Category Archives: Nature

Asymmetrical Dualism

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Fragment 199, word count: 534.

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

The Primacy of Ideality

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

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

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

The Dystopian Predicament

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

Embedded links:

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

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

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

The World of One and Many

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Fragment 198, word count: 604.

Tags: nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, caring, thinking, agency, knowing, metaphysics, Hegel.

The world is organized by two very different sets of principles. One is a system of “laws of nature” as described by empirical/ mathematical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy. This system of nature appears to be universal and immutable and presents itself in a vast natural world-structure including enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. The other set of organizing principles is a scattered multiplicity of separate and distinct points, namely the set of busily gazing sensibilities, each encountering and personalizing parts of the natural world, each curious and needy and learning to make sense of its surroundings which it must come to know to situate and orient its personal agency. The personalizing and coming to know is the world organizing activity of sensibilities. Through careful attention to specific qualities among the contents of strictly personal sensitivities, each sensibility organizes an idea of a world that surrounds it, a sense of enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. What is crucial to sensibility is a semi-reliable set of known place-markers for an effective orientation of agency for an unstoppable and dangerously indeterminate future.

It has been speculated that the world of objective nature would be incomplete or insubstantial if not for knowing sensibilities who each personally organize from their sensitivities an idea of the world and then live with and build that idea by sensitively touching fragments of objective nature against it. There is speculation (Hegel) that nature calls sensibilities into existence in the course of perfecting itself, so that it can know itself, reflect and appreciate the awesome grandeur of its intricate existence. Sensibilities mirror nature, certainly, and are often struck by nature’s beauty. The speculation suggests that mirroring the world of nature, knowing its details and its evasions of being known, is the purpose and fulfillment of the existence of sensibilities. However, sensibility is not fulfilled or completed by knowledge severed from the drama and caring in its personal purposes. Sensibilities are very bad mirrors of the objective world since the personal idea of the world that any sensibility organizes to live through is unavoidably very different and largely remote from objective nature. Each sensibility organizes its idea of the world according to its personal principle of caring, with the result that relatively few objects or patterns are noticed or remembered. Any personal idea of the world needs helpfully simplified schematic impressions, abstractions, generalizations, variously structured forms of ideality. (search circle)

As bad as sensibilities are at mirroring the brute actuality of nature, we do manage, in orienting ourselves for ongoing personal agency and expression, to organize our creative ideality into a world we recognize as hugely not-self, and in doing so we manifest what we are as more than objects in nature, as supra-objective particulars existing as neighbours of the hard not-self, the uncaring and unquestioning natural world. Although nature seems to subsist independently of sensibilities, it must be kept in mind that “I think, therefore I am!” highlights that the only certainty of knowledge we have is our own personal existence as a world organizing principle. Thinking is caring and questioning, the ever-questing focus of personal caring. It is caring and questioning so specifically that the focus of attention passes from relevant detail to relevant detail, revising and filling out a precisely pointed future-ward movement. Our certainty of the world of nature is based on the certainty of our personal existence as a caring world builder. The objective world of nature is, after all, an idea, a structure organized by sensibility for the purposes of living and enjoying what it is to be living.

Context

Fragment 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity (word count: 788)

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

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (word count: 2,321)

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

How Reality Matters

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Fragment 197, word count: 596.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

What is Real?

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Fragment 192, word count: 537.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

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

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Metaphysics is You

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Fragment 185, word count: 505.

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

What are Ideas?

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Fragment 183, Word count: 375.

Various answers to the question “What are ideas?” mostly have in common that ideas exemplify a distinct immaterial face of existence. Idealism encompasses answers to that question which emphasize the foundational or primordial status of such immaterial existence. Essentialist idealism presents ideas as primordial templates for the categories of all things that exist, absolutely independent of any living consciousness, excepting possibly a unique eternal divine consciousness. These ideas are prior to the rest of existence in some profound sense and supposedly cause the rest of existence. As exemplified by Platonic idealism, there is a certain sense of metaphysics presented by essentialist idealism: a primordial reality that is profoundly different, in its immutable immateriality, from the world of ordinary appearances, a reality of predetermined forever templates for the forms that any physical existence must take.

