Category Archives: Narrative

Dissent by Metaphysics

07 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 172, word count: 680.

tags: spirit, hive-mind, identity, sensibility, culture, self-possession, caring drama, dissent

It is not unusual for some individuals to recognize a personal discordance with mass identities, cemented into uniformity, as they are, by collectively sharing an orientation up toward a commanding height of metaphysics that denigrates human existence among ideas of disembodied demons, deities, and ever recurring cycles and circles of events and personal incarnations. It is widely recognized that shared stories and emotional triggers distributed on popular media, under the control of a few corporate owners responsible to certain investors and advertisers, contribute mightily to a shared sense of reality which is the human equivalent of hive-mind. In the individual’s quarrel with hive-mind dystopian regimes, the individual can’t do much about mechanisms of mass control except to shift focus onto the deepest level of politics: conceptions of creative power, freedom, and self-possession at the level of the individual.

Without recognizing the reality of actual creative agency, the enactment of spur-of-the-moment aspirations or intentions from conception at some moment through subsequent time, the idea of spirit is entirely unnecessary, but with such a recognition the idea is indispensable and profoundly important as a transcendence within reality. Creative agency is a drama of perfecting expectations and inventing intentions for effective self-declaration. To be experienced, reality must come within that caring drama of a personal life in the world. Expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations are states of ideality that occur only in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a personal “I”, a sensibility that is the living experience of some individually embodied personality. As well as coping with the falling away of all particular states of actuality with the passage of time (the ephemeral situation of bodies on planet Earth), the main drama for every spiritual being involves the value experienced from nurturing, caring for, and creating enduring relationships with others, sharing the drama of expectation and self-declaration, mutually reflecting the super-reality of living consciousness, collaborating as pilots of a searching, questioning, gaze.

Only the original drama of caring conceived by each individual confers a shape of relevance and importance on brute uncaring actuality, the envelopment of inertial and entropic nature. The specific caring of every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, certain parts more than others, crucially different for every individual. Every person has the same transcendent creativity in building a life’s drama within its enveloping world. However, there have typically been assertions that certain individual dramas must be disabled in order to enable others to play out more favourably. In that context the individual sensibility or orientation is the matrix of politics, the essential battlefield in the wars of hive minds.

To a considerable extent, our perceptions of things are culturallyimposed on our expectations. Given the fact that ideas (expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations) occur only in the living experience of some embodied personality, the history of ideality is the history of the interplay between cultural influences and personal inventiveness in forming ideas for the arc of orientation and bearing of lives, the mutating expectations that people suppose over generations about nature, culture, themselves, social interconnectedness, and sacred transcendence. The community master narrative over-represents the perspective of the most acquisitive and competitive stratum of the social order, glamourized to reinforce inequalities of wealth and power, often expressed in stories of apparently exceptional persons: kings, princes, aristocrats, military and police officers, the very beautiful or lucky.

Culture is not nature, and not divine intervention, but a human and political interpretation of experience, an expression of what mattered previously in the caring drama of certain people. Everyone’s personal state of orientation is culturally influenced, guided, and enriched, situated at some place in the historical and political evolution of a mutating culture. From recognizing that this culture is not the end but yet another in a string of badly flawed iterations, individuals can use the inherent creative power and freedom of spirit to recognize their self-possession and to own a measure of participation and control in conceiving the ongoing evolution of their society and culture.

Embedded links:

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

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550.)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Contesting the External Almighty

28 Friday Aug 2020

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

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Fragment 167, Word Count: 3,113.

Plato’s External Almighty

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

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

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

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

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

The Christian External Almighty

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

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

The Contestant

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

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

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

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

External Almighty Restoration

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s The Thing

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

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence Matters, Being Doesn’t

30 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Narrative, Nature, Subjectivity

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Fragment 162, word count: 340.

Humanity/ personality is a gaze into nature from a time-bound drama in which some things matter more than others. Without the gaze of a personality, nature has no drama and nothing about it matters. The gaze is a questioning of what’s there to encounter, a living point in an arc of intended intervention, knowing, anticipating, aspiring, discovering, and learning. The seeking gaze is a bearing onward in an ever changing poise of orientation that defines a monad of agency conducting the personal drama of a person’s life. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, but it is an act of the drama, a move forward in and by the drama, a creative act that is an essential piece of the drama. The gaze is the drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world. An individual’s momentarily located orientation and bearing is inseparable from the emotional stakes of the larger dramatic idea of this embodied life. The direction and sensitivity of the gaze, the specifics of its questioning, are the application of a curated sensibility, a many layered orientation, a sum-up of all previous engagements, lessons learned, and vectors undertaken, the whole of a personal no-longer. All the context that makes sense of anything is in the questioning of the gaze, the sensibility expressed. The orientation and bearing of an individual’s questioning is reconfigured by everything learned, by every recognition and discovery. What personality has instead of an essence is a learning arc, a personal fountain of curiosity and intent expressed in a questioning engagement and in the creation of an ever changing path through a temporally unstable actuality. The scientific conceptual system leaches all drama from existence, and so leaches out reasons, meanings, creation, and ideas in general, and so presents a limited impression of reality. The only kind of conceptual framework that can comprehend the drama of what matters is an existential idealism.

