Category Archives: Nature

Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia

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Fragment 171, word count: 780.

There is a western consensus that the rapid launch of mathematical science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe drew the decisive line in human history, the crossing of which heralded a future with unlimited improvements in all human affairs. There was some speculation that after understanding the energies of nature humans would use them first to perform essential production work and then venture on to accomplish our fondest hopes. It was thought to be self-evident that ingenious mechanisms for channelling energies far greater than human and animal muscle power would free people from the physical burden of work and create such abundance that none would suffer privation. This, roughly, was the theory of science for a better world, material progress. It didn’t work out because understanding the energies of nature did nothing to change the cultural limits on how the wealthiest groups distributed empathy toward other breathing beings. The result is that now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the idea of progress, Better World Theory, is confused and seriously disputed. Developments in digital technology over the last half-century have given a new boost to STEM-based hopes for a better world, although weapons of mass destruction and climate change loom larger than ever and technology still doesn’t break down the cultural barriers to expanding empathy.

The reasons for intractable and extinction level problems in this age of mathematical science, which promotes itself as the means for solving all human problems, cannot be discovered by scientific research. Materialist science cannot settle the culture war between the core values of patriarchy from feudal Christendom along with other antique societies which similarly control strictly and sparsely licensed empathy, over against an emerging conception of culture and society based on a universality of empathy. Nostalgia for an imagined past along the lines of feudal Christendom is still widespread and a characteristic feature of fascism, a worse dystopia than what we have. From this perspective, what makes a society dystopian, a mortal danger to itself and others, is a poverty of empathy.

Populist Sense of Loss: Birthright and Patriarchy

The sense of loss that drives right-wing populism results from progress made in extending empathy, bringing with it some degree of dignity and equality, to previously denied people, and especially from the successes of feminism and its inexorable drift of values toward nurture and away from the masculine culture of dominance-derived pride. Right-wing populism is nostalgia for misogyny, racism, celebration of masculine strength, patriarchy, and terror of a supernatural masculine mind in the universe at large which decrees all those dystopian arrangements and certifies their eternal endurance.

There is also a populist rage against the elite status and honour of education and scholarship, of expertise, study, scribal skills and their culture, because they override the tradition of birthright. Birthright claims to be the decree of nature or the almighty creator, in which people are born to a certain social status as a man or as a person of the dominant race, a meaningful niche with a certain richness of rights, privileges, and dignities. In a world of education, there is no birthright. Everyone must accomplish what they can through effort and ingenuity. That has given women, racial minorities, and marginalized groups generally, a way to bypass birthright in dominant cultures.

The broadening of empathy is not an accomplishment of science or technology, and not likely to be helped by artificial intelligence. It is instead a product of the two culture engines identified as threats by the political right-wing: the culture of nurture and attachment cultivated mainly by women, and the scribal culture of broad literacy, inquiry, and scholarship. The posture of inquiry that is philosophy, for example, covering the whole of culture and experience, arises from a judgement, beginning from Socrates, that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions.

Early on in the twenty-first century, the political left-wing might be desperate in its struggle against advances by traditional patriarchy in a conservative, neoconservative, and neofascist onslaught, but in a long historical perspective the political right-wing is at least as desperate because people generally have become and continue to become more nurturing and to embrace nurturing ethics and values. Violence is less tolerated in many cultures than it was even one generation ago, although there are still forces striving mightily to legitimizing authoritarian patriarchy and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, brandishing and glorifying the tools of violence. The truth about individual human spirituality is that the potential for empathy is inherent and as near universal as we need for a better world.

Embedded links:

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

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

Copyright © 2020 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.

Time is a Dual Instability

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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

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Fragment 166, word count: 416.

‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘an anticipatory ideation of agency’. The existence of teleology is a certainty, perhaps the only one, although we also act routinely on the practical certainty of known features of actuality that have been reliably stable. I know what a coffee machine is, where mine is, and how to use it to make coffee. That knowledge is part of my orientation, my sensibility. Let’s accept from science that measurable nature is perfectly non-teleological in its brute material actuality. The completely different existence of teleology is a certainty because it is the very genius of our knowing and caring agency, our living existence within brute actuality. “I anticipate, expect, wonder, and intend, therefore I am.” Since teleology conceives a place and grasp in the non-actual future, it is by definition an idea, a constant re-directing of the willing of an ongoing agency. Every teleology is, of course, an individual person. With teleology at the core of our dramatic lives of knowing and caring (we know because we care, we reach knowing through caring *), we cannot coherently claim uncertainty about its existence or its power to intervene effectively in the arrangement of things in brute actuality. So, we discern reality in its duality, two contrasting but entangled moving streams of instability, one which, in itself, doesn’t matter in the least as it falls insensitively by inertia and entropy. The other is teleology which creates importance and relevance in the personal drama of its individually embodied living. Teleology is the only reason anything matters, and that, along with its ideality, is its claim to transcendence. The notion transcendence tends to lift our gaze to the sky, away from the simple light of individual consciousness. However, it still makes sense to call teleology transcendent when it only belongs to embodied personalities of the familiar kind and not something skyward or cosmic. If teleology (the only certainty) isn’t transcendent then nothing is. The foundational status of ideas and ideality in the world that matters, the world as experienced, lands us in metaphysics, and the whole of metaphysics rests on the single question: What should we make of teleology? What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which is our consciousness of time as our primordial context? The answer lies in conceiving an idealism that identifies teleology as a multitude of individual and locally embodied sensibilities in an irreducible duality with measurable actuality which is perfectly non-teleological: time is a dual instability.

* Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t care, so can’t know.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Genius of Ephemerality

05 Sunday Jul 2020

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

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Fragment 165, word count: 595.

There is a longstanding pattern in the Western intellectual tradition of artificially separating a cognitive-rational aspect of a person’s engagement with experiences from the active play-out of emotional drama which is a person’s life in the world (and the definitive existence of ideality). As well as dealing with the precarious situation of living on the surface of planet Earth, what mainly shapes the drama for everyone is seeking out other sensitive beings to nurture and care for, constructing profound and enduring relationships with them. In this way ideality (always I-deality) is primarily empathy. Learning facts about things and solving problems are strictly incidental to the conceived imperatives of empathy. On the basis of the separation of cognition from empathic and dramatic agency, an edifice of conceptions has been built distinguishing data, facts and truths, from the emotional drama of “subjectivity” (often denigrated as inherently biased and limited by specific embodiment). However, it is always someone’s emotional drama which confers identified existence on anything.

We carry on living on the basis of a practical certainty that there is an actuality, some of which we eat and breathe and make clothes from. Actuality is what it is and persists in its nature quite independently of how it is conceived by us multitude of individually embodied ideality living with it. Yet it does permit a variety of ways of being conceived, and our ways of conceiving it express how things matter to us in the active play-out of drama which is life in the world.

The genius of ideality is creative ephemerality, turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to an endurance of never-ending newness made possible by purposefully plunging and probing through time, conceiving freedom in a strictly non-actual but variably probable and possible future. The questioning push directing ideality’s gaze at the world is a self-directed re-orientation in flight: with a specifically directional bearing but also questioning, always incomplete. What is crucial to subjectivity is semi-reliable markers for orientation, to make agency,  operating into an open future, possible. We orient ourselves with ideas about actuality and other personalities, interpretations of experience, concepts created in the context of the teleological need for an open-ended and socially interconnected future-ward arc of living. Ideas are constructive acts of a consciousness living a life in the world, acts of gazing, creative acts of a knowing and learning at the questing point of an arc of purpose. Ideas are openings of newness, created outside actuality, interventions of an instance of a supra-actuality, non-being, which is the existence of living consciousness.

Individual subjectivity has to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the instability of actuality experienced as the passage of time. Having the power to do that is the genius of ideality. Knowledge is precisely a state of subjectivity in relation to the world in which a subject lives and orients itself. Nothing can be knowledge except in someone’s knowing, and only a particular subject/ person can know anything. Knowledge is first and always someone’s ideas. The conceptions of reality created by subjective ideality, and their cultural expressions, are tentative and mutable under the force of new experience, deliberation, and creativity. There is no absolute world-order (as in Plato) given (as data) to be known without the constructive activity of subjective ideality. Learning is a change of directionality of intent, expectation, and aspiration, of orientation, rather than a collecting and recollecting of images or word strings.

Notes

“ … Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, An Existential Contribution, Volume I: Text with Introduction and Notes, written by Soren Kierkegaard, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1992). ISBN 0-691-02081-7. (p. 203)

“Feeling is a kind of knowing; it is only through our feelings that we know that we have been insulted, that we love someone, that danger lies ahead or that it is uncertain what next step we ought to take.” How to Be an Epicurean, The Ancient Art of Living Well, written by Catherine Wilson, Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. (2019). ISBN: 978-1-5416-7263-5. (p. 269)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Self-Thinking Idea

15 Monday Jun 2020

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

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Fragment 164, word count: 553.

