forces, philosophical Romanticism was an interpretation of the French Revolution by the German academic, literary, and artistic class, just as the Revolution was a kind of French interpretation of the German Reformation (then more than two centuries in the past). The human interconnectedness is a medium and an echo chamber in which cultural creations get refracted by interpretations from person to person (interiority to interiority) and from group to group. In 1789 Germany was emphatically backward looking in political culture as a legacy of the Thirty Years War. German intellectuals such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814) and the artist known as Novalis (1772-1801) were both excited and repelled by the Revolution because in Germany they were immersed in a neo-medieval ideology of admiration for Christendom and its chivalrous aristocracy, even though they longed for complete freedom of thought at the same time. The young German intellectuals felt the thrill of new freedom but desperately wanted to fit it into the stability of existing (medieval) institutions in Germany. They merely wanted people like themselves to be recognized as meriting membership in the fellowship of the privileged.

Broad Effects of Philosophical Fundamentals

Those historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with philosophical fundamentals, and especially philosophical conceptions of idealism, of which romanticism is one particular form. Idealism generally asserts that there is a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual, transcendent, and as such indispensable in any conception of reality. That category is what was described above, in relation to informal romanticism, as the spiritual interiority of subjectivity. Both of the following usages of “ideal” illustrate that special interiority. Certain politicians are described as ‘idealist’ rather than pragmatic. Idealist politicians are aspirational in the sense of striving for something not yet actual, something there is reason to believe would be better, but which might be impossible. Also, there is the sense of idealism in “idealized”, in which things are simplified and imagined in a perfected condition. The “idealized” item is distinct from any actual items, and it is commonly understood that, as such, it is interior to some or other subjectivity as an idea. In articulating the importance of a category of non-actuality, 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. Idealism is politically explosive because it is an affirmation and embracing of a supra-actuality, something more important than whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors have bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world.

Standard Idealism: Plato and Hegel

The directionality of any human gaze is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Any philosophical idealism is some model of spirituality and a recognition of spirituality as elemental or non-reducible. In other words, idealism is some version of absolute recognition of the special interiority of intelligences. Recognizing the special non-actuality of spiritual interiority gives any position an aspect of idealism. A strong idealism asserts that the most fundamental character of the cosmos is intelligence or spirituality.

Romanticism is a kind of idealism, but not the only kind. For example, Plato’s idealism is quite different, and Platonic idealism has been the most influential by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the European system of cultural reality that still has considerable force. Plato’s Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so automatically associated with (the interiority of) some kind of divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of a metaphysical hierarchy, a structure of descent from a divine One-ness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Their association with intelligence is far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some romantics have imagined as divine intelligence. Also, Hegelian idealism has been vastly influential, especially as it lives on in Marxism, in spite of the declared materialism of Marxism (dialectical materialism). The historical effects of Marxism are yet more consequences of the mutating conceptions of idealism. Hegel’s is clearly a mutation of Platonic idealism, a vision of cosmic history as the striving of all-encompassing universal Being toward full reality and self-recognition as Ideal Form. Hegel retains the Platonic metaphysical structure (including levels of reality not unlike those in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism), but in Hegelian idealism the universal Being starts from the bottom and is striving up the “chain of ascent” to the divine One-ness at the final and highest stage of reality.

The Kantian Revolution against Platonism

Then there is the kind of idealism which occasioned philosophical romanticism, namely Kantian idealism, which maps out the necessity of personal spiritual activity in the construction of ordinary knowledge of the world, of every individual’s orientation in the world. Kantian idealism is the most personal and subjective of the philosophical visions of spirituality, especially as tweaked by Fichte. Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. Fichte’s vision is a re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Kant and Fichte, and there could have been no Fichte without Kant. Romantic idealism was clearly a development from Kantian idealism, although hardly a straightforward one.

Although Kant did describe his work as “a Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, it is not clear that he recognized the full bottom-up social and political implications of his personalized idealism. Kant was a social and political moderate-conservative, and as a university professor employed by the state, his livelihood depended on being seen as a supporter of the status quo, more or less. However, the spiritual entity who is the subject having experiences in Kant’s vision is self-legislating and so has no need for the Church, aristocracy, or any other social authority. Personal spirituality for Kant is almost monadic, clearly influenced by Leibniz in that way but completely free of Leibniz’s totalitarian predetermination. Kant’s personally interior idealism would logically lead to an equality of individuals based on autonomous spirituality, and so it implicitly discredited the whole social edifice of aristocracy and the hierarchy of Christendom. That qualifies Kant’s idealism as an extension of the European revolutionary movement into the matrix of ideas. That is the Kantian revolution, although it is doubtful that the early romantic philosophers understood it in that way. Nevertheless, the response in Romanticism was something altogether shocking: a declaration that philosophy as an activity should be abandoned completely and replaced by art; a call to forsake philosophical thinking, the better to seek immersion in poetry, music, stories, and images. That is why romanticism is more prominent as a literary and artistic movement than as a philosophical system. Something in their interpretation of Kantian idealism brought the romantic philosophers face to face with a vision of human tragedy from which they recoiled. The tragedy does not arise from Kantian idealism or Fichte’s absolute I. Those are not tragic visions.

The Tragedy of Romanticism

Radical French philosophers had made an attempt to construct a Plato-busting bottom-up metaphysics with their materialism (in the footsteps of ancient Epicureans), after the suppression of the reformation in France, and it had been remarkably effective up to a point, but it was not sustainable. Materialism and freedom are mutually exclusive. It was Kant’s elaboration of Luther’s idea of spiritual freedom which really accomplished (on the second attempt, so to speak) the bottom-up metaphysics. Kant’s idealism is clearly set at the level of the ordinary individual person because it is in continuous engagement with brute actualities of the ambient world within which the spirituality finds itself, entangled with effects of the “thing-in-itself”. However, the early romantics encountered Kantian idealism in their studies as Fichte’s philosophy students, and so really encountered Fichte’s interpretation of Kant, and they never took it seriously enough as a description of normal individual intelligence or spirituality with broad implications for empathy, sociability, and politics. Romantic philosophers lived in a very hierarchical culture and age. They would have taken value strata among human beings as self-evident givens. The grip of their top-down orientation was so strong that they couldn’t conceive the absence of hierarchy. So, they came to understand Fichte’s absolute “I” (so much more monadic than Kant’s because of the absence of a countervailing thing-in-itself) as a portrait of divine mind, the mind of God. Certainly it could be argued that the main effect of Fichte’s dismissal of the thing-in-itself was exactly to make his conception of spirituality less human and essentially divine.

As a vision of the divine mind, there was profound novelty about Fichte’s “absolute ego” as compared to the God of Abraham, of Maimonides, or even the purely rational God conceived by Leibniz (much closer to Fichte in cultural tradition). The Abrahamic God is bound and limited by goodness and by love for his creatures. However, the philosophy students who were on their way to developing the romantic vision, could not help but see Fichte’s divine subjectivity through the lens of their experience of the French Revolution, an intensely violent uprising completely justified by the stark contrast between the lives of the privileged in European society and the lives of the drudgery classes, gross institutionalized injustices, any change to which threatened the entire social order of their world. In that light, it was impossible to hold onto the idea of divinity limited by goodness. To the romantics, Fichte’s divine mind is absolute monadic creativity, an artist god, with no responsibility to any other and not bound or limited by anything. Fichte’s absolute ego, in its romantic interpretation, was not the slightest bit interested in morality or orderly civil society, and was nothing like perfectly rational as Leibniz’s God was. He issued no demands to humans for obedience, reverence, or worship, but also offered nothing to balance human suffering, no eternal reward, no redemption from guilt. Instead, he was a playful artist creating drama, emotional upheaval, and shocking beauty. In many ways, this was an historically novel concept, including a form of creativity that was broadly applicable to individual humans. With the absolute ego from Fichte, the emphasis is more on creativity than on command, control, reward, or punishment, and that removes some emphasis from command and control generally even in worldly social and political situations. It also recognizes creativity as the core of subjectivity. Fundamentally, it was gender neutral in conception, although in style and application it was full of male bias.

