Dissent by Metaphysics

07 Thursday Jan 2021

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

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

Fragment 172, word count: 680.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embedded links:

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

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

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

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

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Enlightenment, History, Immanuel Kant, imperialism, interiority, Marxism, metaphysics, patriarchy, philosophy, politics, scribal ideality, transcendence

Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

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

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

The Enlightenment

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended

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

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

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

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

Postscript to Superego

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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freedom, sociability, social control, spirituality, superego, thinking, time, transcendence

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that it is an ongoing meditation on thinking, the life of ideality or spirituality, and the potential for creative freedom present in the world through the agency of the individual person. Since every person is a self-thinking idea, then in that sense we are nothing but thinking. As the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world, the power to think is the really transcendent power, but thinking has vulnerabilities which normally result in a socially acquired self-blindness. Since interpretations of experience and the individual’s reach into futurity are typically colonized by an ambient social control structure, effective subjectively as a personal superego, there is another sense of thinking in which to think is to identify and disrupt that superego, using an original voice of curiosity to follow through on its own questions. Beyond the superego, thinking is the process by which consciousness comes to recognize and assert its creative freedom. Spirituality or intelligence is not any kind of substance, but instead, is a transcendent interiority, the interior of a person’s teleological time.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (3)

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Why thinking?

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community, Copernican Revolution, culture, personal identity, thinking, war

American exceptionalism (or British, German, European, white, Japanese) is a modern instance of a human-style hive mind. Even though there are positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative human effort, there are also striking negative consequences to the “hive mind” way of motivating stability. Most spectacularly, hive mind collectives become violently antagonistic toward one another and willfully instigate catastrophic destruction and instability on a vast scale, preparing for which they tirelessly devote great resources in advance. With all the advances in science and technology so celebrated over the last century, militant hive-mind-ism is not weakening and confidently controls all the dominant institutions of sovereign states. The persistence of this war fetish means that the collective situation has reached a condition in which the only way to deal with its problems is for individuals to abandon hive minds entirely. A kind of thinking is required which proceeds independently of the conceptual vocabulary internal to hive minds.

In Medieval Christendom it was taken for granted by those in authority that the majority of people would go mad, commit mass suicide and random acts of destruction, if it were known that the universe as a whole did not revolve around the Earth. Even though humanity survived the Copernican Revolution, there are even now many well educated and professional people of science who argue that it is not possible for humans to do without a socially and culturally constructed hive mind, that individuals would, if separated from hive mind, be in despair from total lack of personal identity, meaning, purpose, and the sense of having a place in the world. However, there is more to personal identity than what is assigned by the hive. There are resources in every individual’s experience to draw on and build with. After all, the markers of the collective/ hive often have the low definition of symbols, abstractions, and emblems, (flags, seals, anthems, titled officials, iconic historical events and personalities, monumental architecture), whereas personal self experience is the high definition of direct immediate involvement with the world. Even for individuals outside a hive mind orientation, human history is still human history, (profoundly misrepresented by the stories used to fashion any particular hive mind). Every individual still participates in that larger history that includes the whole collection of hive minds and what is also beyond them.

… continues.

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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embodiment, freedom, imperialism, individuality, macro-parasite culture, metaphysics, nature, sociability, spirituality, theology

A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories going around (models for tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as material culture and typical ways of acting, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature and the supernatural, community, and individual subjective interiority. The social construction is the repeated, continually re-imitated activities in which people fit into processes of production and consumption, conversations, and crowds.

All institutional systems of reality have been top-down systems, that is, structured into metaphysical stories in which supernatural beings have decisive involvement. Systems of reality typically include a supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, for example, when language is considered as prior to voices, you have a top-down system. That orientation supports a comprehensive top-down conception of value and power, effectively blocking a true self-recognition of spirituality and stifling the autonomy, creativity, and self-possession of all individuals.

There is nothing inherently parasitic, disempowering, or repressive about human interconnectedness or about cultural forms to formalize that interconnectedness. It is our sociability (as otherwise isolated individual intelligences) which inclines us to welcome culture in as tokens of our connectedness to a collective of spiritual beings. However, culture has been made toxic by a particular historical contingency. Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on “sedentary” grass-eating mammals which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That process launched the cultural efforts to celebrate and glorify top-down human-on-human parasitism. It is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation. The historically special, and historically traceable, cultural and political force of the human-on-human macro-parasite faction has eluded recognition, for example by deconstructionists, who instead blame oppression on a tragic, unalterable, flaw in humanity. ‘We are all complicit and co-conspirators in our own oppression’ is just the default rhetoric of cultures still emerging (slowly but surely) from Christendom, a repetition of its declaration of original sin, an inherent vice which turns every individual against itself. Deconstructionists got “everything is political” right, but they completely missed the criminality (perpetrators and victims) in the operation of power. Culture, something everyone depends on, under these conditions becomes critically disabling for individuals.

The systems of reality elaborated and declared by cultural institutions such as religions, economic production and exchange systems, and the military wings of sovereignty, are crucial for any individual’s orientation, and as such they top the list among bits of heritage which must be questioned in critical thinking. Anyone is able to re-orient, to engage in a process of self-directed re-orientation by which the official conceptualization of community, subjectivity, and nature (including the spiritual forces of non-earthly intelligences) are replaced with de-cultured conceptualizations recognizing that human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between the givens of nature and the myriad non-actualities of creative subjectivity, in the play of interior non-actualities against the brute actuality of nature.

The Ultimate Reality System Hack

For such a reorientation to be possible, there must be a framework of orientation that is independent of culturally supplied conceptions, and philosophical questioning (the spiritual quest, critique of orientation) brings it to light by exposing certain elemental features of experience. The elements of the philosophical frame of reference are personal embodiment, spirituality, and sociability. Sociability, the gratification each intelligence derives from engagement with others, is really part of spirituality. What enables the ultimate hack of false systems of reality is contemplation of personal embodiment because embodiment imposes needs, costs, and vulnerabilities, as well as powers and abilities, at the level of the individual. In doing that, personal embodiment defines spiritual individuality. Embodiment decrees individuality. De-cultured acquaintance with embodiment and spirituality (and with it sociability), and with the powers and vulnerabilities that come with them, situates a person for creative autonomy and a re-conceived interconnection with others.

Life for the individual person is the engagement of metaphysics with physics. There is nothing metaphysical about the natural world at large, the cosmic terrain. It is just plain old physics. Metaphysics is entirely interior to individuals, to us embodied spiritual beings. Metaphysics is our interiority, our spirituality. Conceptions of metaphysics emerge from thinking about time, and time has almost always been misconstrued in philosophy as a dimension of objects independent of intelligences. (What is to be made of temporal discontinuity: the fact that past and future do not actually exist?) Theories of a hidden mysterious substrate of material objects, such as a single infinite substance (Spinoza) which must remain the same even though objects change constantly into different objects, are an attempt to translate time (intelligence) into an occult structure of objects or substances, a way of dealing with time in terms of a ‘metaphysical’ structure within objects, separate from intelligences. However, time is the interiority of teleology, a metaphysical non-actuality. It is the dimension of individual freedom or spirituality, and can only be comprehended in terms of what is interior to intelligences, the bearings of questions, curiosity, projects, and lessons learned in any human gaze.