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

Vedanta is an Idealism

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

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.

Existentialism is an Idealism

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 160, word count: 728.

Existentialism is an expression of modern idealism as sketched in Fragment 158, The Arc of the Monad. This will be clear from a quick review of the main points of modern idealism worked out mainly in Germany in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. It features the claim that the ideality of experience is fundamental in human reality, so that the existence of certain special characteristics of ideality is undeniable. Central to those special characteristics is that ideality is always personality, all forms of ideality occur together in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. The existence of ideas is the existence of ordinary thinking agents. The only reality we can possibly experience is completely structured as and by ideas constituting the interiority of personal experience (Leibniz, Fichte). Ideality is willful becoming, always questioning, learning, and creating, the exact opposite of being. What this amounts to is that personality is not a thing of nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation (Sartre’s existence without essence), it stands outside nature and transcends nature. The supra-actual creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but in ordinary personalities. How things matter in the world does not depend on eternal ideas in the mind of a deity nor in a Platonic heaven where ideas are master molds for material beings. It depends only and entirely on the occurrence of ideas in the living of individually embodied persons. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature at large, but each person creates a personal orientation and future-directed bearing, a life of possibilities, impossibilities, and probabilities in an interiority of non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary persons.

Existentialism inhabits experience as lived by a fully elaborated personality, what Fichte called an “I”. Heidegger’s dasein is a phenomenology of the interiority of an “I”, the monad from Leibniz/ Kant/ Fichte. The focus on freedom, decision, (Kierkegaard, Sartre) at the level of the living individual expresses the central theme of modern idealism that ideality is a transcendence, a transcendence with the drama of life-being-created moment by moment between misery and ecstasy, that is, with caring, at its core. Existentialists expanded on the drama of the life of the “I”, the everydayness of being in the world, but also the profound drama of freedom: dread, anxiety, sense of absurdity, despair, fear and trembling, and ecstasy (Nietzsche). This is a portrait of the interiority of the life of the “I” contributing to modern idealism. Modern idealism provides the conceptual cluster that encompasses freedom by conceiving personality/ humanity as ideality, something not of nature. The established conceptual cluster for nature, from scientific materialism, is antithetical to freedom, a failure of science that is crucially detrimental for politics. Existentialism and phenomenology (a technique of de-culturing) lie in the developmental arc of essentially Protestant idealism, notwithstanding that Edmund Husserl was Jewish and Franz Brentano, Heidegger, and Sartre were variably Catholic.

Nobody was Ready for Modern Idealism

As a distinctly European cultural development, modern idealism (including existentialism) was feared and loather by bearers of the ascendent culture of the USA after World War II, an ideology of national exceptionalism grown from a fresh cultural memory of cowboy-style frontier freedom and colonization, expressed now in patriotic militarism in support of the capitalist assertion of the divine rights of property. Already in the nineteenth century, with the world-shaking adventurism of Napoleon following the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789-99), combined with fervour for the explaining power of empirical observation, it pleased people to generalize from their historical moment to the idea that it is exceptional great men such as Napoleon, romantic heroes above all laws, who create history, art, culture, and civilization (eventually), with regrettable but unavoidable death, destruction, and romantic mayhem along the way. Such people had to be admired, it was thought by the cognoscenti, and given a chance to work their will. This romanticism became fundamental to the American myth-system. Such a cultural environment was lethally inhospitable to modern idealism focused as it was on the unexceptional universal individual, and so the idealism was academically marginalized and left unnamed.

Embedded Links in order of appearance:

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

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

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 143, March 21, 2019, Frontier Freedom (word count: 447)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Dystopia, Metaphysics, and Modern Idealism

22 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 159, word count: 1,010.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” (Karl Marx)

What makes a dystopia is a cultural regime, structured as a human hive-mind, which fails to recognize the creative transcendence of individual ideality. It is hive-minds that make war. A crucial feature of dystopia is that it hides and denies that it is dystopia. It campaigns, mainly successfully, to have everyone accept that, although imperfect and beset with intractable problems, it is the best of all possible worlds. Every personality is strongly influenced by social controls, the ambient society as authority, from a very early age. That makes dystopia a problem of perception, knowledge, and reality: a philosophical problem. Philosophy has a history of seeking to understand how collective illusions and delusions can separate ordinary consciousness from knowledge of the elemental structure of reality. Dystopia conceals itself with just such illusions, making it the philosophical problem.