Embedded links:

Fragment 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky (word count: 2,752)

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Identity and Idealism

08 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Fragment 161, word count: 653.

In terms of culturally mainstream frameworks of explanation, an exit from dystopia depends on finding a way past the grossly contradictory bifurcation currently embracing at the same time creationist monotheism and scientific materialism, monolithic science alongside myths of angels and demons, as conceptual frameworks for understanding the world and the ongoing improvisation of lives in the world. (Fragment 145: Desperately Seeking Reality.) There is strident institutional support for this historically embedded contradiction, even in the most educationally advanced societies. A religious orientation toward a commanding height blends seamlessly into a hive-mind political-state and into reverence for its war-ready collective drama. Any questioning of that inspires panic for social pragmatists. At the same time, science is the darling of capital accumulators, weapons developers, and advertising media device multipliers. Not a single person in higher boxes of organization charts is looking for a way beyond this cultural contradiction, not since the conservative backlash against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, movements which disputed the religious-political side of the contradiction based mainly (and regrettably) on an assertion of scientific materialism. It isn’t just that both scientific materialism and creationist monotheism disparage humanity/ personality (the first by conceiving only dead mechanism about which nothing matters in itself, and the second by conceiving human personality as a weak imperfect image of a disembodied original), but also that both are comprehensive systems of explanation that essentially contradict each other and yet have arranged for peaceful co-existence because each solves a fatal deficiency in the other. They tolerate and support each other because neither one is viable alone.

Both of these schools of explanation are dystopian by constructing hive minds on a nucleus of denigrated personality/ humanity. This is easy to see in the case of creationist monotheism with its counterintuitive concepts of sin and the self-denying path to salvation. Romanticism, fables strategically decontextualized from crucial givens of living reality, happily embraces the drama of mysterious ordeals and glorious rewards, and especially thrills on hidden higher powers, so all religion is inherently romantic. On the other side of the coin, the materialist insistence on strict exteriority expresses a distinctly romantic asceticism. Since the core of materialist ideology is a denigrating denial of subjective ideality, of the condition for there being anything that matters, it is incapable of sensing its own emotional underpinning in a Calvinist-inspired romance, asceticism as a heroically purifying gesture. That thread of self-denying asceticism binds scientific materialism to creationist monotheism with a force like a molecular bond, and pre-determines that the gravitas of science, faced with the hive-mind political-state demanding reverence for war, will pragmatically interpret the state as nature’s food chain manifested in human sociability. Science has declared the dystopia inevitable and made it far more lethal instead of questing for a way beyond it.

The only way to end war is to disband the collective identities that commit to and execute wars. That is not something that will be proposed or initiated by any government or corporation or any other collective entity which earnestly works at creating itself as a collective identity. This is something that can only be accomplished by individuals recognizing themselves as such through philosophical thinking. In our hive-minded dystopia, individualizing idealism is indispensable. Since creative novelty emerges from the particular drama that is the interiority of an individual’s living in the world, the modern idealism exploring this, described in Fragment 160 is a framework of orientation that enables individuals to separate viably from hive-minds. This idealism (call it Existential Idealism) leaps past the metaphysical denigration of what has been called human nature. It recognizes human existence/ personality as a transcendence of nature, if nature is conceived as it is in scientific materialism, and instead recognizes personality as an active supra-actuality in such a way that political rights derive entirely from that transcendent existence, existence as living ideality.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

11 Wednesday Dec 2019

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

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Fragment 157, word count: 552.

The pivotal dystopian feature of existing hive-mind-structured cultures is their denigrating concept of human nature. Hive minds are founded on an idea of human nature very far from creative free-agency at the level of the embodied individual; for example, on a conception such as Freud’s (in the tradition of Hobbes and Augustine): a human nature that is lethally dangerous (id) if not repressed by social control (superego). However, human psychology is so pervaded by social control that it is impossible to make reliable generalizations about human nature from either psychological phenomena or the history of human behaviour.