Religions also have a metaphysical misconception of the fabric of the cosmos, from an insistence that ethical or moral standards are inherent in it, laws based on divine decree and divine enforcement, a universal mechanism of justice: commands and judgments, record keeping, and an ultimate moral reckoning removed to some indefinite remoteness (for example, the karmic progression of reincarnation, or the final day of judgment, heaven and hell). Although even the religious conception of personal spirituality has to emphasize freedom so that moral acts and enforcement have some foundation in individual responsibility, that conception is dominated by the individual’s subordination to the universal (divine) system of moral reckoning, making the religious conception of spirituality hopelessly political: top-down, punitive, and repressive. The supposed cosmic source of our ethical sense is proposed as the essence of our spirituality, immediately locking us into unalterable subordination. It is a misconception which expresses the political agenda of the power-hoarding human parasite faction, projecting a mythical personification onto cosmic nature. Only embodied spiritual beings, ordinary persons, (not cosmic nature) make ethical judgments, and ethics is, again, entirely interior to individual intelligences. The real basis of morality in spirituality is not an occult connection to a cosmic order of justice but rather an individual power of empathy. Empathy is the moral compass. The lack of empathy is the lack of a moral compass.

Not recognizing the transcendence in personal subjective interiority (living in time) sets us up to accept all kinds of absurd superstitions about various (romantic) hidden entities, powers, or forces which are used as mechanisms of psychological manipulation to legitimate injustices of the status quo. The philosophical insight is that ordinary subjectivity itself is the miracle, and that it can be recognized as such even though it is misrepresented by official culture.

Effective Liberation

What is called Liberation Theology was inspired by a recognition of the institutionalized exploitation of indigenous people in “Latin” America, (which was a fully intended consequence of modern European imperialism) and it attempts to provide support from New Testament scripture for grass roots activism in aid of social justice. The immediate project was to restructure economic arrangements to accomplish a more equitable distribution of wealth, power, and choice, and with them dignity, and respect. Freedom was conceived as equitable distribution in the nexus of human goods. In that context, the inspiring idea of freedom cannot be realized without large-scale organizational change because it is inseparable from social structures and economic operations.

The point of posting 88, Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality (December 15, 2015) is that doing something consequential and decisive, achieving self-possession, does not depend on the overthrow of the economic order or on any other environmental change. Freedom doesn’t need to wait for historical or evolutionary change in economics, biology, or culture. It can be achieved individually at any time, but even though the philosophical reorientation is first, decisive, and indispensable, perhaps it is not the end of liberation. Since sociability is so crucial in our spirituality, a withering away of the human macro-parasite faction and its culture, and of human parasitism in general, would be the practical hope and the expected effect of a broad distribution of philosophical liberation.

Note: For a closer contemplation of embodiment see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky

Embodiment and Two Spiritual Vulnerabilities

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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critical thinking, critique of modernity, culture, embodiment, freedom, intelligence, nature, philosophy, science, spirituality, time, transcendence

Taken together, the two previous postings present a couple of observations worth highlighting. The postings are: Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality (July 15, 2015, posting # 85), and Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (November 4, 2015, posting # 86). The first observation, pointed to by the titles, is that (Blind-Spot) philosophy is both a spiritual quest and a critique of orientation. A quest begins in questions, and is a re-orientation process with questions as guides. As a spiritual quest, it is an intelligence’s search for what is most personal and most human, a self-consideration, and as a critique of orientation it is an intelligence’s questioning its situation within what is beyond itself. A spiritual quest is a gaze into a mirror and the critique of orientation is a gaze into surroundings (being in a life in the world). There is already a horizontal duality in this binocularity to the philosophical gaze: inward and outward, although there is no inward-seeing eye. The directionality of the gaze (outward) is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, that it points (in addition to some region of surroundings) back in a direction that can only be characterized as inward. The duality is all the more insistent because we are irritated or nagged by the sense of that inward direction as partial blindness, as obscurity and vulnerability, the sense that there should be an inward sensitivity to match the richness of our outward sensitivities. Since there is no simple gaze inward we are forced to devise or discover a spiritual mirror and we find it in the experience of time. Inwardly, instead of a particularity of instantaneous outline or substance, we have a directionality within time.

Critique of Modernity

Critique of culture is a crucial part of any spiritual quest just as it is of critique of orientation because the engagement of spirit or intelligence with nature (via embodiment) is heavily mediated by ambient culture which is historically rooted and largely arbitrary for the individual. An individual’s surroundings include a multitude of other embodied intelligences expressing a collectively shared orientation (a system of reality) acquired in childhood from the local culture. “System of reality” specifically denotes a culturally stipulated set of ideas and orientations. It is the set of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, the supernatural, community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the culture into which a person is born. Ideas about the supernatural often have a revered status in systems of reality, stipulated as the top-down power over the other elements. Recognizing culture as an accumulation of human creations distinct from nature and from fundamental humanity provides the basis for recognizing in history a variety of systems of reality, which often contradict one another and all of which must include important distortions and falsehoods. Critique of modernity, for example, is culture criticism, since modernity is not a manifestation of nature (such as winter) nor, as a late and special development, can it be a structure of enduring human nature.

Not only the Euro-American imperialist culture of modernity, but every culture, is tainted with superstitious legitimations of the injustices of human macro-parasitism, because there are spiritual vulnerabilities which universally give macro-parasitic cultures access to human hosts. There is no index culture to use as a standard of empathy in human interconnectedness or of the human grasp on reality. Tribal or aboriginal cultures are no better. Philosophy is nothing less than developing re-acquaintance with personal pre-cultural innocence, disconnecting from all the cultural biases, especially constructs of personal identity, self-definition (including gender), and stories of cosmic origins, purpose, and destiny. What you get down to, moving outside cultural influences, is a horizontal dualism: limited personal freedom within the non-actuality of time (which is to say, individual intelligence) confronting brute actuality, a relationship obviously vulnerable to the very active interference of tainted collective culture.

Spiritual Vulnerabilities

The second observation is that there are two spiritual vulnerabilities inherent in intelligences and our situation, both of which vulnerabilities are exploited culturally by macro-parasitic factions to establish and stabilize their regime of top-down human-on-human parasitism. (Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on a “sedentary” grass-eating mammal which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation.) It is incorrect to say that critical thinking would have no function without the distortions of reality (such as gods, demons, inherent human vice, the great food chain of being, fine art, monumental architecture, and good breeding) spun culturally by macro-parasitic factions to legitimate themselves. Even without that distorting cultural force, the inherent vulnerabilities (self-uncertainty and orientation to top-down subordination) would remain. Although both spiritual vulnerabilities are culturally re-enforced and exploited, they are not created out of nothing by cultural forces. They are inherent in the encounter between the non-actualities of subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature, and so pre-exist cultural influences. However, it would be wrong to characterize the inherent vulnerabilities in the situation of intelligences as any kind of inherent vice or fault, there is no trace of original sin there. Vulnerabilities are not vices. Vulnerabilities require a strengthening of individual autonomy, encouragement and support of individual expression and critical thinking, and not repression or punishment.