For Romantics, then, there is a single immaterial spirit with a personality and mental life quite similar to a human’s but with infinitely more power. The Romantic deity is an artist. This spirit has dreams, it indulges itself in daydreaming, and those dreams are the world that humans inhabit, ourselves being dream-things in those dreams. Whimsically, he picks certain people to be his prophets, and grants favours and inspiration to certain heroes and artists, like the gods of ancient Greece were supposed to do. Every landscape is an inner landscape for romantics, pervaded with dream code-work, disguises, and multi-layered associations, unrestricted by cultural norms or by the laws of physics. With the inner landscape, things display (obliquely) their emotional meaning in their appearance, as things do in dreams. What romantics saw in this new idealism was the artist God who toys with the world, and with the humans in the world, without any interest in justice or redemption, as proven by the spectacle of the Revolution and the light it shed on social organization and the force of history.

This conception of the divine mind meant that the Christian religion as traditionally constituted, with pledges of eternal reward and redemption, upon which the stability of the European social hierarchy and culture depended, was a lie. Earthly suffering has no meaning other than the whimsical amusement of an omnipotent daydreamer. Romantics saw the political enforcement of Christendom as a version of Plato’s “noble lie” (Republic), and they accepted the necessity of using that lie to preserve the organization of society, so that some small minority at least could devote themselves to beauty and ideal things, supporting and enjoying the arts, the work of artists, for their own immersion in transcendent beauty. The human artist became the example of the optimal, godlike, human being. However, the romantics also felt tragedy in the need to lie to repress the vain aspirations of the vast majority, in a world so made as to depend on such a lie. Privileged people don’t want social justice and can’t want it because for them the age-old forms of injustice are the price that must be paid so that some few (themselves) can live the higher life of refinement, beauty, and ideal things, a milieu enabling such contemplations as math and science, but above all artistic beauty, as close as possible to the life of the high God and as such the authentic heartbeat of their civilization.

On that worldview, we humans are dreamed just enough in God’s image to think sometimes that we have freedom and power to achieve justice, but that thought is an illusion, and so the human situation is fundamentally tragic. The immediate form of our tragedy is the squalid institutions of unalterable human inequality. We must either accept being deceived by the dirtiest of lies or else be parties to proclaiming that lie, and the problem with philosophy is that its history has brought it to the point of exposing the deception and undermining the civilization of the champions of beauty. For romantics, the only real power we have is to dream, to create our interior non-actualities. That is the romantic vision of transcendence available to humans, and they take it as our shield against glimpsing the ugliness of the broader human situation. The romantic idea of the deity is an emphatic confirmation that the social oppression they witnessed was so entrenched as to appear metaphysically decreed.

Romantic idealism, then, is yet another top-down vision of divine spirituality, a mutation of Platonism into a more modern idiom. The real implication of Kantian idealism was completely different, a sort of re-distribution of spiritual creativity and power down from on-high and into the multiplicity of agents engaging in ordinary experience. The romantic vision of tragedy arises by removing spiritual agency from every individual and ascribing it instead to a universal deity, imposing a completely inappropriate top-down orientation on Kant’s vision of interior spirituality. In doing that, philosophical romanticism seems to glorify subjectivity, but in fact trivializes it. The romantic call to leave philosophy and turn to art and culture is profoundly political and strictly conservative. Their nihilism was the angst of the unjustly privileged, an awareness of the stark and pointless contrast between their lives and the lives of the drudgery class.

The Tragic Sense of Life

We are still living with legacies of romantic idealism, for example in the commonplace declaration that “stories are all we have”. The conclusion and fulfillment of that philosophical Romanticism is a resolve to abandon thinking that goes beyond stories and instead to concentrate on moments of subjective ecstasy or rapture in the altered states inspired by poetry, tragic drama, music, and stories of magic, wonders, and heroes. “Since actuality is ugly, depressing, and utterly beyond our control, let’s achieve the transcendence of personal tranquility and joy by listening to awesome music, contemplating beautiful images, or absorbing our minds in narratives of heroism and nobility.” The romantic “elevation” of ideal things is completely idle, and the narrative sparkle and flash of tragic heroes, witches, wizards, demons, exotic locations, high drama, violent conflict, glory in battle, dangerous rescues, lost causes, fatal flaws, futile but beautiful gestures, narrative suspense and satisfying resolutions, are all merely hiding romantic nihilism. That turn of romanticism is very much like mysticism, which embraces the trances and altered states of consciousness resulting from sensory deprivation, drugs, or mortification of the flesh as if they were higher states of being.

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture, embodiment, gender, metaphysics, philosophical liberation, Romanticism, sociability, spirituality, time, transcendence

No one can, by looting property or by any other kind of violence, get beyond the control of the macro-parasitic capitalist faction and its structures of cultural influence, because violence and property are the operating mechanisms of the parasite faction itself. The most important and valuable personal possessions aren’t property anyway but rather the system of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, transcendence (the supernatural), community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the ambient culture into which a person is born, and presented as reality. Getting beyond the control of a dominant faction has to be done by getting beyond the cultural system of reality which legitimates the parasites and their operations. Specifically, it is necessary to get beyond the top-down orientation of popular systems of reality, because that orientation enables the use of those systems as ideological legitimations of macro-parasitism. For example, the fact that cheetahs prey on antelope is cited (since Darwin) as proof that human-on-human macro-parasitism is decreed by the laws of cosmic nature. However, every Great Chain of Being that serves as a food chain is a political construct to legitimate predatory behaviour and institutions. To re-orient freely, you have to disconnect from the message built into culturally assigned personal identity that you are a product, creature, construct, or function of the ambient cultural system, of your ethnic and religious background and your relation to the economic system. That involves going beyond the stories and formulaic word groupings in common currency.

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

Any survey of human behaviour at large finds striking uniformity, and that is often used against the idea of individual autonomy and creativity. However, there is widespread uniformity because culture provides circumstantial compulsions. All of that cultural uniformity is founded on a fascination that individual intelligences have with other intelligences. The most interesting thing to any individual intelligence is other intelligences, and it is undeniable that individuals are almost helpless and completely unviable without the support and nurturing of a surrounding group of people. It could be argued that the mutual attraction of intelligences is the ultimate spiritual vulnerability, because we are very often ready to put up with great discomfort and un-fulfillment to maintain our interconnection with others. One thread of romanticism holds that, due to the dependence of individuals on the support of other humans, the most important thing, the crucial thing, is that individuals be provided culturally with a sense of belonging and social attachment, no matter if that sense is based on outright falsehoods and deceptions. Because we are spiritual beings in the uncertain process of self-creation, and because we are uncertain of our spirituality, we begin by accepting the stories going around ambient culture, including the assignment of personal identity in terms of ethnicity, family, religion, nationality, gender-role, sexual orientation, job aptitudes, or trophies won, until we recognize that, along with belonging, they impose a sense of personal diminishment and a disabling false finality. That leads to a philosophical questioning of the ambient cultural system of reality, and of personal orientation within that reality, especially upon recognizing that top-down concepts of subjectivity, spirituality, and identity which produce personal diminishment and false finality also maintain control by the macro-parasite faction.