If acts of philosophical thinking are to be unprejudiced re-conceptualizations of the drama of existence, of existence structured in terms of caring, existence as experienced (something that matters), then de-culturing is the single crucial operation of philosophical action, not merely an incidental, occasional, or optional beginning. It is what is required for acquaintance with simple existence as ideality, as creative free-agency at the level of embodiment: a specifically oriented bearing into futurity, the point of view of a knowing, learning, and purposive gaze. Here is living human nature: to occupy, to dwell in, the reach or bearing beyond now and beyond no-longer, into an empty not-yet still to be created, the transcendent moment of ideality.

Any idealism asserts the existence of some supra-actual transcendence, creative fountain of surprises. Such transcendence has overwhelmingly been conceived, as in Plato’s idealism, as separate from the individual person, operating in some manner that is remote from embodied living. The tendency of Lutheran-stream Protestant idealism is to retain a sense of transcendence (the creative freedom of ideality) but increasingly to relocate the occurrence of transcendence from a remote central deity to individual human personalities. We see this worked out through a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte.

The context of philosophical thinking is an age-old historical drama structured around the dystopian culture of patriarchal dominance, expressing the idea of deity by imposing the will of the strongest (imperialist exceptionalism) and culturing hive minds for compliance. Various intuitions of free-agent idealism, in which the individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is conceived and treated as inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive mind, have regularly found the courage to resist assertions that rights are the exceptional property of the strongest. A striking example of one articulation of that contrary intuition is expressed in Kant’s idea of universal maxims, formalizations of simple empathy. As anyone is capable of forming these maxims, everyone’s fundamental duty is universal empathy, recognizing all sentient beings as ends, bearers of rights from their transcendent manner of existence.

The idea of a divine plan and a supernatural planner who irresistibly determines everything has been crucial in legitimizing the lethal power of patriarchal sovereignty. The idea of totalitarian natural law has been used to the same effect. The tendency of scientific materialism is to eliminate transcendence, leaving a desolation of utter predictability: the future will be the same as the past. However, the supra-actuality of creative ideality at the level of the embodied individual completely negates those assumptions. Not-yet is empty and undetermined, to be created out of the transcendent moment of ideality in vast multitudes of individuals.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Single Exception

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Fragment 155, word count: 1,234.

It is impossible to understand history without some insight into human hive mind, since the conflicts of national hive minds loom large in historical narrative. Hive minds are not merely societies in which the vast majority of people hold the same ideas about what has value and why hierarchy and authority are noble and worthy of trust, they are societies in which a majority habitually turns to institutional voices for explanations and narratives that define them in relation to some pivotal and essential drama of human existence. Philosophy is a problematic presence in all such societies because a crucial aspect of philosophy is discovering or inventing ways of de-culturing, ways to negate hive mind influences for a personal experience of things from Socratic innocence. In Euro-American capitalism, various degrees of deception, selective presentation and de-contextualizing of facts, outright propaganda and censorship, are always required to glorify a drama of conflict and competition; incentive and reward systems focused on scarce trophy properties and gradients of prestige, precedence, and celebrity as prizes for strength, conquest, and dominance. Science, claiming final authority on reality, endorses this as the drama imposed by nature.

Before we declare any set of psychological purposes to be definitive of being human, it is necessary to shift perspectives by asking what kind of existence is required for the occurrence of any purpose, and the answer is existence as ideality. Any purpose is anticipation of non-actual situations as settings for self-initiated actions, and as such pure ideality. No sentient being could consistently deny the existence of such ideas, and all forms of ideality occur in clusters commonly recognized as embodied personalities. The existence of a personality is precisely a living with purpose, and purpose or reason is a specifically directed bearing of creative ideation, the opening of a pathway with many branches into possible futures. Time is not something of sensation. All that is ever in sensation is some particular condition or stimulus. Perceiving objects is always the act of a personality reading a shape of surroundings into sensory stimulations from a personally constructed universe of ideality. Time has to be posited in ideality, by a living/ forward thinking personality. Time as future is an indeterminate world of possibilities and impossibilities, probabilities of various degrees, from the point of view of a knowing, learning, and purposive gaze. Since purposive ideality is always transforming itself in a creative arc, it is the source, the fountain of creativity from which value comes into existence. There is no competition for the gratification of creativity.