A non-essentialist idealism presents a very different sense of metaphysics: ideas are ephemeral features which shape the frame-work of orientation that guides the future-ward tilt or bearing of some living individual. Ideas exist only in the intentional agency of living individuals. Instead of standing as eternally enduring categories and structures, the special genius of ideality is its fluid subsistence by leaping ceaselessly into losses and novel opportunities expressing personal dramas of caring; plunging, partly falling, into an ever-just-opening non-existence, evaluating the uncertain prospects for improvisations of personal dramas within a mix of expected and unexpected circumstances and expressive impulses. There is no question here of ideas existing separately from the living of particular sentient and intentional agents. Even as such, ideas cannot be left out of a description of fundamental existence, of what there is, since they present an undeniable complication to neat conceptions of reality as fixed, atomized, and final. As necessarily temporal and immaterial (even though organized as embodied), ideas are anomalous existences, inseparable from the subjectivity of personal experiences. Ideality is still metaphysical but its meta-physicality is in its living spontaneity and creative agency, in its sentient-intentionality at the raw ever-becoming edge of existence. Human existence is living: experience-derived anticipation as context and inspiration for important intentions and aspirations. It is an actively reaching incompleteness or openness to existence at its core: discontinuous, multiple, monadic, locally limited, ephemeral.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Loneliest Un-Loneliness

08 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Nature, Political Power, Why thinking?

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Fragment 181, word count: 913.

tags: human hive-mind, embodiment, attachment, war, philosophy, un-loneliness, culture, imitation, originality, freedom

The most urgent issue for philosophy is the relationship between individual persons and collective identities of the kind described here previously as hive-minds which make war with each other. This urgency can be illustrated by reference to the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians, in which the crucial divide between the Asian cultural system and the Euro-American cultural system is eastern collectivism (extended-extended patriarchal family values) as opposed to the legacy of individualism from the European metaphysical upheavals: Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Revolution of 1789-99. Obviously, western societies are also still largely organized as patriarchal hive-minds. Human hive-minds, collective identities, are the important and dangerous structures behind war, colonization, imperialism, and national exceptionalism expressing the conviction that strength and power merit the privilege of dominance and special rights. Hive-mind collective identity is distinctly not universal but instead an imprint of the point of view of some self-proclaiming superior beings club, an ‘us against the unworthy’ ideology. However, the metaphysical contests of western history have had some effect, and citizens of the resulting modernity are somewhat less rooted in an unquestionable patriarchally defended essentialism with its vision of rigid permanence in the structures and cycles of everything!

To be human is to relish engagement with other intelligences, and culture is always created to aid that engagement. Personality is inherently a creator and imitator of culture. As a deliberate intentional act, imitation is a declaration of intelligence to another presumed intelligence, a declaration of sensitivity, perception, memory, and caring, within a declaration of recognizing or supposing perception, memory, and caring embodied separately and paying attention. Imitation is a crucial declaration of pattern recognition and an invitation and promise of a conversational future, imitations with surprising innovations.

Absorption in an ambient culture is so crucial for people that the understanding of basic reality in any individual’s encounter with the world is almost completely mediated and structured by culturally transmitted religions, stories and ceremonies of national patriotism, and the ethos of some specific and exclusive stratum of social status and esteem: socially normal expectations about styles of consumption, work, and family relations, of gender expressions and attractiveness, social manners, niche cultures of decoration, costume, dwellings, celebrations, topics of conversation, and markers of success. The human world is a patchwork of such cultural niches (up to and including civilizations) all addicted to certainty about themselves as the best possible expression of divine will and of nature, the bedrock of categories and laws that determines things to be just as they are. Each collective’s cultural expression supports it feeling superior to others no matter what appearances and comparisons may suggest, stridently unwilling to accept reality checks, dangerously threatened by reality checks. As superior beings clubs, these culture pods are determined to remain as they are and to keep everybody under the spell of their dramas. However, cultural ideas that self-aggrandize, and externalize a supposedly less worthy subset of humanity, are arbitrary stipulations based on superstitious fears and magical wishes. In this context thinking philosophically can be a serious business that depends on a personal separation from the cultural currency of suppositions. The stakes are high here for individuals, and in this cultural context philosophy can be a reality check where a reality check is needed desperately.