Embodiment and Spirituality

The incongruence between personal embodiment and spirituality has always been an important inspiration for philosophical questioning (in addition to the two vulnerabilities described in the previous posting). The challenging nature of the embodiment – spirituality duality is already expressed in ancient Orphic philosophy: a story about spirituality exiled and cast down from divinity, and imprisoned in matter by embodiment. That ancient story illustrates a longstanding approach to spirituality as the reach for “something higher”, as an inherent sense of relation between personal spirituality and a universal divinity. In fact, the inspiration to search for “something higher” is nothing other than the sense of unknowing or uncertainty about personal spirituality (what is personally “higher” in relation to dead matter), for example, the search for how personal aspirations and accumulated lessons learned are present invisibly (which is the immediate presence of “something higher”). The same impulse that goads the quest for the “higher” (non-apparent) presence of personal bearings or directionality is full enough of hopes and fears to fixate on the most grandiose possibility of the “something higher” in the form of deity, a non-apparent cosmic master intelligence or spirituality.

The rejection of such upward-orientation is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creating of time as accomplished by every individual intelligence. Time is freedom into which an intelligence projects itself creatively, a personal hyper-space of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. This is an unfamiliar idea, but time is the conception (opening) of freedom-from-nature and as such the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze (always into futurity) and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences. **

There are several ways in which it is correct (but also misleading) to say that there is no spiritual self. The basic nature of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself, to project its self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a spirituality or intelligence: a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and freedom. What time as a personal mirror shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of spirit is precisely the same thing as the immateriality of time. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

The only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of embodiment. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom, the non-particularity of intelligence is the non-particularity of freedom, and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body. We have a tendency to overemphasize our particularity based on the finality of bodies, since bodies are measurable in great detail, mappable, chartable, locatable, and so we are very clear about our presence as a body-particular, up to a point (another vulnerability). We are much less clear about spirituality since it is a no-thing-ness, only a directionality pointing out away from itself. So, under the influence of cultural teachings, we underrepresent the never-yet-particularity of personal spirituality (intelligence) in our self-identification. That is why the emphasis here is on identity as spirituality with its creative freedom. The realms of experience most expressive of embodiment are, first, placement (being here), then, effortful mobility within, and effortful mobilization of, brute actuality, grounded in a person’s accumulated sense of the metabolic cost-shape of the world, and third, communication and interconnection with other people which, surprisingly enough, cannot be done strictly spiritually, but instead require gestures of the body. Embodiment defines a strict spiritual individuality.

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

The no-thing-ness of spirituality is not a void to be filled from outside itself, but instead is a gusher of curiosity, questions, projections of marks and patterns, and expeditions of discovery and creation. That is why the proponents of macro-parasitic patriarchy would like to appropriate spirituality as a masculine quality. There is an historical attempt to connect mentality, specifically rational thinking, with masculinity, coupled with an attempt to associate femininity with embodiment. However, there are possibly more metaphorical congruences of spirituality with aspects of female sexual biology, based on spirituality as no-thing-ness, an absence, labyrinthine, creative, undefined and as such free. The positivism of embodiment surely is more congenial as representing a certain dominant style of masculinity. Not much should be made of any such metaphors, no metaphysical conclusions please, especially since far too much has been made of them historically. Spirituality is gender neutral, and metaphysics is not gendered.

It is obvious that no individual’s re-orientation beyond the dominant culture is going to cause the institutions of macro-parasitism to vanish, so that pay-off is strictly off the table. Getting past the typical top-down orientation does not objectively negate the power of the entrenched macro-parasitic faction and their decisive influence on culture-at-large. So, it is fair to ask what is achieved by getting past looking up to sovereignty, divinity, tradition, institutions, ethnicity, the language community, or anything like that. The process of philosophical liberation, the re-orientation accomplished by a critique of common reality, leads back to a new recognition of personal spirituality, to embracing spiritual individuality as defined by embodiment, and nullifying the typical alienation of autonomous creativity. The only pay-off is life as a spiritual being than which there is none greater or higher, embodied among others, conscious of the transcendent freedom of individual intelligences as distinct from the unfreedom of inertial nature, without guilt from any mythical inherent flaw, original sin, or from interpreting the will to live itself as a fatal weakness. The immediate result of going beyond culturally assigned definitions of personal identity is taking on the burden of spiritual no-thing-ness, which is the project of self-creation at every moment, engagement in a personal creative process. That has to be the new way to enjoy engaging with the surrounding cluster of other spiritual beings, all relating to one another using our precious embodiment.

** An earlier iteration of this paragraph can be found in posting 74, June 7, 2014, The Use and Abuse of Spirituality.

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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alchemy, culture, dualism, freedom, inherent vice, intelligence, macro-parasitism, metaphysics, nature, philosophers' stone, philosophy, Philosophy of Time, spiritual quest

Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? These questions are personal, and at the same time reach beyond the personal, in a spiritual quest. A spiritual quest begins from a questioner’s recognizing the imperfection of self-awareness or self-possession, recognizing itself as its own blind-spot, recognizing the blind-spotness of itself to itself. It is a questioner’s sense of unknowing and curiosity about its own impulse (or imperative) to question and discover, about its own curiosity and its resulting construction of ever accumulating orientation, so, about its intelligence. Out of that sense of unknowing, a spiritual quest is a search for a fuller acquaintance with, or understanding of, this personal situation of intelligence in its aspect as the human situation.

Intelligence or spirit is (and intelligences are) the most interesting dimension of the situation of human life, but not the only one. There is a contrast between acquaintance with material surroundings on one hand and acquaintance with manifestations of intelligence such as the impulse to question and discover on the other, standing as a fundamental dualism in the quest for improved acquaintance with intelligence. Acquaintance with intelligence would not need a quest unless our ordinary acquaintance is mainly with something else, something not-spirit, normally identified as material nature or inertial nature, forces of unfreedom. Intelligence confronts nature. Deliberate teleological striving confronts lifeless falling. The freedom of curiosity confronts the unfreedom of inertia. Non-actuality (interior to an intelligence) confronts actuality (exteriority or the space of nature). Subjectivity confronts objectivity.

This dualism of human embodiment is not incidental to our situation but is essential and fundamental. Human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between non-actualities of our subjectivity (futurity, memory) and the brute actuality of objective nature. Many people find this dualism to be unsettling, even unthinkable, but to deny it is to evade the dynamic forces at the core of human lives. Philosophical consciousness is an orientation based on recognition of self as intelligence, but an embodied intelligence in a horizontal dualism with the non-intelligent (unfree) actuality of nature. In other words, it is an orientation based on recognition of self, paradoxically, as a spiritual presence with no appearance, with no-thing-ness, an embodied interiority of non-actuality, constructing and projecting freedom by constructing time within nature.

Metaphysics: Time is the Mirror of Intelligence

On the question of intelligence encountering and discovering itself (in its own blind spot), time is the crucial consideration, the self-revelation of experience. If you are searching for subjective intelligence in the perception of the world, you identify it in the essential temporal dimension of the world as perceived, in the subjectivity of our human position in time. Contemplation of time is the portal to the self-discovery of an intelligence. Time is, not incidentally, the main inspiration for metaphysics, an example of time being the mirror of intelligence. All metaphysics points to intelligence, but unfortunately often misconstrued as an alienated or disembodied cosmic intelligence.

At the edge of every conceptual system of reality there is some unavoidable vision of metaphysics to deal with the contradiction between actuality and the non-actual certainty of change, the contradiction between actuality and futurity, between actuality and memory. This is true also of materialism, which makes heroic efforts to avoid recognizing the creative contributions of intelligence in constructing reality. Material objects are models of perfect self-subsistence except as they exist under the aspect of time. There is always more than meets the eye, since time is non-apparent. Saying that there is an interiority to subjectivity is a way of acknowledging that it is non-apparent, and the non-appearance of time is exactly the non-appearance of subjective intelligence.