Ideality is a violation of the mechanistic conception of the world. It is a supra-actuality with some power, at the level of the embodied individual, to override the mechanistic fall-lines of what would be predictable from iron laws of nature. The existence of purposes isn’t a bounded structure in the manner of objects, since it must include the spontaneous creation and realization of novel purposes and so breaks through the limitations that the perspective of mechanistic explanation would impose on human nature. Self-recognition as the living transcendence which is ideality, consciousness, teleology, as the personal future-designing of a self-thinking idea, is both discovery of deep individuality and of the universality of the predicament of embodied agency, of a being who enters a condition of living freedom by positing (creating and projecting) the non-actuality of time. The essential drama of human existence is here. Nature is dead weight within the iron laws of falling. There is no freedom without teleology and teleology necessarily posits the continuous approach, arrival, and passing of specific possibilities.

The main discovery enabled by de-culturing is, obviously, your own personal existence, and the kind of existence it is. The example of Descartes’ method of skeptical doubt illustrates this. It brought Descartes very directly to such an encounter, to Cartesian innocence. The only reality we can possibly experience is reality as experienced, and such reality must always be partly formed by being experienced. Through de-culturing you become conscious as the experiencing dimension of reality, spiritual existence. This living of personality is a drama poised between misery and ecstasy, and drama is no part of brute actuality because it is a fabric of caring ideality, a desperate process of opening an existence. Since that is constant reorientation, constructing purposes and bearings within a sense of placement and context far more elaborate than the brute actuality of what is perceived here and now, the de-cultured encounter is the discovery of ideality or spirituality, the knowing and desperate gaze of consciousness.

In the ideological context of science, in which human behaviour is conceived as the strict working of mechanisms, say, biological mechanisms forming psychological mechanisms, there is inevitably a political race to control the mechanisms. There are many groups with great wealth working diligently to control mass behaviour for their own profit via such service providers as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, in addition to legacy advertising media. Developments in behavioural and social science in combination with mass data analysis have added sophistication, effectiveness, and stealth to such control efforts. Academics do not work for free, and large scale investors and corporations control the flow of money. Modernity is an age of scientifically engineered messaging, of corporate, political, and ideological efforts to control public opinion and population behaviour, streamed pervasively through mass media, all at the command of groups with the ability to mobilize great wealth. The function of government is to keep the majority compliant in support of the value-culture of the class of the wealthy, within its tradition of proclaiming a national hive mind. The value-culture is a celebration of trophy property, consumption, and competition as primary values, maintaining the existing profile of value in capital property, sparkly wealth trappings, and effective control over the patterns of work and consumption that support this cultural edifice. Elected officials with advisors and assistants spin out narratives based on a perceived duty to mediate between factions with established wealth/power and the ordinary majority of wage-earning and tax-paying people. The message that serves the purpose of politics will always be what seems to reconcile a mass audience to the expectations or whims of the most powerful. What that propertied class insists on is the reliable increase in the value of their possessions, driven by a vision of human nature as primarily motivated by competition and trophy possession, by belief in competitive envy and greed as core drives. Adherence to that idea is crucial to the capitalist hive mind. Of course science has been marshalled to champion this as the brute mechanism of nature. Philosophical de-culturing is the only counter-force available to any individual, the single exception and portal to universal dignity from inherent creativity. From the perspective of de-cultured consciousness the individual is always bigger than any particular drama declared foundational for a hive mind collective, bigger than placements on offer within competitive hierarchies or culturally identified functions (tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor). If government weren’t a lynchpin in controlling the mechanisms of human motivation as an instrument of a propertied class, it could instead express and cultivate a sense of human personality as creative spiritual autonomy at the level of the individual, and defend that against groups which strive to profit parasitically from narrating a collective drama as the rhythmic buzz of a hive mind.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Being Human

24 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Narrative

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Fragment 151, word count: 367.

The historical rise and accomplishments of the political left-wing in opposition to perennial oligarchic dominance is what makes the Euro-American cultural system actually special. The rise and survival of the political left expresses an intuition that the nature of persons as supra-actual points and enduring arcs of purposeful ideality, self-orienting within a sensed, guessed, and unstable surroundings, is such that we have a self-sourced mission or project beyond becoming a satisfied or even ecstatic eating machine, work supplier in a production system, or follower of commands as the belonging of a hive. Two vectors of ancient philosophy which were already leaning left were, first, an effort to get rid of superstitious myths about capricious divine personalities such as the Olympian gods and demons; and second, to clarify the peculiar existence of the gaze of personal consciousness, opening onto, and questing into surroundings of shifting and drifting possibilities and impossibilities as the context and meaning of brute actualities. The cultural imperative for universal literacy, mass education, free-ranging research and philosophical enquiry, and democratic influence on institutions of sovereignty, all express a striving for open-ended individual empowerment, a sense that existing societies are all too small to contain or express the whole of any individual. This spirit of the left affirms that education should provide individuals with the means to understand and take a substantial measure of participation and control in the ongoing evolution of society and culture.