Spirituality

The spiritual vulnerability studied in Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest is existential self-uncertainty. The spiritual vulnerability studied in Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality is a tendency to accept without question the imprint of a whole complex of normal human circumstances as a top-down or child-to-parent orientation on a cosmic scale. There is a direct correspondence between the two spiritual vulnerabilities and the two directions of the philosophical gaze, with a spiritual vulnerability as both an inspiration and a challenge to overcome in each direction. For the spiritual quest itself there is the vulnerability of self-uncertainty, spiritual no-thing-ness, the necessity to self-create at every moment. The spiritual quest never arrives at the discovery of a definitive self. Instead of having any definitive self-particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality: time and the freedom that comes with time and the teleology of creativity, constructed of interior non-actuality, accumulating orientation. The past never accomplishes a definitive self, which is, of course, inseparable from freedom. However, the inherent self-uncertainty is exploited as a vulnerability to having a culturally assigned identity imposed. Consequently, the spiritual quest has to include a critique of the culture of personal identity. Personal identity definitions assigned by culture have to be put aside so that innocent self-experience is encountered and liberated.

Horizontal Dualism

Outwardly, the vulnerability is the readiness or early conditioning to project a top-down parental-type orientation (personal subordination) onto the self-to-environment relation at large. In fact that readiness to project a top-down structure onto the self-to-environment relation spills over and invades self-uncertainty as well, so that it becomes a vulnerability to crediting personal intelligence (non-actuality, time, freedom) to some cosmic source intelligence or master intelligence. The posting Horizontal Dualism … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of spirit, based on its transcendent freedom and creative power, to superiority and mastery over nature. As just noted, spiritual mastery has usually been alienated from individuals and made more plausible as a mastery by being centralized and assigned to a cosmic master intelligence, leaving the individual as some sort of subordinate derivation or product of the vastness of the master intelligence, but, even as such, still claiming a share of mastery over local nature. Rejecting that (culturally re-enforced) alienation brings intelligence back to the scale of the individual which already makes it more horizontal with respect to nature.

Enlightenment rationalists moved western culture along the right path by pioneering scientific secularism to replace the imagined agency of disembodied spirits in religion and magic. They made the people of their future (made us of modernity) philosophical in an important sense by helping us be secular. People have largely become scientific instead of superstitious and that was once thought to be the crucial aspect of being philosophical: accepting strict causation, interpreting and perceiving strict causation in the events and structures of the surroundings. However, conceiving science as “universal laws” still retains the old top-down orientation. With science, we are still overawed by the splendours of nature as a self-subsisting matrix or grounding to which the individual intelligence is subordinate. (That gets interpreted politically so that the fact that cheetah prey on antelope is offered as a legitimation of capitalism.) Comparing the radically located individual intelligence to the scale of cosmic nature, which is by definition omnipresent, seems to show the individual as insignificant and again some sort of derivation or product, this time of the vastness of nature. Critique of Orientation … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of nature at large of all-embracing superiority and mastery. Something crucial is missing from that system of reality, and what is missing is the experience of subjective interiority and the fact that human life is played out by individuals in the (horizontal) encounter between non-actualities of personal subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature (conceptually mediated by culture via the human surroundings). The awesome creative freedom of individual intelligences is still edited out, censored, from the scientific system of reality. Innocent self-discovery (self-possession) as an autonomous intelligence with the creative power of time/ non-actuality/ freedom is the release from that cultural distortion and from the spiritual vulnerability exploited by that system of reality.

The forces at the core of human life at the individual level are spiritual freedom and embodiment, constituting a strict individuality to spirituality in its embodiment. The encounter between the free non-actualities of the interior of intelligences and the brute, pre-determined, actuality of nature is an inseparable and shockingly fruitful dualism, essentially horizontal. To deny the dualism is either to deny spirituality or to deny embodiment, either of which is perverse and self-defeating. Effective freedom and the fulfillment of transcendence requires both.

Contrary to the prevailing Euro-American culture, which still includes important remnants of Christianity, there is no innate flaw or taint in human nature which reduces the individual to a destructive force in need of external control. Additionally, there is a global misidentification of transcendence as belonging to some other-world, an afterlife world, a future world of science and technology, or a supernatural ideal dimension, knowledge of which is reserved to a few selected gatekeepers. However, again contrary to prevailing culture, there is no such world to wait for, to escape to, or to expect rescue by. With no transcendent other-world there are no gatekeepers able to offer access to such a thing. This moment of being in a life in the world is it. There is transcendence here and now in personal creative freedom.

The inherent spiritual vulnerabilities would still challenge philosophical thinking even if there weren’t social inequalities which parasitic beneficiaries legitimize by means of culturally instituted (false) identifications of external transcendence, such as monumental high culture (instead of the transcendence of individual intelligence). It is still true that tainted culture exacerbates and institutionalizes the individuals’s spiritual confusion originating from the inherent vulnerabilities. Philosophical thinking is uniquely suited to overcome the influence of poisoned culture, and the existence of philosophy is evidence of a pre-cultural innocence. Something innocent in intelligence is drawn to the spiritual vulnerabilities as questionable, and strikes back against the confusion and diminishment around the vulnerabilities, and against the distortions and violations of reality that are institutionalized in culture. We are intelligent and embodied before we are cultured.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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bottom-up politics, community, creativity, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, individuality, intelligence, nature, philosophy, religion, science, subjectivity

Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

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

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

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

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture, empathy, Enlightenment, freedom, innocence, intelligence, nature, self-possession, teleology, time

The reason for the seventeenth and eighteenth century efforts at Enlightenment was to unseat the entrenched top-down human-on-human parasites plaguing Old Regime society. Those parasites were disguising themselves as avatars (monarchy, aristocracy, and Church hierarchies) of a fictitious Supreme Parent (projections of the universally imprinted parent), and in that guise systematically curtailing the liberty, initiative, individuality, and material prosperity of the great mass of the population, with the intent to channel disproportionate wealth and privilege to themselves. The purpose of the Enlightenment movement was to improve the conditions of human life generally by dismantling the effects, material, cultural, and psychological, of top-down human-on-human parasites.

Orientation from Strict Rationality or Intelligence

In the work of Spinoza, one of the founding visionaries of the Enlightenment, there is a quite Stoic identification of philosophical thinking with strict rationality, such that a person is thinking philosophically to the extent that their thinking goes entirely beyond the influence of traditions, habits, imitations, the talk going around, commonly accepted assumptions, fads and fashions, the declarations of authorities, or any other cultural givens and influences, not to mention personal guesses and fantasies possibly expressing wishes and fears, and instead proceeds entirely on the basis of clear evidence and mathematical (geometrical-logical) rationality. On that view, l’esprit philosophique is a dedication to thinking rationally and to building a general orientation by a consistent practice of thinking rationally.

In his lecture series about Pre-Platonic philosophers*, Nietzsche focused on the novel kinds of persona constructed and projected by individual philosophers in their philosophical presentations. Spinoza’s strictly rational philosophical person belongs in that line of thinking. To take that line to a conclusion, it can be said that when any sort of person thinks philosophically about issues, they do so entirely as an intelligence. If a person presents claims from thinking as a representative of a particular race, gender, body type, social stratum, ethnicity, religion, profession, or even age, then those claims are limited, culturally biased, parochial, and special, in a way that philosophy needn’t be and shouldn’t be. To think philosophically is to act strictly as an intelligence, but philosophy as such is not the only way to express personal existence as intelligence. Acting creatively from any personal creative process also qualifies. So, to think philosophically in the tradition of Spinoza is to think from a self-identification as pre-cultural (innocent) intelligence.

*The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated from German and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Greg Whitlock, Published by: Urbana, University of Illinois Press. (2001), ISBN: 0252025598. See page 58.