Looking Up

What often stamps a form or structure onto the dualism of the spiritual quest is a very old idea, already formed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the intelligence of each ordinary individual person is a limited and inferior replica of, particle of, or a window on, a single grand intelligence, the cosmic intelligence. The spiritual quest then becomes a search for that obscure source intelligence, the greatest or highest intelligence, and the conception of the source intelligence typically expands into a conception of the creative source of everything, because only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. (This teleology of creation is another identifier of intelligence, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive voice.) So the idea of the source intelligence becomes an idea of intelligence as “higher” than the material surroundings in which it finds itself, higher conceptually by being the creator, and experientially as being represented in the ethereal vista of the starry night sky.

Lessons from the Failure of Alchemy

There has been a long history of searching nature for signs and signatures of the great source spirit or intelligence, since the personally interior intelligence, in its aspect of blind-spot, resists attempts to pin it down as anything in particular. Perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated search program in that history was practiced by alchemists, who thought that the material world must be some sort of map or image of intelligence or spirituality, designed by a gracious Creator as a guide for humans to find a way out of our spiritually fallen condition (trapped by ignorance within matter and time). Their idea of the philosophers’ stone, for example, was part of a projection onto nature of the spiritual quest. Alchemists thought that if they could find the process that transformed base metal into gold it would be a guide to moving the individual’s spirit out of its confinement in time and matter, along an upward path, to be reunited with divinity and eternity, a fulfillment of the spirit’s ultimate divine destiny. The philosophers’ stone was supposed to be the missing link between both base metal and gold, and between the mortal life of spirit and its divine life in eternity or timelessness. Alchemists were searching for eternity (immortality) as an escape from time itself.

So science, the study of nature as strict actuality, was a spiritual quest in the beginning, rigorously developed by alchemists. Alchemists made the mistake of supposing there must be a mirroring, a sameness of structure, dynamics, forces and processes, of intent, between the spiritual (which they conceived to be primarily inner in some way, as well as higher) and material nature (outer, lower). The researches and experiments of alchemists failed to discover the upward path they predicted, but their failure established quite convincingly that material nature is not a guide to the destiny or nature of intelligence, and does not present messages, signs, or signatures of a grand source intelligence. That was and is progress. Indeed, the failure of alchemy also goes a long way to proving the futility of the whole idea of the source intelligence, the grand master intelligence. There is nowhere in the world for such a thing. Their search was self-defeating all along because it is exactly time as the form of freedom which requires and so reveals intelligence in ordinary individuals. However, the alchemists’ error is still with us, as for example in the academic philosophers’ obsession with language as an objective map of thought or human interiority, instead of as a culturally constructed mechanism of imposing a collective orientation.

Something that stands out in alchemy as a spiritual quest is its acceptance or assumption of metaphysical hierarchy. The spiritual quest was preconceived as an upward path which rose from the low world of time and material objects, soaring to the glorious and noble heights of pure spirituality and eternity, to a reunion with divinity, hinted at by the ethereal vista of the clear night sky. This is an illustration of a profound problem with traditional conceptions of dualism, namely its vertical orientation, with spirit enjoying dominion or mastery over nature.

Re-Orientation to Horizontal Dualism

The fundamental situation of any person, the relationship between actuality (nature) and non-actuality (intelligence), is not hierarchical, but is instead horizontal. This is contrary to the historically normal assertion that spirit stands higher in the spirit-material encounter. The encounter of intelligence with nature can still be said to be horizontal and non-hierarchical even though the intelligence side (freedom) is also said to transcend the brute determinism of nature. The creative life of intelligences does have freedom-in-time whereas inertial nature does not, and that is a profound transcendence. However, the survival and freedom of intelligences is entirely dependent on engaging with nature. There is no immaterial heaven or occult dimension from which intelligences were somehow exiled and where we might return to manifest our full transcendent freedom. We depend on our embodiment, embedded in nature, in our very construction of teleological time and so of our freedom. The embeddedness of intelligences in nature prevents any assertion of metaphysical hierarchy giving spirit mastery over nature. The two sides of the dualism are so profoundly other with respect to one another, and yet so entangled, that there is no scale applicable to both to rank one above the other. Nature seems to subsist quite independently of intelligences. Having life-in-time does establish intelligences as profoundly different or ‘other’ with respect to nature, one side of an insurmountable and spectacularly creative, dynamic, and yes, freedom-producing dualism. Intelligences aren’t things of nature in spite of our embodiment (because freedom is not something of nature), but the bodies of intelligences are things which project or present the creativity of intelligences into nature. That is the situation and matrix of freedom. To embrace any universal totalizing absolute, you would have to abandon individual’s freedom-in-time, life itself.

The historical norm has been a misconception of transcendence as a soaring beyond experience, out from placement within time and so out into eternity. However, time itself is transcendence (freedom/ non-actuality) and the only transcendence. (Perhaps there is some sort of timelessness in acquaintance with time as an interior construct of personal intelligence.)

Pity the Culture-Bound

In the absence of an inherently clear individual self-intuition as autonomous intelligence (non-actuality/ time/ freedom), macro-parasitic cultures (sponsored and enforced by human macro-parasite factions, developed around ideology which legitimates and sanctifies such parasitism) declare that individuals carry an inherent vice, an original sin, from which we must be saved or redeemed by a higher exterior power. Such cultures exploit our blind-spot-ness to ourselves, our lack of a clear self-intuition, just as they exploit the whole complex of experiences inclining us to settle into a top-down model of reality, as described in posting 85, July 15, 2015, Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality. The parasite faction asserts itself as representative of the higher power, claiming to maintain the social order that God or nature decrees from above, and in that effort assigns individuals personal identities and values that fit a macro-parasitic agenda. When hegemonic cultures define and value individuals in terms of their economic niche, for example, the overall message is that the individual is a product of, a creation of, the social and cultural system they operate within, without which they are nothing. This has even acquired an academically rigorous ideology and the status of an indisputable given.

Human cultures misrepresent that which is peculiarly human to their host humans and so make an institution of our alienation from authentic self-acquaintance. For example, intelligences are not naturally prepared to fit easily into particular economic niches. Economic niches are always artificial. Yet every individual must find some niche in the social structure of an economic system, and focus considerable devotion to it. In capitalism, individuals are encouraged to construct a sense of personal identity and value from the economic niche they inhabit, and on the reward patterns of commercial consumption constructed into that niche. Under peer pressure we do our best to represent ourselves as some version of “economic man” expressing competitive self-interest in the hierarchical arrangements. Correcting this is a matter of identifying that which is peculiarly human in the human situation, or personal in the personal situation, which is intelligence (freedom, time, non-actuality) in a horizontal dualism with the brute actuality and unfreedom of nature, also encountering, within nature, multitudes of other embodied intelligences, all normally expressing the normative and controlling influence of an ambient culture. Culturally constructed self-alienation is what misdirects us to expect to locate transcendence in some ethereal milky-way of the supernatural, outside time. But no. The freedom of time is the only transcendence, and it is interior to individual lives, embodied and engaged with nature and with culture tainted with the macro-parasite orientation.