Institutions of military-backed states survive by keeping as many as possible dependent, and the crucial dimension of hive-mind dependence is (drumroll) metaphysics. For example, if you accept anything like the Freudian conception of human nature then you loath and fear your own individuality and feel allegiance to externally imposed authority symbols against yourself, siding with the normalized practices of ambient society no matter how bizarre. There is a strong tendency to normalize whatever bizarre power inequalities happen to exist. Although Freud presented his work as scientific, the overall model of personality he offered followed a pre-existing and pre-scientific set of speculations and superstitions with contributions from Plato, Augustine, and Hobbes. The Freudian model of human nature places inherent personality (id: biologically generated drives with a tinge of the demonic) in urgent need of social control by an internalization of authority symbols (superego); recall philosopher kings, divinely established religious authority, and a social contract for absolute sovereignty. That conception of human nature is a longstanding piece of metaphysics which misidentifies what is fundamental to humanity or personality by conceiving it as something of nature: a determinate set of attributes, fixed, unalterable, and universal. That bit of metaphysics, a conception of individual personality as a bit of nature tilting demonic, serves to legitimize patriarchal power and control. Freud’s model dovetails with social contract theory, upholding the ancient and traditional view that human beings can’t thrive without strict social control. What’s wrong with that is that personality is not a thing of nature, but, as existence without essence (thank you Sartre) transcends nature.

Instead of defining metaphysics as commentary on ‘being’ (strictly impossible to define *) it is more effectively understood as commentary on the occurrence of ideas, of ideality. Being is defined as universal and eternal, which, by fiat, makes ideas as ordinarily experienced inadmissible. Ideality doesn’t have being. The fact that you are conscious as you read this is proof in a general way of the truth of idealism, the most obvious thing there could be. Consciousness is ideas. The only reality we can possibly experience is completely structured as and by ideas constituting the interiority of personal experience (thank you Fichte and Leibniz). Nature is adequately comprehended by physics, since there is no intrinsic drama to brute actuality, no structure of what matters to make sense of or explain. Ideality is the only home of drama, of things that matter, of purposes and reasons. Neither physics nor biology is helpful in understanding ideality. The question of human nature brings us into metaphysics immediately because any individual person exists as ideality, and ideality is necessarily the stuff of metaphysics. In the modern idealism worked out in the wake of the Protestant Reformation it is recognized that ideality is always personality, all forms of ideality occur together in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. The existence of ideas is the existence of thinkers. This idealism retains a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality (personality transcends nature) but relocates it from a patriarchal Christian deity to ordinary individual human personalities. The supra-actual creative power (again transcendence) is removed from Platonic heaven or gods and demons to ordinary personalities. After all, how things matter in the world does not depend on ideas in the mind of some deity nor in a Platonic heaven where ideas are master molds for material beings. It depends only and entirely on the occurrence of ideas in the living of individually embodied persons. We know ideas from personal caring and our engagement with others who express caring. Living personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and purposive activity. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which express ideation: caring, sensitivity, knowledge, and the preconception of intentions, the drama of inventing, moment by moment, a particular life in the world. Ideas are openings of newness, created outside actuality, interventions of an instance of supra-actuality, non-being, which is a living consciousness. Ideality is willful becoming by always questioning, learning, and creating, the exact opposite of being. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in a 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 persons.

Dystopia hides behind false conceptions of fundamental reality, distorting every individual’s self-conception so the old systems of top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism can be maintained and wars can be fought. Every individual is still a fountain of original re-conceptions of a future, of self-creation, with an inherent capacity to be free of hive-mind influences, starting with hive-mind patriarchal metaphysics. That is a bit of cultural conditioning that can be controlled at the level of every individual. Any aspiration for cultural, social, and political change must be founded on an appreciation of creativity, recognition that reality is mutable because ideas make up so much of the structure of reality. To change the world, it is first necessary to go beyond the colonization of patriarchal metaphysics.

Notes

  • Medieval Philosophy, Volume 4 of: A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2019), ISBN 978-0-19-884240-8. (Chapter 25: It’s All Good – The Transcendentals, especially pp.179-80.)

Doubting dystopia? Think about these articles in other publications.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/06/615483/A-message-from-Black-America-to-the-People-of-Iran-

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/chile-rapist-path-chant-hits-200-cities-map-191220200017666.html

Internal links:

Fragment 106, May 10, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (1) (word count: 520)

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

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.