In present circumstances, just as in the Old Regime era, the intent in developing a philosophical consciousness, a practical identification of personal subjectivity as innocent intelligence, is to re-model ordinary culture-influenced consciousness to remove the internal “receptors” that give human parasites the opportunities they need to trigger subordination and the whole system of false values that goes with it, and so to gradually dislodge the current collective of top-down human-on-human parasites, and eventually discredit the culture of parasitic will-to-power masculinity permanently. Getting beyond every vestige of the imprinted parent, probably the most important trigger of subordination, is an aspect of recognizing both personal freedom and the fundamental equality of intelligences.

This is not a move in an endless cultural evolution from one form to another, not a change of fashion resulting from some fundamental instability, dialectic, or taste for novelty in nature or human nature. There is a destination, an end point of this process, which might be described as the popular and widespread achievement of a philosophical consciousness, beyond all vestiges of the imprinted parent and the cultural tags of subordination.

Time is the Form of Freedom

Notwithstanding the spectacular advances of science and technological engineering, the enduring relevance of philosophy derives from its specific orientation to the questioning in any human gaze, and especially to freedom in that individual gaze. Without the question, there is no gaze, no perception, no knowledge. The freedom in that questioning is inseparable from teleology, from futurity, the construction of time. Time is not a substance, nor substantial in any way. No theory of substance, not even the single substance of Parmenides or Spinoza, will help with understanding time or teleology, because teleology is a construct of what does not exist. Time is interior to each individual questioning gaze, and in fact, time is nothing but the question in the gaze. Time is not a dimension of objects (or of nature) except insofar as objects are identified by an intelligence in its building a life.

Empiricism, a strong feature of Spinoza’s vision, depicts an impossibly passive intelligence, and does its best to diminish and marginalize the questioning in the individual gaze, attempting to construe knowledge as if it were entirely a product of sensations. Empiricist knowledge, on that view, is merely an effect of non-intelligent givens, of natural causes. However, contrary to strict empiricism, before an intelligence reacts to its surroundings, or even receives effects, it questions, reaches, searches, selects, and makes some kind of sense of what it finds. There is always an indispensable contribution to what is perceived made by the perceiver. Some conceptual form or sense must be applied to givens, and such conceptual form is a creation of intelligence and is not a sensory given. (That is a version of Kantian idealism, an interpretation of rationalism.)

Nature Excludes Teleology (Freedom)

It would be difficult for anyone to disagree that there are events in the world, such as one’s own deliberate actions, which can be understood properly only as teleological, the results of purpose, aspiration, intent, or the prior conception of future goals in the context of building a life. Yet it is also evident that not all events are teleological. Nature is indeed a completely non-teleological realm. There is no teleology in strictly natural processes, in the playing out of natural laws in the cosmos as a whole or at a local level. However, since we began by recognizing teleological events, that we create them, it is difficult to avoid envisioning a system of two different but interacting sets of events, one of which consists of the deliberate actions of humans or generally intelligent beings. There is nature and additionally a complex category of teleological non-nature. Teleology is temporality, futurity. Orientation toward a future constructed of intelligently conceived but strictly non-actual possibilities, negations, and estimated probabilities is the framework of freedom. The category of non-nature includes both the population of individual (embodied) intelligences about whom it makes sense to talk about teleological freedom, and the cultures which that population has created. Culture is the creation of the population of individual embodied intelligences engaging with one another exterior to exterior, making use of nature to do so. However, the longstanding success of certain factions of humans at being parasites on other humans, and in that effort constructing culture as a mechanism of inequality in power and control, makes culture inextricably coercive, which is to say, political.

Culture as a Parasitic Weapon of Mass Disempowerment

It is not difficult to see how religion, managed by a faction with large-scale parasitic intent, works as mass disempowerment. An organization or person can play on the pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, some parental-type authority and the superstitious expression of that conditioning in beliefs about all-powerful free-floating parental-type spirits such as a father-god in the sky. Such an organization or person only has to pull off a convincingly theatrical assertion of receiving divine revelations to establish themselves as the chosen prophet, the messenger, the instrument of the invisible Supreme Parent, and suddenly the mass of believers is at their mercy. The Old Regime parasite factions had succeeded in contaminating western culture with superstitious myths of omnipotent disembodied avatars of the Supreme Parent, an ideology which allowed them to carry on brutal parasitism with nearly complete impunity. It is crucial that they based their legitimacy on metaphysics, the metaphysical claim of an omnipotent disembodied super-intelligence, because it turned out that a more plausible metaphysics (and only that) could reveal the falseness of their claim to legitimacy. That was and still is a stunningly surprising vulnerability in the operating of human parasites. Human parasites always appeal to metaphysics, such as cosmic intelligences or materialist determinism, to proclaim the ultimate necessity of human subordination and hierarchy, the institutionalization of parent-child type inequality; and so metaphysics is the first and crucial place they must and can be discredited. That is the enduring relevance of metaphysics. Only a philosophical consciousness (l’esprit philosophique as it was named in the eighteenth century) as distinct from a consciousness projecting and accepting Great Parent avatars of the internally imprinted parent, can think beyond the myths of power entrenched within prevailing culture. A philosophical consciousness implies bottom-up rather than top-down access to reality in the power of critical and creative thinking inherent universally in individual teleology.

So consider, what metaphysics would illuminate the conditions for general human happiness and well being? What is the metaphysics of universal human rights, democratic equality, and individual freedom of thought and expression? In other words, what metaphysics would discredit and remove from the great mass of humanity the burden of top-down human-on-human parasites? The Enlightenment idea of a philosophical consciousness was indistinguishable from the emerging scientific consciousness in which disembodied teleology and parent-type omnipotent teleology were removed completely. Spinoza’s materialism was understood to discredit the pretensions of reigning violent families to be legitimized by divine determination of human affairs because with materialism there could be no divinity distinct from determinate nature to intervene in human affairs. In the vacuum left by the destruction of that traditional authority, the importance of every person as a rational being, and the general will of the collective of all people, emerged as the only plausible foundation of authority. The power of individual rationality was combined with the consequences of materialism for myths of the great unthinkable parent. That was l’esprit philosophique emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The same pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, parental-type authority still exists in mostly unidentified obscurity. The old father god is still widely taken for granted and, even without that superstition, the idea of parental-type sovereignty of the state is still largely unquestioned, as is hierarchical subordination generally, structured by competitions for recognition, rewards, and upward advancement for those proven most pleasing in the calculating gaze of some great parent avatar. The competition to reach the top in business organizations or professions has a semi-unconscious, unstated, informal, agenda. Just below the surface, the competition is about projecting a sustained impression of masculinity, a culturally stipulated masculinity as the systematic invulnerability to empathy. To be chosen for top positions, females would have to be the most masculine candidate in the competitions, but not many women can do that.

The condition of adult orientation in which no vestige remains of an imprinted parent would be a philosophical consciousness, recognizing bottom-up access to reality, since individual intelligence is what remains when authority vanishes. It was already clear to Enlightenment activists that the crucial means by which to get beyond the universally imprinted parent at a broad cultural scale was to identify, clarify, and distribute l’esprit philosophique as individual empowerment. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now should include awareness of the fundamental importance of l’esprit philosophique in the Enlightenment effort for universal equality and human rights, the unique historical precedent of accomplishing a large-scale cultural movement to get beyond the effects (inequality and subordination) of the universally imprinted parent which has been fundamental to entrenchment of human-on-human parasites.