Notwithstanding reveries of utopias and primordial states of nature, philosophers have not often questioned the stratification of society and political power as they found them. They mostly laboured to ‘justify the ways of God (or nature) to man’ on the essentialist assumption that food-chains of power, wealth, and social esteem (essentially master/ slave social organization in superstitious hive-mind formations) are unalterable basic reality. It is assumed that it must always be this way because nature is strictly pre-determined to vary within a narrow range, fated to swing through ever-recurring cycles. However, there have been various intuitions of monadic personal agency, in which the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is recognized and treated as inherently greater in depth and scope than the imprinted cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. This can be illustrated by a consideration of language. Language is a public transit system. Experience for any individual goes vastly beyond the territory marked out by language, just as geography goes vastly beyond the streetcar tracks. When poets or philosophers make efforts to communicate experience that is not included in the current transit system they have no choice but to bend and stretch and sculpt new parts of language to draw attention to previously private regions. The individuality of spontaneously questioning sensibility grounded in embodiment is enough to permit individuals an exit from-hive mind collective identities.

The lesson of philosophy in its long and complex history is that individuals, as defined by embodiment, have the power to conceptualize creatively and originally the world that can be abstracted within the rich spiritual context that digests what is given externally. Philosophical statements have been an individual’s declaration of independence as a conceiver of living a life, and, as such, a challenge to the collective orientation of hive-minds. Philosophy is a person’s description of encountering the world after discounting the cultural currency of suppositions previously supplied by an ambient society, when, in their loneliest un-loneliness, they encounter the universality of innocent experience: intentionality, sentience, caring, within an eventful given world. In this innocence no one is a member of any collective subset of the interconnectedness of personal beings.

Embedded links

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

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

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence and New Reality

28 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity

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Fragment 180, word count: 505.

Tags: actuality, creation, learning, supposing, intending, time, ideas, Plato, eternity.

There are only two explanations for there being something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and supposing intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. This second explanation is a variant of materialist determinism. Neither of these two conceptions should be ignored, because ordinary experience combines both, and they stand in a special relation to one another. The cascading instability of actuality has only an exclusively single-state instantaneous existence, but that existence is an instability, a particular wave shape just arrived from a completed arc of other individually exclusive shapes utterly vanished and gone, and yet still bursting at the incomplete bursting edge of existence toward another arc of merely possible shapes and more or less probable shapes. Within that bursting-forth, instantly vanishing, vast cascading unstable actuality, we fragile monads of sentience endure by continuously aggregating a personal orientation from since-vanished shapes that we noticed and learned because they matter to our dramas of survival and attachment. Vanished and possible arcs of the nature-wave have current existence only as ideality in the ever-refreshing orientation of particular sentient intentional monads living an embodied life within actuality. With our orientation and our effective embodiment and our dramatic vectors of care we create intentional interventions, novelties, spur-of-the-moment new reality. Monadic sensibility/ intentionality is always on the point of arriving from playing out dramas within a learned shape of circumstances, still continuing to burst forth into hopes, quests, possibilities, and probabilities, with intent to continue a specifically personal mark. Momentary and always re-shaping features of actuality are personalized in the curation of every particularly embodied sensibility/ intentionality. The dramatic poise of a monad is entirely distinct from deterministic actuality through its just-created directionality.

The only straightforward way of conceiving a sentient intentional monad oriented for an intervention with intent to create new reality requires the monad to be already oriented within some state of actuality. This disqualifies any impulse to project intentional intervention universally as the original matrix of all existence. It leaves us with the inexplicable random cascading instability as a pre-condition for intentional acts by any sentient intentional monad, such as ourselves.

In cultures under the influence of Plato, ideality (spirituality) is identified with immortality and eternally stable and unchanging existence, but that is exactly not the experiential presence of ideality, which is always bearing into and enlarging into the incompleteness of ephemeral suppositions, pushing into ideas as the world falls. Aliveness, the living of life, living personhood, is inextricable from the ceaseless opening and passing of event-full time, and every living person is a co-creator of that opening of new reality.

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Fragment 177, May 31, 2021, The World that Matters (word count: 450)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

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

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Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.