The taint at the source of human brutality and injustice is culture and not human nature (intelligence) which is non-actuality/ time/ freedom at the individual level. The failing is in the historical legacies of a particular human culture, derived from the essential thing about the lives of cowboys (armed men on horses, prehistoric, ancient, and modern): their violent macro-parasitism on migratory herd animals such as cattle and horses. It is a macro-parasitism anciently transferred onto human collectives. Cultural forms and traditions which structure the interconnection of individual intelligences, all tainted by human macro-parasitism and ideological efforts (metaphysical, ideological) to justify and legitimate that parasitism, are the source of the brutality and injustice in the systems of interconnection among individuals, and of our stubbornly persistent self-alienation. These are systems of reality in which the main value promoted by cultural incentives and rewards (proofs of manliness) is to be a parasite. However, that is not the way to freedom. There is an innate individual freedom which does not depend on brutality and injustice, or on the force of a higher power.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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cosmic personification, critique, intelligence, nature, non-actuality, philosophy, science, systems of reality, the cultural orientation grid, the supernatural, time

Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy

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bottom-up reality, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, idealism, Immanuel Kant, intelligence, Johann Fichte, Martin Luther, materialism, Romanticism, subjectivity, the great chain of being

Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Reality

We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by the awesome vista of the starry night sky as experienced from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to the ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also by our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local parts of the vast environment, and on our bodily contact with its solid structures. Those are important but contingent and incidental circumstances of intelligence, and individuals are quite capable of maturing beyond their influence as complete models of reality. Conceiving the cosmos as the Great Chain of Being (which is always a top-down chain of command) is not a feature of human nature nor necessitated by human nature. It is circumstantial and cultural. What is far more important for a mature orientation within elemental reality is that human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of our individual subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. As long as we are caught in impressions of the Great Chain of Command, we are vulnerable to a certain sort of macro-parasitic fraud. Factions which assert their seniority, divine inspiration, natural, or even merely cultural superiority can take control of vast numbers of subordinated people by claiming to represent the great cosmic chain of command.

The Keystone of Romanticism

The nub of philosophical Romanticism is a clash between ancient and perennial top-down visions of cosmic reality (such as the Christian doctrine of an omnipotent God, or Plato’s ideal forms) and the local experience of individual creative freedom, as evident especially in artists and art. By the time of the early work of Johann Fichte (1762-1814) the line of philosophical thinking about individual freedom that went from ancient humanists (Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic) to Luther and then to Kant should have been profound enough, finally, to support and enlarge the egalitarian forces launched previously in the radial Enlightenment. The recognition of individual freedom should have been ready to subvert and overturn the age-old top-down conceptions which always alienate creative freedom from individuals. Instead, Romanticism actually subverted that line of progress and just revived Medieval fables of exceptionalism, hierarchy, and The Great Chain of Being. The position of Romanticism in the history of ideas reveals that the top-down orientation of all codified and institutional systems of reality has been the crucial barrier to progress, the tragedy of ideas.

From Novalis

Romanticism always includes a conviction that there are forces, or a reality, that is higher than (and very different from) the ordinary everyday work-a-day world, and that the higher ‘something’ is difficult to recognize or to perceive, if not invisible (occult). It includes a declaration of the active presence of a force of spirit (disembodied intelligence). (It can do this either seriously or ironically.) In romanticism lower is fragmented and higher is progressively more unified, all the way up to a total-oneness at the cosmic level. The higher reality is one spirit, free of causation (the magic idealism of Novalis), but not merely random. Events are the caprice of a discretionary intelligence. Dreams, after all, are free of internal causal chains but not free of personal relevance associations.

Can Rationalists Dream?

Romanticism was a reaction against a misrepresentation of Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics comment on rationalism as if it were a campaign for a total focus on humdrum practicality, utility, and efficiency in all human affairs. In fact, the radical Enlightenment rationalists were campaigning for rationality as a way to improve dramatically the claim to autonomy and dignity of every individual. Rationality was their shield for every individual against the established and oppressive ideology of a universal taint in human nature itself, original sin, which benefits from authoritarian control. Efficiency and utility are top-down administrative and economic ideas which were quite foreign to radical Enlightenment philosophers, who were riding the coat-tails of the new cultural wave of scientific ideas with the hope of achieving their own social, political, and cultural improvements. Spinoza and his interpreters were rationalists and not romantics, and yet conceived the Enlightenment. Rationalists dreamed of an equal society in which all people would have rights and freedoms in a bottom-up political system operating to improve the lives of all. That is their radicalism. They embraced the scientific metaphysics of materialism as a potentially bottom-up vision of reality in opposition to Christian spiritualism, which was profoundly influenced by Plato’s idealism and which justified authoritarian control as divine command.

Failing to recognize that Enlightenment rationalism’s main intent and effect was to empower and enhance the dignity of individuals universally, romantics saw in rationalism only disenchantment, formalism, the tyranny of brute material actuality and determinism, including “laws of thought”. Searching for reasons to reject such things, romantic philosophers were inspired by the early work of Johann Fichte which places emphasis on the creativity of individual subjectivity, the personal “I”. Fichte created his innovation out of an insistence on making Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Fichte’s entry point into philosophy) consistent by eliminating the idea of an ultimate external reality, an objective “thing-in-itself”. To Fichte’s way of thinking there was no reason, on Kant’s own basic principles, for supposing that there was a thing-in-itself, although the thing-in-itself was apparently crucial for Kant’s overall vision. In the absence of acquaintance with a thing-in-itself the individual subjective “I” must perform a creative act in which it “posits” (conjectures, pretends, considers, day-dreams) its entire world, including itself.

Note on Idealism

Romanticism is an idealism, since the most fundamental character of the cosmos, on this view, is intelligence. Idealism comes from recognition of the interiority of intelligence (discretionary non-actualities), in contrast to materialism, which rejects such interiority, and restricts existence (ontology) exclusively to what is exterior to intelligence, the strict actualities of physics, pre-determined, measurable, nature. So any philosophical idealism is some model of the interiority of intelligence, and a recognition of interiority of intelligences as elemental or non-reducible. Recognizing the interiority of intelligence gives any position an aspect of idealism.

Kant vs Fichte: A Bottom-Up Re-Conceptualization

Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (noumena) retained the old top-down orientation, in spite of his recognition of individual freedom. His main emphasis was on scientific knowledge, on the importance of, and difficulty of, achieving acquaintance with what was external to and vastly more elemental than individual intelligence. However, Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. (The atomic materialism of Democritus is another contender, as suggested above, and so is Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was, of course, Christian, which is an assertion of a top-down supernatural model of reality. More on this later.) The main importance of Fichte’s vision is his unprecedented re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Fichte.

Fichte and Luther: The Personal Power to Posit a Reality

Fichte’s concept of subjective interiority, the personal “I”, in its creative act of “positing” itself and the cosmos, is doing something comparable to Luther’s more Stoic and more strictly personal “leap of faith”. Both are subjective and deliberate acts of creativity going beyond acts which can be guided completely by previously acquired knowledge, direct acquaintance, or rational calculations. Both Fichte’s and Luther’s creative acts are assertions of a particular intelligence, acts of self-declaration, self-definition, or self-creation, with both the intent and effect of projecting the peculiar power and freedom of that intelligence. Both acts are projections outward into nature and culture of inwardness, of the freedom of an intelligence. However, Fichte’s idea of a subjectivity “positing” dreams leaps well beyond the sort of creativity required by Luther’s leap of faith. There is still a leap, an assertion and a projection of the freedom of an intelligence, but in Fichte’s conception the projection has far more shape, content, and self-sufficiency. It is not just Luther’s act of embracing or assenting to reports of a divine plan supposedly revealed to some distant source and passed along. Fichte’s subjectivity is its own transcendent source. The freedom of Fichte’s subjectivity is richer by far than Luther’s at the same time as being rooted solidly in Luther’s vision. That is the basis for claiming that, in spite of problems, early Romanticism represents a philosophical advance in conceiving subjectivity and its creative freedom.