The Question of Enlightenment Individualism

One of the limitations of Enlightenment materialism with its shift of sovereignty from divine Providence (as expressed through Churches, aristocracy, and monarchy) to the general will was a certain lack of attention to human individuality. The principle of the universality of human rationality did serve as a grounding for universal human rights and individual freedom and dignity, but the tendency of strict rationality is generic, and the more creative aspects of human individuality and freedom were not clearly founded in Spinoza’s monism. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now must include awareness of the real foundation of universal human rights and equality, which is to say, awareness of individual intelligence-as-such, innocent teleology, the fundamental humanity which eliminates all the culturally determined tags of subordination, alienation, and de-humanization which work as barriers to universal empathy. It should also include awareness of the cultural mechanisms and techniques of the parasite faction to present and preserve inequality as a positive value, and that the crucial challenge of philosophy in the twenty-first century is to repudiate the claim of parasite factions to be justified and legitimized by nature as represented by science.

The Will to Power vs Empathy

The idea that a “will to power” is the core of all vital force, all vitality, an idea from Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) as interpreted by Nietzsche, is just another expression of the persistent culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, and as such narrowly biased. Another philosophical expression of the same culture can be seen in the idea Hobbes had of the state of nature, a war of all against all, quite accurate within the dominant culture of masculinity. Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all childless males with few profound attachments beyond a small cohort of male peers. The theory of the will to power is properly appreciated as a revelation of their culture of masculinity, what could be called will-to-power masculinity. The overwhelming predominance of males in academic professions, all immersed in that culture, still enables the theory of human nature as will-to-power to be pervasive and persistent, for example in contemporary deconstructionist theory. It dovetails with the legacy of Augustinian Christianity, declaring human nature universally to be the unalterable source of injustice. Such a bias obscures the very possibility of progress (illustrated by Foucault, for example) and also blocks identification of the culture of will-to-power masculinity itself as the historical, and very alterable, source of injustice. Culture is mutable even if nature isn’t.

Empathy

The parasitic culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, cowboy masculinity, works by exploiting opportunities presented by the universally imprinted parent to disable universal empathy. It is difficult to imagine eradicating that whole poisoning culture, but what it comes down to is whether or not it controls you personally, and there are ways for innocent teleology to cultivate its self-possession. Beyond the imprinted parent lies a truly empathic philosophical consciousness. Only when you strip away from personal definition everything except bedrock innocent intelligence (and you can) do you escape the prejudicial tags used within cultures to mark out constructs of superiority and inferiority, tags such as race, gender, ethnicity, abled-ness, body-shape, size, strength, wealth, extroversion, and so on. Those tags are cultivated by the culture of will-to-power masculinity specifically to obstruct any straightforward empathy with other intelligences (people) universally, but when the cultural tags are discredited and ignored what remains is innocent teleology which is discernible, although individual, in all individual eruptions into nature of intelligent animation. Nothing but a philosophical consciousness, which is just self-consciousness as creative teleological freedom, innocent intelligence, can disempower the controlling effects of culture poisoned by the ethos of human-on-human parasites. This all points to a metaphysics that can reboot the Enlightenment movement to dismantle the material, cultural, and psychological effects of top-down human-on-human parasites, and that metaphysics is not any form of deterministic monism.

Beyond the influence of myths and projections of a universally imprinted parent (a dominating super-intelligence or institution of subordination) dawns the recognition of a large number of individual intelligences, each with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other teleological individuals. (Self-consciousness as intelligence includes awareness of both inertial nature and human culture as external to personal innocence.) The same empathy that empowers individuals to sense teleological behaviour, intelligence, outside ourselves also empowers us to sense the effects that inter-intelligence parasitism has on its victims, and so reveals such parasitism as categorically immoral, ugly, vicious, and repulsive.

This is Not Theory

Personal cultivation of that kind of philosophical consciousness (self identification as teleological freedom, without parental-type authorities) is distinct from ideological sophistication, religious faith, speculation, or theories of anything. We don’t need revelations, faith, ideology, or theories, because we can know personal teleology or intelligence by immediate acquaintance, achieved in a process of letting go of cultural influences. Transcendence (freedom) is thinkable and clearly defined without appeal to occult or obscure forces or powers, hidden principles, aliens, or magic. However, there certainly is a contribution to be made by self-directed education in support of sophistication about history, culture, and ideas.

Metaphysics of Freedom

The most important challenge and purpose of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was disputing the metaphysical claim asserted by operators of systematic Old Regime lethal power (Churches, aristocracy, monarchies) to be justified by divine intervention, by Providence, in their violently coercive social supervision. However, the crucial program facing philosophers of every era is to understand individual human freedom (the questioning in the gaze) in the face of so many clearly controlling and determining forces. The roots of a metaphysics of individual freedom go deep in the history of philosophy. The discovery by Martin Luther (1483-1546) of an interior power of teleology to take a creative leap (of faith for him personally) was the breakthrough in modern thinking about individual freedom. Luther drew on ancient Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism which he encountered in his humanist education. The Stoic version of individual freedom was much more limited. Stated strictly, it was just a freedom to assent to the universal Logos in every detail of reality or else to dispute or resist it internally. The personal interiority from which that Stoic freedom emerged included deliberate rationality interacting with emotionally charged appetites and competitive impulses, for example, and the power or freedom of rational deliberation was considerable in that interior context. Luther’s identification of the creative leap was an interpretation of that Stoic interiority, but also a crucial creative leap beyond it.

Luther, Kant, and Freedom

A form of Luther’s idea of the individual leap of faith became fundamental to Kant’s self-legislating ethics, and in fact to his whole kind of idealism as sketched above. Peel away Kant’s technical terminology and the fundamental insight underneath is the personal creative leap that Luther made famous. Fichte’s self-positing ego is yet another expression of the same basic insight. It is no great surprise to find such a Lutheran grounding, since the religious upbringing of both Kant and Fichte was Lutheran. Kant’s contribution was to recognize the broad personal freedom implicit in the power of an intelligence to take creative leaps, that if an intelligence could take a leap of faith then it could take a multitude of different kinds of leap, and so Kant de-coupled Luther’s insight from the conceptual universe of Christendom and Abrahamic monotheism generally. In Kant’s work the leap became an individually created rule or conceptual pattern for structuring personal orientation within phenomena. Still another step is required to de-couple that basic interior creative freedom from the conceptual universe of sovereignty and sovereign rules in which Kant was still immersed.

Kant did not specifically relate his rationalist account of freedom with his recognition that time is contributed to experience by the experiencing intelligence, but he should have. Both the subjectivity of time and the individuality of freedom become clearer in that combination. Time, teleology, is the form of freedom.

The tradition of metaphysics recognizing a plurality of embodied teleologies with individual creative freedom is the philosophical legacy to draw upon to support human rights and freedoms far better than materialist monism or any other kind of fatalist determinism. The Lutheran line of freedom philosophy provides the matrix of an understanding of teleological freedom and the transcendence of intelligence.