The dominant orientation in folk societies is backward-looking. In traditional societies time is an eternally recurring circle or wheel. What was done in the past is so revered that it is assigned the status of metaphysical template of what society should be and do forever. From the influence of thinking on the political left, modernity has a different conception of time in which both futurity and temporal anteriority are considered absolutely unique. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being because the past is recognized as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, oppression, monotony, poverty, and the conformity imposed by myths of an urgent need for strength in numbers, from which even the most advanced societies are still only beginning to emerge.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Life after Hive-Mind

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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Posting 132, Word Count: 1,454.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of liberal influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; theatrical ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred and obscure “us against them” mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such things are not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story line, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda and censorship.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature as having no intrinsic need for sovereign authority is now an old idea, the real core of liberalism, and it always went against the conservative dogma, from religion, that everyone needs supervision structured within the symbols, pageantry, and authoritative superego of collective solidarity and belonging. The historical endurance of the state as sovereign authority shows that the enrichment of the idea of human nature from the Enlightenment was effectively smothered by that pre-existing culture. That pre-existing culture of authoritative supervision was an entrenchment in institutions of the traditional rights of the father, an overt expression of the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be parasitic on the weaker. These cultural assumptions grow from the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The Enlightenment and liberal conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices, and that is what accounts for the hive-mind efforts of modern states.

It is now clear, however, that there are multitudes of people with very elastic and insubstantial attachments to collective entities. For example, the globalization of capital has fostered an internationally educated and mobile professional and business class. Academics, engineers, medical practitioners, business and financial professionals are all educated in an international context and trained to have a cosmopolitan outlook, quite detached from any specifically national or territorial master narrative which is the normal core of hive-mind. Additionally, the loyalty and national belonging of the investor class generally evaporates instantly upon election of a socialist government, so is always largely a pretence. Yet, these groups and individuals conduct lives they find meaningful. They are not without a cultural framework of orientation, but it is more a culture of trophy property as primary value. A focus on possession of property always includes fear for the security of possession, requires protection by at least the readiness of force, and so includes a culture of reverence for intimidating strength and power, control of taxes, laws, and war, the organization of violence, all still core features of patriarchy. Obviously this property-based cosmopolitan framework still has a stake in maintaining the institutions of nation-state sovereignty, especially police, military, and intelligence agencies, but strictly as service providers, supplemented or replaced by private suppliers when convenient.

The cosmopolitan perspective of these factions shows that there are experiences of gratification, identity, and meaning, which make identification with a national collective completely unnecessary. Gratification from symbols and pageantry of collective identity, embedded in the narrative of national peril and exceptionalism, is not necessary for a meaningful life, as demonstrated by the contented lives of the masses of people with scant engagement with such things. Gratification from property possession is still part of traditional patriarchal culture, inextricably invested in organized force, and by far the most culturally dominant and celebrated gratification experience, but there are others. Nurturing children (or nurturing animals, even plants), socializing them into the linguistic community and having ongoing conversations with them as they develop is inherently gratifying. This nurturing sociability is an independent non-property based source of profound value, meaning, and sense of identity, in fact the most important source for most people, although studiously unrecognized as such. Still another realm of gratification experience is thinking, often in the form of ‘scribal’ ideality. Philosophers have frequently asserted that the greatest human pleasure, the most fun, is thinking. A great deal of human fulfillment is derived from following personal curiosity, learning, reading, writing, and synthesizing ideas, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity. This gratification is individually interior, the model of spiritual autonomy, although always with some important relationship with sociability, communication, and human interconnectedness. Yet again, craftsmanship is another source of value experience, expressing and performing creativity, knowledge, and skill in working with tools and materials, actualizing a previously conceived shape in observable objects. There can also be pleasure in experiencing any skillful power of the human body, but assigned donkey work is boring, dirty, sweaty, energy sucking, exhausting and that is why a ‘working’ class does not have an independent culture of value experience, whereas ‘homemakers’, certain kinds of scribes, and craftspeople certainly do.