For the “I” to posit a world, as it does according to Fichte, is not to create an actual world (which would be a thing-in-itself) but rather to create a subjective non-actuality, interior to a particular intelligence (with the unbounded malleability or mutability of such interiority). Romantic philosophers recognized the difference between objective actuality (thing-in-itself) and subjective non-actuality, and they recognized that culture is mainly a construct of non-actuality, that is, orientations which are internal to individual subjectivities. However, they could not accept that individual subjective non-actuality is the matrix of real creative freedom. What prevented them from recognizing that truth of freedom was their (romantic) inability to get past the age-old top-down conception of reality. Anything profoundly original had to come from “on-high” somehow. So the problem for romantics was how to reconcile their top-down conception of reality with their subjective idealism. The easiest way out is to universalize and unify subjectivity and posit a single top-down omnipotent subjectivity, thus to conceive everything as a play of ideas in that divine subjectivity, and that is pretty much what romantic philosophers did. Considering this from another perspective, the problem with dismissing the thing-in-itself is that it seems to license dismissal of other-intelligences-in-themselves also. That would leave a single absolute subjectivity as the entirety of existence, and, in fact, that seems to be the way Fichte’s thinking developed. Such an absolute subjectivity or intelligence is a variant of the concept of God.

Romanticism began with an assertion of individual freedom by Fichte, who picked up and developed the radical Enlightenment thread of empowering and enhancing individuals in his early work on the all-positing I. The Fichtean “I” is the reality of freedom. That in itself is congruent with Enlightenment rationalism up to a point, but of course it cannot accept materialism and determinism as conceived by Spinoza and his fans. So, even though the Romantics were reacting against (a misrepresentation of) Enlightenment rationalism, they were also building on the main feature of that rationalism, up to a point.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, published by State University of New York Press (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3272-6.

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.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.

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

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature

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anarchism, culture, freedom, law, left-wing politics, sovereignty, the great chain of being, Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described his imagined ‘state of nature’ as a vicious anarchy that was a continuous war of all against all, and Hobbes’ vision has become the default or common idea of anarchism. Hobbes did not recognize that the humans of his vision, who behave as missiles of (aggressive) self-gratification, are under the influence of a certain culture, a culture of human macro-parasitism perfected by nomadic animal herders in very ancient times and soon enough transferred to conquered human communities. A suitable name for that macro-parasitic culture would be ‘Aryan masculinity’ from the most famous historical group of conquering herders out of the great Eurasian steppes (‘Aryan(s)’ means ‘lord(s)’*). When there are lords, or better, barons, expressing the culture of Aryan masculinity there are always human livestock, underling workers forced into servitude to the barons. Since that is a culture and not a racial trait (nor inherent to human nature), the practitioners are long past being visibly Aryan or anything else in particular. The cultural poisoning from Aryan masculinity ( “to the victor belong the spoils”, glorification of living from top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism) is even now pervasive and normalized, and was so already in Hobbes’ time, which accounts for his (and the previous Christian) view of human nature. The war of all against all is the concept of ‘anarchy’ from within the cultural matrix of Aryan masculinity. If the human population consisted entirely of Aryan-cultured males, each expressing his alpha-trophy-looting will-to-power impulses, then indeed the human condition would tend toward a war of all against all.

Law

When the Aryan-cultured barons got around to attempting to limit their own lethality among themselves, they constructed a personified law by making a person into law, a sovereign, constituting the nucleus of a single Aryan superman on a massive collective scale. They did it by designating the most dominant among them as sovereign leader and then all aligning as projections and extensions of that person. The alignment was primarily military, an organization of aggressive violence, with all sovereign operations conceived as variants of the military organization and spirit. The collective beast so created, which Hobbes called Leviathan, a sovereign-owned-and-operated collective (and which we still endure today) is a mammoth replica of the individual Aryan male driven by competitive ambitions, with a brittle pride (honour) quick to take offence at disrespect, insubordinate autonomy, or resistance; its acquisitive appetites engorged by culture to smother universal empathy and nurturing impulses generally. Devotees of the macro-parasitic culture are persuaded to put up with some personal limitations within the social beast Leviathan because each one can participate in the institutional projection of a massive will-to-power and feel himself enlarged by the conquests and sparkly trophies of his sovereign Leviathan, a share of those trophies becoming personal rewards for devoted loyalty. The most commonly recognized form of Leviathan is the sovereign state, originally some form of monarchy, but other forms are common and can include corporations, crime families, and organized religions, as well as less formal cultural associations or communities of ethos such as organized class consciousness.

The father-figure sovereign, as sovereign, was mythologized as a redeeming force, seeming to lift individuals out of their selfishness, but in fact just absorbing them into a larger selfishness. Rejection of that kind of sovereignty, lordship, and hierarchy is the essence of the egalitarian political left-wing, but rejection of Aryan-type or Leviathan sovereignty, in which the body social is an institutionalized Aryan male on a gigantic scale, is not promotion of war of all against all. Instead, it is promotion of a richer understanding of individual creative intelligence, lacking the top-down idea that humans as individuals need to be redeemed or saved by a herder of some kind, inherently in inescapable debt, owing everything to the higher power which was able to herd them (obvious Aryan propaganda).

The Big Lie of the Macro-Parasite Faction

Whenever there is an authoritarian form of society, a chain-of-command society with a top-down structure of power, it is a legacy of the culture of Aryan masculinity which glorifies macro-parasitism. The grand strategy of the macro-parasitic patriarchy is to convince everyone that Aryan masculinity is the inevitable essence of human nature. “Yes, we all contain evil, but we are the same as everybody, just doing what anyone does when they can, because that is human nature. We need a higher power to press us to do somewhat better.” (The real essence of “human nature”, or rather human individuality, is living in time, which is to say, freedom. Culture has the effect of masking the creative freedom of individuals.) As long as the Aryan view of human nature is accepted, then some authoritarian sovereignty, such as the one described by Hobbes, is necessary for the most basic security of person. However, Aryan masculinity is not inevitable human nature, and insisting that it is is the Big Lie, the Big Ignoble Lie, of the macro-parasite faction. Fear of philosophical thinking is built into the culture of that faction because a philosophical ‘phenomenology of innocence’ refutes the lie and enables a more accurate recognition of human individuality. Another way of saying this might be be to say that the strategy of the macro-parasitic faction is to convince everyone that there is a determinate human nature within a determinate Great Chain of Command (Being), whereas a personally conducted phenomenology of innocence reveals freedom.

* Indian Thought and its Development, written by Albert Schweitzer, translated from German by Mrs. Charles E.B. Russell, published by Henry Holt and Company Inc. (1936). See page 20.

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchy, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, Freud, intelligence, nature, philosophy, Plato, reality, sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes

Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Equality, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power

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aristocracy, civilization, class, culture, History, human parasitism, oppression, politics

The Malice of Civilization

Human-on-human parasitism is not something civilization strives to overcome, not some accidental or unanticipated by-product of the social and political institutions called civilization, but rather is the entire intent and matrix of, the fundamental goal and reason for, the arrangements of civilization. Political and economic arrangements originated historically in the violent coercion of human communities by certain human factions determined to enjoy the benefits of parasites by means of that coercion. History reveals a human community divided between parasite factions and the human masses they prey upon. The most obvious lesson from history is the global triumph and entrenchment of a culture supporting top-down human-on-human parasites. It isn’t human nature which preserves the common injustices which constitute parasitism, but rather a specific dominant, pervasive, and institutionalized culture dependent on inequality and subordination, a culture which could be called will-to-power masculinity. For oppressions of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or religion (or atheism), it isn’t human nature that has to be confronted and somehow overcome, but the parasite faction’s culture (a “unified field theory” of oppression). What is waiting for everyone riding the social mobility bus north into the corporate and investor class is benefits from the practices of parasites.