The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment attempted to replace a Christian ideology sanctifying arbitrary oppressions exercised by institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and Churches with ideas supporting democracy and the global equality of all people as individuals, requiring the abolition of slavery, torture, serfdom, and the oppression of women. However, the weight of opinion within the politically engaged public was always skeptical about the competence of individual rationality and generally supported traditional religions and institutions of wealth and subordination, probably out of fear of the unknown, of unpredictable social change. Consequently, strong democracy and global human equality have still not been accomplished, but they are ideals still inspiring many people and having unpredictable political consequences. The forces of top-down human-on-human parasitism have always been winning, most recently since the suppression of the anti-war and counterculture movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s which blossomed around the early cultural impact of television. (The only intensively televised war, the most realistically communicated and the most popularly questioned and hated by spectators, was the American war in Vietnam 1965-75.) Here in 2014 the top-down forces are winning spectacularly, although there is also surprising new resistance.

The Enlightenment is not yet a story from history with beginning, middle, and end. We and our times in culture and politics are still very much part of the ongoing struggle of ideas and social arrangements at the core of the Enlightenment movement. The cultural and social transformations effected by rationalist philosophy, especially as presented by Spinoza and his eighteenth century French materialist interpreters, notably Denis Diderot (1713-84) and (Baron) Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723-89), who worked to define and communicate l’esprit philosophique, defining the categorical criminality of torture and slavery, for example, unquestionably earn the radically bottom-up political philosophy of the Enlightenment a central place in modern philosophy. It is remarkable that the mainstream work of contemporary philosophy shows so little vestige of that legacy.

The reflections here on Enlightenment history, Spinoza, and in particular l’esprit philosophique, have been informed and inspired by:

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

A Philosophical Consciousness

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Strategic thinking

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bell hooks, Enlightenment, freedom, human-on-human parasitism, imprinted parent, philosophy, politics, Power, science, sovereignty, time, transcendence

Toxic Consequences of the Imprinted Parent

Human cultures have been poisoned by both direct and indirect consequences of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence, the universally imprinted parent, and because of that it is urgent for individuals everywhere to search out and discover the non-poisoned pre-cultural features of their personal powers, sensitivities, and impulses, which is to say the features of experience which express their innocent intelligence. The interiority of every intelligence has both innocent foundations and additional conditioning by the culture or ways of life of the people surrounding it. (Meditation in traditions related to Transcendental Meditation, for example, has innocence-rescuing aspects such as disengaging from language.) A movement of individual re-grounding in personal innocence is the only way that cultures and the human interconnectedness that those cultures condition can be reconstructed to eliminate distortions of reality, injustices, and other poisons which currently damage and restrict the large numbers of individuals exposed to those cultures. Searching out and discovering the innocence of personal intelligence is a critical thinking process, the building of a kind of philosophical consciousness.

Direct consequences of the imprinted parent are personally embedded habits and expectations of dependency and subordination expressed in a continual search for and orientation to authority figures, leaders, elders, and supervised sophistication. Indirect consequences are cultural distortions of reality and elaborated ideologies developed and broadcast by parasitic groups and factions with the intent of exploiting standard parental conditioning to establish themselves as legitimate, stable, and institutional authorities and supervisors, dominant powers, controllers of wealth and general behaviour in a community as a whole. It is the universality of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence which has enabled human-on-human parasitism to establish itself securely in all kinds of communities and to use culture to mask its true nature.

bell hooks on imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy

The vicious qualities that bell hooks identifies in the ordinary functioning of Euro-American society, described as imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, all resolve into top-down human-on-human parasitism. The overt purpose of imperialism is to acquire the benefits of human parasitism as specified in posting 73, May 21, 2014, bell hooks on Freedom, and war as the instrument of imperialism is parasitic on grunt soldiers in a most overt way. White supremacist ideology (or any ideology of racial inequality) is a device to justify human parasitism by de-humanizing (second-classing) certain groups. Patriarchy is an expression of an ideology of gender inequality which provides a (false) justification for males to be parasites on females. Capitalism is an ideology of socio-economic class hierarchy (claiming scientific support from Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, or similar purported laws of nature) along with a structure of laws and organization of property, production, and distribution which glorifies and privileges owners of the means of production (capital, including conceptual property such as patents), effectively licensing owners to be parasites on non-owning employees who labour to supply, operate, and maintain the means of production. Capital arranges to increase eternally while the acts of labour continuously deteriorate aging labourers. In that way the institutionalized injustices named by hooks are all manifestations of the same underlying culture of human-on-human parasites, and an intent to enjoy the rewards of parasites is the motive for particular groups and factions to exploit basic parental conditioning to establish themselves as authorities, dominant powers, controllers of wealth, and supervisors of communal behaviour. The only way that any of the injustices of those institutions can be ended and prevented is to discredit, discard, and go beyond the culture which glorifies human parasites through exploiting the universal and uncritical expectation of parental-type authority, namely the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity derived historically from nomadic animal herding cultures.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

It is encouraging to discover that a large-scale project of getting beyond projections of the universally imprinted parent actually began soon after 1600 with the period of Euro-American cultural history known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental impulse of the Enlightenment was to improve the general condition of humanity exactly by eliminating the power and authority of churches, aristocracy, and monarchical institutions, along with their representatives and agents, thus eliminating all the externalized Old Regime avatars of the Great Indefinable Super-Parent. In the Old Regime the sovereign courts of kings and princes were staffed chiefly by activist members of the military-landowning aristocracy, the large-scale capitalists of their era. Governments were really control mechanisms of that overtly parasitic ownership class, direct constructs of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of armed men on horses which originated with conquering nomadic herding confederacies which in their conquered territories evolved into a ruling confederacy of what modern people would call crime families. That parasitic ruling (herding) faction justified its oppressions by an appeal to cosmic intelligent design, claiming appointment and support by divine Providence, the Super-Parent. Of the three main engines of Old Regime social supervision, Church, monarchy, and aristocracy, the second and third rested their legitimacy on that of the Church. The rhetoric of class conflict would clearly apply to aristocracy and monarchy, but less clearly to Church hierarchies, even though the higher Church officials would all represent the aristocratic crime family class.

In the Euro-American cultural system after 1600 there was a significant rate of literacy and advanced education which was partly the result of the humanist movement of the fifteenth century Renaissance, and since the spread of the printing press after about 1450 there had been a growing culture of debate and exchange of ideas in writing (self-consciously calling itself the Republic of Letters) which functioned outside the immediate control of governments and religious foundations such as universities and church hierarchies. People engaging in that literary culture used philosophical ideas and rational arguments to identify and specify injustices of the prevailing forms of feudalism and to propose better alternatives. Fundamentally, it was discovered that if the non-rational claim of divine appointment or supernatural intervention was disregarded then the traditional structures of wealth and power in European society (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical) were all exposed as arbitrary, unjustified, illegitimate, and plainly parasitic on the common majority of people. Credit can be given to Spinoza for articulating that insight in a broadly convincing way. It was mainly Spinoza, based on his materialist metaphysics, who argued for abandoning the non-rational claim of traditional powers to represent supernatural intervention, divine will, or a providential deity controlling human society and history.