The culture of property possession as primary value is part of a conception of human nature as a painful emptiness craving to be filled, a sucking pit of needs for definition and gratification from outside itself, a deficiency that grasps for acquisition, consumption, and competition; determined by biological and material laws. However, the importance of gratification from nurturing, from performance of creative craftsmanship, and from scribal ideality clearly refutes the claim that human nature is a consuming emptiness. The ubiquitous practice of nurture shows human nature as a fountain of empathy and compassionate caring. The intrinsic gratification in practicing craftsmanship shows creativity in projecting shapes from personally interior ideality into material actuality. Intellectual activity, a cultivation of ordinary thinking, is a fountain of personal curiosity, questions, directed impulses for relevant exploring, researching, learning, discovering, original conceptualizing, writing, reading, and synthesizing ideas. Every personality is a fountain of such goods, of spontaneous creation of curiosity, questioning, inspiration, and caring, a gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others. These self-sourced experiences of value are profound enough to build lives upon, and many people do exactly that. In this light, each personality is a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world. This recognition of human nature as self-creating from interior ideality eliminates the primacy of competition and conflict, as well as hierarchical rankings and trophy collections derived from competitions, crucial features of possession of property as primary value. It also means that individuals do not have any inherent dependence on experiences of belonging provided by hive-mind sovereign states or any similar collective entity.

The entire conservative conception of the human predicament, featuring an intrinsic grasping emptiness of human nature, property possession as essential identity definition, inevitable competition and conflict for scarce goods, celebration of strength and violence, the necessity of a sovereign authority to dampen the lethality of conflict (civilization), and the rights of the strongest to be sovereign and parasitic, all supposedly pre-determined by natural law, is a bogus and toxic cultural legacy, a mythical metaphysics to make the world exciting for aspiring heroes in their romantic dreams of a cosmically ordained struggle for dominance. This old mythology is a dystopian nightmare for most people. The way out is cultivating the gratifying activities which express personality as a fountain of ideas for interventions-in-actuality. That creates the alternative experience, acquaintance with a human nature that can trust itself in the complete absence of authority or any vestige of patriarchy, in the absence of any controlling hive-minds projecting sovereignty of the strongest, with no need for the kind of identity and meaning assigned by a controlling collective. There is a far better life after re-orienting outside nationalist hive-minds and also outside any other rat race for symbolic markers of self-worth and identity. Hive-minds make war and are made for war.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is More than Nature

08 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, University, Why thinking?

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Posting 128, Word Count: 867.

On questions of politics and social order, there is always more involved than just nature, since there is always the involvement of the subjective ideality of individuals, human spirituality. Ideologues of the political right-wing make every effort to reduce political forces to a narrow concept of nature: predetermined, rigidly and unalterably ordered by eternal categories and hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being. The right-wing concept of nature includes the right of the strongest to use lethal force to exercise sovereignty over the less strong, and conceives a general flaw in human nature, much like original sin, which means that people deserve and even require subordination to sovereign supervision. Those assumptions grow out of the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and the women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The appeal to the inevitability of nature serves the purpose of defending the advantages of those who already have the greatest advantages, mainly rights attached to possession of property. Property fits well within a narrow concept of nature. However, crucial points supposedly determined by nature on the right-wing view are really features of culture, and culture is mutable.

The Mission of the Interior Individual

The involvement of individual subjective ideality in all matters of politics and social order means, first, that the fabric of reality includes crucial forces which are very unlike the concept of nature as predetermined, unalterable, rigidly ordered by eternal categories and the great chain of being. Individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the fundamental instability of actuality, an instability represented by time. The conceptions of subjective ideality and their cultural expressions are tentative and mutable under the force of deliberation and creativity. Second, the spirituality of people means that we individually have an interior source of value, gratification, and original creation that is not connected to possession of property, that is a projecting fountain instead of a deficiency that craves consumption, acquisition, and competition. Every individual has an expressive mission that goes beyond competitions for scarce goods, struggles for survival, and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, beyond submission and obedience, beyond accumulating property, and beyond aligning with narratives spun by scribes of power and wealth in a patriarchal hive-mind. Individual subjectivities have a mission to conceive and actually make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is part of sustaining that mission. Social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas since ideas are openings into a mutable future.

The reading/ writing persona that is cultivated in literacy and education has a distinct kind of autonomy of thinking and authorship. Young people have little attachment to property, but much to their unique voice and spirituality. A great deal of human fulfillment can be derived from learning and thinking, reading and writing, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity, but such a source of fulfillment goes far beyond top-down centralizing control. It is far too autonomous and individually interior for the political right-wing to endure. Right-wing interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego to intimidate the supposed inherent vice. One reason the political right-wing is anti-intellectual and struggles to narrow eduction to vocational training (STEM etc.) is to limit a general encounter with Enlightenment era ideas which illuminate an empathic and non-property based autonomy of the individual.