A clear view of the malicious culture at the heart of civilization can be found in The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt*, in which a close study of medieval chronicles shows the values and patterns of perception characteristic of European aristocracy, the cultural faction pioneering economic and sovereign power as it still exists, forming institutions of sovereignty, nationality, war, high culture, and wealth distribution that still function throughout the modern cultural system. It is the ethos of an absolute and unending quest for splendour of personal reputation, the culture of manly honour/ profit that still plagues humanity in many forms. Those aristocrat knight/ barons and their literate intelligentsia took themselves (barons) to be models of human nature at its purest, which is to say devoid of and contemptuous of empathy. They also conceived their Christian deity as very much like themselves and as such the source and proof of their superiority. Something that Brandt does not say, but which is implicit in his observations, is that those medieval barons (armed men on horses) were consolidating a way of living as human parasites on many levels. They were parasites on the females of their own class (for their reproductive and nurturing labour), on people outside their class working to create the necessities of sustainable lives, and most immediately on animals, the horses that were forced to carry them and the dogs that did their hunting, for example. The barons acquired ownership of property of all kinds by lethal assault, and refined a culture which glorified their looting. Brandt refers vaguely to the fading of their culture, sometimes called feudal chivalry, but it cannot be doubted seriously that there is a direct line of cultural descent, a single ethos, extending from knight/ barons in the chronicles studied by Brandt to contemporary crime families, corporations (such as investment banks), and governments (especially in their military culture, covert activities, and ‘foreign’ relations), all of which have the means of evading law and so the immunity to act out patterns of behaviour which channel the culture of the barons. The households of barons were organizational embryos of the governments of modern sovereign states, of corporations, and of crime families; and their personal ethos remains the cultural ideal of capitalism and masculinity generally.

Culture is Strategic Propaganda

In their fetish for display, ornamented decoration, pageantry, ceremony, and elaborate entertainment the barons inaugurated the models of high culture and fine art which still endure. The people who can afford to consume the work of artists on a moderate to large scale, to employ artists and to commission particular works, are royals, aristocrats, capitalists and their wealth organizers, princes of the Church, and people in power. When they have their portraits made or commission architecture and monuments, the intent is to idealize, glorify, and immortalize themselves, their culture, and the whole parasitic system of power and wealth they represent. Works of art in that context are intended to overpower and bedazzle, to halt critical thinking by invoking emotional currents with the specious beauty of an image or an impression. Of overriding importance for fine art in the capitalist economic system is that it is a branch of the finance/ investment industry, a luxury goods trade dealing in trophy items promoted as so rare, unpredictable, and impressive that they become an investment hedge for surplus wealth. Of course individual creators are capable of removing their creative process from that superstructure of art culture, but in no case are the artifacts produced important enough, neither individually nor in sum total, to count as justifications for, or legitimizing achievements of, parasitic culture and practice.

The coercion practiced by parasite factions has been normalized through efforts of that faction’s intelligentsia to construct benign explanations and justifications for it, normally by appealing to an omnipotent divine intelligence, to “justify the ways of God to man” (John Milton, Paradise Lost). Any religious culture featuring omnipotent cosmic forces serves instantly to justify whatever happens to exist. Intellectual work, including philosophy, is always written in a cultural context controlled by top-down human-on-human parasites, and intellectuals normally belong to, or owe their livelihood to, the parasite faction, and like everyone have to contend with the coercion of ambient parasites. In that context many philosophers devote themselves to an attempt to justify, even sanctify, existing institutions and avoid thinking beyond the belief system which supports inequalities of wealth and power. The fact that Aristotle invented justifications for slavery, for example, illustrates the longstanding effort by philosophers to conceive grounds of morality other than empathy, so that universal equality could be avoided and the brutality of sovereign states and the baronial classes which operate them could evade a true moral evaluation.

So, not only are the parasites diverting benefits disproportionately to themselves, but, far more importantly, by decisive influence on both high culture and popular culture, including religions, art, entertainment, media of advertising and journalism, and intellectual culture, they arrange messaging to convince everyone that their arrangements are inevitable, pre-determined by higher powers, by God or nature, the best of all possible worlds. In aid of that, there is cultural support for the assumption that individuals are not competent to identify and think about this issue, that we do best keeping a narrowly practical focus, earning and consuming as much as we can manage, refreshing ourselves with cultural entertainments and doing our utmost to ride the social mobility bus up, changing nothing but our personal circumstances. The idea of human equality has such a difficult time being broadly understood and embraced because the entire culture of institutionalized sovereign states and their economic organization is founded on top-down human-on-human parasitism constantly declaring justifications for itself.

*The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt, published by Schocken Books (1973), ISBN 0-8052-0408-3.

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 2 of 2)

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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History, philosophy, politics

Enlightenment Rationalism in Perspective

The rationalism of the Enlightenment is sometimes blamed for major problems of modernity such as the militaristic organization of the economy, an inhumane corporate obsession with efficiency, environmental destruction arising from alienation of human-kind from nature, and the subversion of democracy by corporate interests. Nietzsche (no fan of democracy) blamed ‘the academic voice’ (a rational style of discourse he traced back to Socrates) for sucking the fun and vitality out of life. Such charges are false and ill founded. What is really sucking vitality and causing the destruction of the planet is the cultural poison of legitimized top-down parasitism that derives from a very particular historical source. In modernity the profit-collecting class is exercising industrial scale parasitism on the whole planet.

Back to The Revolution

The attack of radical rationalists against the legitimacy of totalitarian Christian supervision of society was so effective in the long run that by the time of the French Revolution of 1789 the sovereign power structure in France had been effectively discredited in the popular mind by the spread of rationalist ideas. That was a main event in the slow historical spiral of revolt by which Christendom withered and Modernity emerged, and it was effective enough to enable the Revolution. The Revolution reveals profound hostility toward the crime-family aristocracy in addition to the Church, and also shows acute consciousness of the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, misleadingly called “the class war”. However, that consciousness and hostility was strongest among the rural/ agricultural proletariat and not so much among the educated urban commercial and professional classes who also had substantial involvement in the Revolution and in the eventual restoration of civic order. Those urban classes wanted to emulate and benefit from certain features of the crime-family success story, and so they complained about specific practices only, for example, about trade monopolies or prejudicial taxes and fees which they found too restrictive for their aspirations. There was never a penetrating and sustained historical-conceptual critique of aristocratic/ crime-family culture, the parasitic and predatory alpha-trophy-looting culture which was the other foundation of sovereign power in a profound partnership with patriarchal Christianity. That partnership was so profound because both had cultural origins in parasitic nomadic animal herder societies.

The Enlightenment critique of Christian authority succeeded in discrediting the pretensions of both Church and aristocracy to sovereignty by divine appointment, and both of those groups began to wither away, but the military-based institutions by which sovereign power was practiced and projected were enduring models of control which the new rising lot of commercial/ professional crime-families exploited to defend their own legitimacy as effective sovereigns. There are always varieties of crime-families eager to take the places of any that get exposed and put out of business. Since the conceptual foundations of the Old Regime mechanisms or institutions of power were never objects of a thorough discrediting critique, they were simply accepted and conserved on the basis presented by Hobbes, the claim that the only alternative to them was a jungle-like war of all against all. Even Rousseau advised that the institutions of sovereign authority and law should be honoured. Consequently, ‘modernity’ emerged as a period when the culture of power was only partly understood, only partly deconstructed.

Top-Down Political Force on Debate about Crime

One cultural reality-distortion that follows from the uncompleted work of the Enlightenment is that, based on the influence of well-funded right-wing political propaganda, political debate remains silent about, and apparently blind to, top-down human-on-human parasitism at the same time as keeping up a continuous campaign to alarm the public about bottom-up parasitism in the form of petty crimes. There is a connection between the political correctness of never mentioning top-down capitalist power in democracies and the right-wing “tough on crime” alarmism about bottom-up parasitism. The connection is that attention on the political force of capitalist ownership families would risk revealing the top-down human-on-human parasitism of the culture they accept and practice, far more destructive than the kind of crime that is commonly recognized as such. It is a blatant tactic to divert public attention away from the cultural source of intractable criminality. The only real solution to bottom-up crime is the eradication of legitimized top-down parasitism.