Enlightenment in general, in the eighteenth century sense, meant recognition of the fundamental power of human rationality and universal principles derived by rational thinking and debate. The ultimate authority of reason is the crux of Enlightenment and the authority of reason both undermined claims of divine intervention in worldly affairs and conferred the crucial dignity and (potential) power of rational thinking, as basic to human nature, upon every individual. In one interpretation, it would mean being educated in the scientific approach to nature as distinct from superstitious and magical thinking typical of religion and other assumptions of disembodied spirits. Rationalists emphasized that appeals to divine will to sanctify inequality of wealth, power, freedom, and privilege are implausible, non-rational, and obscurantist. Rationalists also emphasized that, since appeals to revealed commands of a supernatural dictator are non-rational, it makes better sense to decide appropriate moral action and human interaction by calculating the resulting happiness of and benefit to humanity as a whole. What follows from that is the sovereignty of the collective of all people, the general will, and a requirement for individual empowerment through freedom of thought and expression on a base of rational education, all of which defines a serious kind of universal human equality from which tolerance of racial variety follows and which dislodges any particular culture or religion from a privileged position. Of course, the kind of thinking and expression that was legally forbidden by institutions of wealth and power in the Old Regime was precisely anything that questioned their legitimacy. They did their utmost to use the power of existing institutions to enforce conservatism, mobilizing the already active apparatus of state censorship and the Roman Catholic Inquisition to snuff out freedom of thought and expression, ideas of democracy, and legal recognition of universal human rights.

Legitimation Drift from Providence to Popular Sovereignty

In spite of the fact that we people of modernity consider our science-driven society to be well beyond the superstitions and brutalities of Medieval and Old Regime conditions, there are profound continuities as well, as highlighted by the work of bell hooks. Monarchical and aristocratic forms of violence-based sovereignty have not disappeared but only morphed into new configurations. Although the top-down faction of human parasites still clings to the conservatism of religion, it shifts the base of its legitimacy more to an identification or unification with sovereign governments as ambient cultures become more secular and governments appear more responsible to the majority of citizens. The ownership class justifies and exercises its parasitism through participation in and partnerships with the traditional top-down force of now apparently legitimate governments. The legitimacy of government is bestowed upon the means by which large-scale wealth accumulates ever more wealth: commercial corporations, businesses, and industries which are licensed and fostered by governments to encourage employment and something vaguely called national wealth. Government members must have a proven dedication to the corporate sector, and especially to banking and the investment/ financial industry. The whole ownership faction rides the coattails of the appearance and rhetoric of ‘sovereignty of the people’ created by elections every four or five years offering some choice of ruling political party.

Top-Down against Bottom-Up Political Forces

The problem with that foundation of capitalist legitimacy is that democracy is more myth than reality, and consequently the legitimacy of familiar governments is an illusion. The concentration of wealth in a small faction enables that faction to exercise decisive political influence, vastly overpowering the bottom-up political forces such as voting every four or five years. As discovered and documented by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) there is an overpowering influence of great wealth in all political processes. Behind the great wealth is the malign culture of alpha-trophy-looting cowboy masculinity which honours and glorifies the accomplishments of human parasitism. In any country claiming to be democratic, inequality is eventually fatal to the legitimacy of power because it removes even the appearance of democracy.

It is now common to acknowledge that, even in the most modern democratic countries, the top-down political force of organized wealth (class-conscious strategic action within the corporate owning and controlling faction of society) is far more influential, effective, and agenda-driven (funding political parties, political candidates, and lobbyists, for example, in addition to owning and controlling mass media, academic research, and large scale employment opportunities) than any bottom-up forces such as citizens voting for party controlled representatives in government every four or five years. That vast inequality of political influence is not new, and has been the political reality in some form since long before the emergence of national governments with democratic fig-leafs such as elections, but the current state represents the dramatic reversal of a trend in the direction of greater bottom-up inclusion. Since the Enlightenment era of Euro-American history, since the French Revolution of 1789, but especially since The Great War of 1914-18 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was a trend toward greater bottom-up democratic influence. That trend was rapidly reversed around the time of the truncated presidency (1969-74) of Richard Nixon, apparently in reaction to the American anti-war and counter-culture youth movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Nixon was soon followed by a sustained wave of political, economic, and ideological support for top-down dominance. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of The United Kingdom through 1979-90. In the USA Ronald Reagan held the presidency through 1980-88. The trend reversal against greater bottom-up political influence has been so thorough and effective that it is now reasonable to identify it as a coup d’état by the ownership class against the beginnings and promise of a more authentic democracy. It is an ongoing anti-democratic creeper-coup managed strategically over roughly half a century, maybe from around the assassination of JFK in 1963.

The Politics of Metaphysics

In the historical context of Medieval European Christendom and the Old Regime, there was a much abused identification of transcendent discretionary creativity with an externalized and centralized cosmic super-parent who commanded universal obedience: the Christian God. Spinoza’s version of materialist monism, amplified and broadcast culturally in the writings of radical rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually had its intended effect, largely discrediting the legitimacy of all institutions of wealth and power (Church, aristocracy, and monarchies) which founded their legitimacy on the omnipotence of the cosmic super-parent. That’s the big deal about Spinoza. However, a strict materialism eliminates all philosophical idealism, which in this context is the same as transcendent discretionary creativity intrinsic to some entity or entities. Materialism eliminates all forms of discretionary creativity because with materialism everything is pre-determined for all eternity by omnipotent and unalterable laws of nature. So, as a political ideology, materialism soon encountered the limits of its liberating effects, because when interpreted strictly it eliminates the freedom of all individual people as well as the authority of gods, disembodied spirits, and anyone claiming to be their appointed agents. To get beyond those limits of materialism it is necessary to re-admit transcendent creativity back into the philosophical foundation of human relations generally and politics in particular. This time, however, the recognition of transcendent creativity has to avoid the mythological elaboration of residing in an externalized, centralized, or universalized super-parent and instead accept restriction to the individual interiors (non-spacial interiors) of de-centralized animate biological entities, that is to say, all individual animals including humans. There is no super-parental entity here, although on this view discretionary creativity comes with the vulnerability and predicament of being in a particular life in time. This de-centralizing of discretionary creativity is a partial recapitulation of the Enlightenment act conferring profound dignity and (potential) power on every individual at the same time as removing claims to sovereign privilege other than from a grounding in a far stronger and more authentic democracy than has ever yet existed.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the crucial philosophical project was to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be based on omnipotent Providence. There are no parental presences in a philosophical consciousness. It was right for Enlightenment rationalists to marshal philosophy against parasitic pretenders to parental authority over whole communities, and they were right to articulate a philosophical vision, scientific materialism, that had the effect of undermining such claims. As it turned out, scientific materialism was not effective over the long run. Now, again, a philosophical consciousness is required to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be justified by materialist science.

Time As the Condition of Discretionary Creativity

Nothing in nature, neither at the cosmic level nor at any local level, is moved by teleology, by intentions, goals, or aspirations, and in that sense there is no future or futurity in nature (and so no time in nature). A definition of nature could be: the set of non-teleological events and objects, what might be called the set of inertial events and objects. However, there are also a plurality of individual intelligences (ordinary embodied people) and those intelligences (as intelligences) are close to being entirely teleological, and teleology is temporality, futurity, a bearing toward a future. As teleology we are outside nature but certainly operating into or upon nature, and each intelligence is also interior to itself, which is to say, there isn’t just one great teleological striving, drive, or desire manifesting itself through all the individual intelligences. There are indeed vast numbers of separate individual teleological intelligences. Plurality isn’t tidy, so it will lack aesthetic appeal to some, but it is not helpful to ignore this untidiness of reality.