Everyone’s personal state of orientation is always situated in and influenced by a historical, cultural, and political context which includes (prominently) efforts by hive-mind collectives to control the behaviour and thinking of every individual, to orient every individual within a certain story, a tragic drama asserting patriarchy as a metaphysical inevitability. There is no equivalence between the political left and the political right because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has always been an alternative vision of the individual struggling to express the mission of ideality against the great weight of patriarchy. The calling to account of patriarchal dystopia, its being exposed as such by the political left-wing, is a cultural earthquake, unavoidably a bitter and profound incompatibility of visions with little ground for compromise. Of course the messages of the left must disrupt traditional narratives that served as devices of patriarchal macro-parasitism to maintain submissive hive-minds.

An authentic idealist metaphysics is one in which brute nature participates in reality with the ideality of embodied and sociable individuals, in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of originality created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come, creating what comes next.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

The current idea of the political left-wing features struggles by organized labour for greater benefits within investor-supremacist capitalism, raising working class consciousness about structural inequalities in wealth and power. Historically, that view of the meaning of the left developed from the Hegelian/ Marxist idea of economic determinism, the idea that social classes defined by economic conditions are the units of a pre-determined progression of human societies along a course of dialectical historical stages. The idea that there is a natural large-scale structure to change in human societies was profoundly appealing in the middle of the nineteenth century because disruption of traditional social hierarchy had become alarming, in a process that began soon after the launch of overseas European imperialism in the sixteenth century, with wealth looted from other peoples pouring into Europe to financial speculators and commercial and military opportunists. Previously, tradition and custom in Old Regime Europe, the fabric of its rural-agrarian system of wealth and power, kept popular patterns of thinking quite rigidly in thrall to monarchy, aristocracy, and Church. Notwithstanding the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, eighteenth century Europe was still a largely Christian institution, pervaded by patriarchal Christian control at all levels. Disruption of the old hierarchies of wealth, work, and circumstances of living resulted in struggles over power, and broke apart the “order” that had been sacred to the patriarchs of the Old Regime. In the shattering world of new money-wealth, lost attachment to land and locality, and desperate uncertainty for masses of people dependent on industrial employment, the old system of belief and ways of thinking lost contact with reality, and people generally needed new markers by which to reorient. There was a widespread sense that individuals were caught up in forces that were far beyond their powers to control or understand. The forces at play were in fact the competitive greed and racism of the leading factions of European society, expressing the macro-parasitism inherent in their patriarchal culture. Marx’s claim that there were scientific laws of historical change gave hope to a segment of Europe’s intelligentsia, the educated heirs of the Enlightenment era, who saw this claim as a message they might use to reorient the proletarian masses being treated on their native ground in the bestial and dehumanizing ways developed to maximize profits to investors from overseas imperialism and commercial exploitation. In Europe this was still novel and startling, engineered by newly powerful social factions, beyond any custom or tradition that might blend it into an appearance of natural order.

The idea of a predetermined pattern of social and cultural change, arcing inevitably toward justice, has lost all plausibility, especially since the collapse of Marxist regimes in eastern Europe, leaving a fatal ideological void for the most popular conception of a political left-wing. However, the collapse of that idea does not undermine entirely the force of left-wing politics because there was a previous and original “left” movement before the grandiose Hegelian metaphysics took hold. That original leftist movement was the party of philosophy itself rather than the party of organized labour. Specifically, it was the party of a secular philosophy of cultural Enlightenment, and it represented what had become known as the Republic of Letters, independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities created a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in Latin, the international language of eduction, marking an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of ideality. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period. Philosophy was then, and not for the first time, the innovative force against ossified patterns of thinking, and as such it placed primary emphasis on the individual’s power of rationality, a message often difficult to sustain in the context of the vicious campaigns of race and class assault and propaganda that constituted European imperialism.

The Enlightenment

The core innovation of the Enlightenment was not so much an assertion of individualism as it was a secular concept of human nature which changed the meaning of the individual. In the still dominant Christian view, human nature had an absolute need of external sovereign supervision due to the inherent taint of original sin, declared inescapable by Church father Augustine of Hippo. Christianity reinforced Augustine’s idea with Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, both visions of top-down cosmic hierarchy, perfect models for supporting the Church in exercising the sovereignty it asserted to be necessary and beneficent. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment countered patriarchal Christian ideology with two innovations (which eventually proved to be heading in incompatible directions). One replaced the cosmic hierarchy from Aristotle and Plato with an approach that flattened the basic cosmic structure, namely monistic materialism inspired by the metaphysics of Spinoza. More important, the left was the political party of philosophy because it brandished a secular view of human nature emphasizing innate rationality and excluding any inherent flaws and taints, and as such, a human nature not inherently dependent on any sovereign supervision. That was the crucial point, and it put the Enlightenment left in opposition to basic patriarchal cultural mythology, in which the strongest have the (divine/ natural) right of unlimited sovereignty, an assumption still discernible in the idea of ‘meritocracy’, and one that was asserted enthusiastically at the time to justify the most brutal imperialism. This stream of Enlightenment was already and always an anti-imperialist force, the foundation of claims for individual human dignity and rights, equality, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. In a world of people with no need of sovereign supervision, the patriarchal assertion of sovereign rights is naked human-on-human macro-parasitism, vicious and criminal.