Only now, with so much more research into history enabling an identification of top-down human-on-human parasitism (developed from parasitic and predatory animal herding and elaborated into the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity and of uber-masculine crime-families and father-God-in-the-sky religions) as the oppression and malaise at the core of western concepts of sovereignty, executive power, and leadership, can we have a chance to finish the work of the Enlightenment. Now we have to face the fact that the deepest of ancient evil, transmitted culturally, escaped the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution, and still remains in operation at the foundation of our poisoned conceptions of power, hierarchy, social inequality, meritocracy, and sovereignty, for example, not to mention the specific and blatant instances of class, race, and gender parasitism. So the self-justifying culture of the ownership class is only one head of the many-headed cultural legacy of ancient human parasitism. On the bright side, it is still possible to recapitulate the successful strategies of the rationalist Enlightenment, appropriately updated, in marshalling insights into the interiority of individual intelligence. To do that we identify the principles and grounds of our liberating re-orientation.

Vital Knowledge: Documenting the Historical Arc of Top-Down Parasitic Culture

It isn’t necessary to take any particular person’s word for the historical arc of culture. A few books of recent historical research, listed below, make it convincingly clear. What is so inspiring about these works is that the careful and determined accuracy about particular details of events, conditions, and ideas is combined with an equally determined questing and searching for, and recognition of, large scale arcs which are intrinsic to the sense and reality of the details. They create in that way a breathtaking vision, synthesized from masses of observations and pieces of evidence.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, written by Jack Weatherford, Published by Crown (2004), ISBN: 0609610627.

This is about formation of the massive Mongol empire, incorporating China, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, and Russia, conquered by armies of tribal nomadic animal herders who then facilitated the distribution and development of cultural elements that impressed them from the various societies they controlled. It has remarkable insight into social conditions in a completely lawless tribal society, in this case the society of the nomadic people of the Asian steppe. The second half has important insights into the flow of cultural property between China, Persia, and India enabled by the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. The author’s claim is that this flow also branched off into Europe and created the European renaissance by the fifteenth century. It is a wonderfully un-western view of world history which attempts to restore the credit due to the great Asian civilization which flourished as never before under Mongol administration roughly between 1211 and 1332, ended finally by the great bubonic plague which spread from China to the Atlantic. It is impossible that the thriving of that Asian civilization would not have drawn the admiration and imitation of western Europe. Marco Polo is an individual instance of the cultural diffusion into Europe.

1215: The Year of Magna Carta, written by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, Published byTouchstone (2005), ISBN-10: 0743257782, ISBN-13: 978-0743257787.

An illuminating glimpse of life in Europe at an important moment in the development of law. At that moment it was perfectly clear that the social layer made up of the landowning aristocracy or nobility was nothing other than crime-families.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (2002), ISBN: 0199254567.

This is packed with information about the Enlightenment and readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things.

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited and with an Introduction and critical apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0226805301 (0-226-80530-1).

This is a fascinating follow-up to Radical Enlightenment because it documents the political consequences of what the Enlightenment movement of ideas had accomplished.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

The first four historical studies listed just above provide a perspective from which to interpret this stunning overview of political theory. It is striking that, in spite of the philosophical effort to remove demons from descriptions of nature, the main effort of political theory has been to justify something very close to the familiar structure of power at the time and place the theory was being written, almost as if “to justify the ways of God to man”! It was probably that sort of observation that persuaded Karl Marx that economic conditions determine ideas. However, the point it illustrates is that the parasitism that is familiar and in power over a stable human collective is very difficult to think about and to identify for what it is. Watch for discussions of the iron law of oligarchy. Also watch for the discussion of: “embourgeoisment” (pp. 655-657). Enjoy.

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power

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History, philosophy, politics

The Philosophical Tradition of Cultural Detox

The projects of ancient philosophy included removal of demons, spirits, and gods from descriptions of nature, in other words, removal of a certain kind of cultural poison that disabled the full power of individual thinking. For the Hellenistic Epicureans, for example, the cultural poison that included belief in various gods resulted in unnecessary anguish, worry, pain, and unhappiness. Roughly 1700 years after the Epicurean movement flourished, the work of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment continued that tradition. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove similar poisons which were being used to legitimize the exercise of sovereign power to stifle freedom of thought, for example, by the burning alive of the philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 in Rome.

Considering subjective interiority in the context of politics, the Enlightenment stands as an historical precedent for the effectiveness of that interiority against the propaganda of a crime-family oligarchy. During the European “radical Enlightenment” (roughly 1650-1750), and to a lesser extend earlier, during the Renaissance, philosophical humanists made an appeal to “innate rationality” which empowered every individual to question, and to understand the fallacies of, religious superstitions enshrined in Christianity, the religion that legitimized and even sanctified brutal sovereign power. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove cultural justifications for top-down human-on-human parasitism (a concept of life inherited from nomadic animal herders) from Old Regime European culture, and indeed some cultural poison, involved with the sovereignty of the Church as messenger of God, was discredited, a verifiable instance of progress in history.

During the Old Regime (the period of European history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution of 1789) the oligarchy of a crime-family class was quite overt, explicit, and widely acknowledged, but the ideology used to legitimize the powers, privileges, and immunities of that aristocracy had become Christianized. The oligarchy was assumed to have been somewhat tamed and sanitized by its traditional association with organized Christianity, which formed the mediating class of pre-modern European culture. Ultimate justification for sovereignty came from the Christian God’s active engagement in the world, as proclaimed and celebrated constantly by the pervasive organization of the Church. With Machiavelli’s political philosophy (please see posting 46, December 7, 2012, Machiavelli’s Prince) it was recommended that the Renaissance should include a kind of crime-family coup against the senior supervisory authority of the Church. The crime-family aristocracy judged that it had established itself as pack leader on the ground sufficiently to do without the senior partnership of the Church, a judgment bolstered by their claim to create ordered civilization merely by their effective monopoly of armed violence (also made explicit and provided with ideological support by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). Aristocracy considered social order itself to be their independent claim to be agents of God. However, in spite of that claim to independent legitimacy as sovereign controllers, it turned out that they could not do without some claim of divine intervention in their dominance over others, and the Church still owned the patents on divine will in the popular mind.

The conduct of aristocracy was nasty enough to alienate a lot of people, and when they had to justify their dominance, their strongest claim was always that the whole of existing reality was ordained by God, and the Church could hardly do anything but support that. Consequently, when the carriers of humanist philosophy in the Republic of Letters launched their critique of sovereign ideology, it was specifically religious ideology that was their focus. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, was an inspirational event of that movement. The struggle went on long before and after the period 1650-1750, and it eventually succeeded, largely, in de-throning the claims of Church officials and aristocrats to be messengers of God in their disempowerment and exploitation of ordinary individuals.

From a broader point of view, however, that whole effort was only half the battle, because the cultural basis of the strictly aristocratic “half” of medieval oligarchy, the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, a concept of life derived from nomadic animal herders, was never identified as part of the fundamental oppression in the organizational culture of western civilization, and the real malaise of the west. Hobbes’ view of the social contract (an important model for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)) was very much myth instead of history, an over-rationalized and sanitized narrative to account for the existing institutions of civic order, including law and private property. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau knew, nor could have known, history in enough accurate detail to trace the actual derivation of sovereign power. The parasitism of nomadic herder culture, and its legacy in the culture of crime-families, was not mentioned or considered by either of them. Hobbes, as a courtier, was thinking from a comfortable position inside the privileges enjoyed by sovereign power. Rousseau, in thinking that common people had been tricked into giving up their rights for the social contract, was wrongly assuming that people had surrendered their rights and now had no alternative but to accept the instituted structure of power. At least Rousseau sensed that injustice had been institutionalized, which was an advance beyond Hobbes.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Hierarchy

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Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

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Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 2 of 2)

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)