European imperialism had given patriarchal dominance-culture unprecedented power both economic and cultural, especially in the hands of new commercial factions. The materialist side of Enlightenment was not a problem for them and in fact was a helpful frame of reference. Mechanistic materialism was making impressive advances in understanding objective nature and delivering new machines for the benefit of large scale industry and commerce. Under the banner ‘science’, claiming to represent strict mathematical rationality, it was acquiring ever-increasing prestige, at the same time realigning with patriarchal assumptions of natural hierarchies, and giving up any claim to flatten the fundamental structure of nature at large. This was the side of Enlightenment that rode the triumphant wave of imperialist wealth and power, but there remained a stubborn minority report: the basis of the political left.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature drew on a history of development that included the campaigns for universal literacy from the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384), as well as the Lutheran emphasis on a personally interior relationship with divinity in a free act of faith. From that history, Enlightenment human nature was an inherent richness of individual interiority: curious, creative, empathic and sociable, and a rational learner and eager user of language (spoken, written, printed) in engagement with others, deriving fulfillment from mutual support and engagement with others. Cultures are crucial to individual human development, but cultures are bottom-up systems, as illustrated by ever-mutating language, not a gift from on-high, nor dependent on colonial masters or any other sovereign power. In the later part of the eighteenth century, within the milieux of Enlightenment culture which was already a force against imperialism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant worked out a sort of phenomenology of spirit (interiority) in which human individuals are understood as inherently self-legislating, and so, again, not dependent on outside sovereignty. This idea was the unacknowledged pinnacle of long centuries of cultural development in Europe, a minority report presenting an alternative vision for post-Christian society. It means that the decisive theme of western history, what makes the Euro-American cultural system interesting, is the contest playing out there over the legitimacy of sovereignty.

Kant’s philosophical work was arguably the best expression of Enlightenment ever produced, a considered advance beyond Spinoza’s materialist monism. There was room in Kant’s vision for both objective empirical science and for an individual interiority that was truly transcendent in its creative freedom. The problem was that, in the context of the mesmerizing frenzy of race and class violence in the era of high European imperialism, nobody was ready to digest the idea of human subjectivity free of an inherent dependency on sovereign power. In spite of that, the enriched conception of human nature had deep historical and cultural roots in this increasingly literate society, flourishing in the Republic of Letters and embryonically in Protestantism, far too embedded to be dismissed. This made a deeply divided cultural landscape that included patriarchal Christianity with its long-established ideology of sovereign power; newly triumphant money-wealth culture, heir apparent to patriarchal macro-parasitic top-dog-ism; scientific materialism as the servant of money-wealth culture; and a vision, contested by all those other cultural forces, of individual interiority as the fountain of creative freedom. The other cultural streams have strong and separate reasons for fearing and loathing the radical Enlightenment idea of the individual. Science can’t abide the existence of creative freedom as a transcendence beyond its laws of determinism; and even the new patriarchal hierarchies can’t abide the prospect of loosing their controlling grip on the work and consumption of the masses, a grip they conceive as power. Those forces have done their best to suppress the radical Enlightenment insight, and have had considerable success working cooperatively.

The Marxist conception of the political left is surely dying, but that is not a decisive loss for a politics of the left, and should be a benefit. Marx’s dialectical materialism and its laws of history show how materialism quickly goes to strict determinism, unfreedom, and the disappearance of transcendence into meaninglessness. In addition, the introduction of Marxist ideas in the nineteenth century revived, in a new form, the pre-Enlightenment assumption that collectives are the primary independent human entities exercising legitimate rights over individuals, traditionally by means of monarchy, aristocracy, and the hierarchy of the Church, but also by means of police, military service, civic pageantry, censorship, and mass propaganda. Marxist party leaders took over that fundamental idea of authoritarian sovereignty, and in doing so decisively deflected leftist development away from its original trajectory. Some philosophy consistent with the radical Enlightenment insight, a secular vision of rich individual interiority, transcendent in its creative freedom and as such the basis for community, cultural development, and fulfilling human interconnection, must be the perennial core of any politics of the left, its taproot as the party of philosophy.

Recommended

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: 0-226-80530-1.

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.

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, written by Jonathan Israel, published by Princeton University Press (2014), ISBN: 978-0-691-16971-2.

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

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.