Non-Superstitious Transcendence: the Question in the Gaze

Not all conceptions of transcendence are vulnerable to the charge of superstition in the way that ideas of disembodied spirits or of cosmic super-parental intelligences are. There is a non-superstitious transcendence: time as a condition of every individual’s personal intelligence. All three of vacant space, time, and intelligences (spirits) have been suggested as ethereal or immaterial. In the case of spirits, the plausible grounding of the very idea of spiritual non-materiality is the inseparability of intelligence and time. Every intelligence is a voice, and voice exists only in time. It is a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. Since space could be described as a condition of strict material actuality, and the experience of space has to be a temporal construct, the one and only true and familiar non-materiality is time, and time is exactly definitive of the interiority of the question or teleological bearing in any human gaze. Knowledge has its existence in that bearing. Time so experienced as a fabric of possibilities does not exist in the strict actuality of nature, but is a creation of individual intelligences in their living a degree of freedom from the determinism of nature. Time is uniquely not physical, far more than a condition of material actuality, and, to that extent people have an aspect which is not material or physical because as intelligence each exists and self-creates through time and only through time, which doesn’t even exist as physical matter or substance.

Leaders perpetuate the belief that fulfillment in life is achieved from devoted service to the supervisory and educational hierarchies of knowledge, wealth, and power, from the sophistication and rewards that long service accumulates. However, the very idea of hierarchy is yet another version of the imprinted parent. Only within an uncritical acceptance of the child-parent pattern of subordination does merit somehow transfigure into meritocracy. The ideology of meritocracy is part of the poisoning of culture to justify parasitic top-down control of populations, and the glorification of parasitism discredits culture generally as a guide to reality, value, self-identification, and human relations. Philosophical consciousness of innocent intelligence enables empathy to the individual transcendence of everyone, each individual with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other intelligences. Philosophic empathy is recognizing all individual intelligences as both physical and creatively teleological entities, as individual eruptions into nature of discretionary creativity, as individual spinners of freedom in transcendent time.

My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely interpretations of:

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

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

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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philosophy, politics

Violence and radical inequality (practices and justifications) are cultural poisons in the human interconnectedness. The glorification of violence is a main poison permeating existing cultures, but it is not the only one. The notion of radical inequality and the normal violence of dominance and control (ultimately by a semi-covert oligarchy) is a more inclusive identification of the poison. Carriers of those cultures are malevolent forces which practice manipulation and control by (among other ways) emphasizing the continuity of individuals with groups or collectives they are connected to, and even with unalterable nature. To exercise full human competence and freedom in that situation, it is necessary to counteract that influence by coming to terms with the discontinuity between the interiority of individual intelligence and the common world of nature and culture (as identified by the whole humanist movement of Hellenistic Greece: Cynics, Skeptics, and Epicureans along with Stoics).

If ordinary thinking is systematically impaired and distorted by every individual’s ambient culture (culture constructed in a combination of historical accidents and strategically deliberate programs) can any way be found personally to resist and transcend that influence? Even as a thought experiment, the possibility that human unfreedom is created by a pervasive culture being deliberately poisoned continuously, more or less covertly, raises an important challenge for philosophy. The question could be framed this way: In the situation of living in a culture that is pervasively poisoned, is it possible for an individual, by personal efforts, to achieve unimpaired or fully functioning human existence, to find grounding in undistorted reality? The answer is: Yes, with a combination of responses.

Two Main Points of Personally Strategic Orientation

First: Equality and the Discontinuity of Subjectivity

The ordinary sense of “subjectivity” is a declaration of the peculiar interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality. It assumes a radical discontinuity between subjectivity and the world of pre-determined nature. Something is called subjective to stipulate its non-actuality, its disconnection from the measurable actualities of objective nature. The interiority of intelligence is exactly subjectivity. In ordinary discourse the non-actuality of subjectivity is held in a negative light, as a failing. However, it is exactly the non-actuality of subjectivity that transcends the brute actuality of nature. The non-actuality of subjectivity includes personally dreamed-up visions of the future, selections of which will be deliberately projected, by effortful bodily acts, onto the actuality of nature. The future does not exist in nature, but exists emphatically in the orientation of intelligence. As reviewed in the posting Rethinking Stoic Interiority, subjective non-actuality always includes variant personal scenarios for the non-existent future, experienced as a steady approach and arrival of, framing an intentional shaping of, decreasingly remote and improbable expectations and deliberately intended accomplishments, including surprises at the point of arrival, but also including, increasingly with remoteness from that point: contradictions, negations, probabilities, possibilities, speculations, fantasies, questions, and doubts, over which subjective intelligence deliberates and designs (and none of which exist in the measurable actuality of nature).

Art, Representation, and Interior Sensibility

It would be difficult to make sense of art without some conception of the interiority of subjective intelligence. There is a kind of art which is crafted representations of the appearance of things in the objective world, but representations suffused with the sensibility of the crafting artist, (sometimes of a character, point of view, imagined by the artist). The tension across the gap between ideals of exact representation and subjective sensibility is highly valued in that art, and qualifies an artifact as art. The advent of photography presented a challenge by seeming to remove the human interior sensibility from representation. Photography inspired a shift away from the traditional representational practices of painting and sculpture, for example, and placed greater emphasis in those forms of art on presentations of pure subjective sensibility, manifestations entirely of the interiority of subjectivity, often emphatically emotional. However, it was soon understood that the placement of the camera and the conditions of the chosen moment of image capture, for example, all communicate subjective sensibility in a photographic image.

The rich interiority of subjectivity is the basis of equality. Inwardly, every intelligence is a universe of creative non-actuality, with its own centre to find and own, discontinuous from the actuality of nature. Consequently, everyone has his or her private interior grounding, a separate universe. (Philosophers who assert that cultural artifacts, text or varieties of sign, are all that philosophy can clarify or conceive refuse to have any notion of powerful individual subjectivity.) Every individual’s interior wealth and power can serve as the portal to reality unspoiled by a culture twisted by malevolence. That is the spring of clean inspiration and questioning curiosity that can liberate every individual from cultural poisons. Therefore, when living within a poisoned culture, be aware of your personal discontinuity from nature and culture. Own and assert the discontinuity between your subjectivity and everything else. You are, as a human, a transcendent creative force, ultimately incomparable to any other. Own your interior surprise horizon, and its creative power of orientation. The journey there is solitary, private. No one is competent to judge a universe they cannot know, and incomparable entities cannot be ranked.

Second: The History of Cultures in the Interconnectedness

The interconnectedness is the product of a peculiar history created by previous humans, limited and desperate. As already mentioned, the glorification of violence and war is a main poison permeating existing cultures within the interconnectedness. The notion of radical human inequality, and the violence of dominance and control that results from that, is another concept of the poison. In the human interconnectedness, there are slavers, enemies of human equality, self-possession, and autonomy, so that, within the interconnectedness, individual self-possession, dignity, and autonomy are constantly at risk and must be personally protected and cultivated at all times. In aid of being appropriately sensitive to that, keep building an awareness of cultural history within the interconnectedness, and construct it by reference to the actual conditions around you. Be assured that violence and inequality are not pre-determined or necessary in the human interconnectedness. The interconnectedness itself is the most magnificent creation of multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), and it still needs a lot of work. From the history of the dominant cultures in the interconnectedness, it becomes clear that to prepare for construction of a new culture we must finish the work of the enlightenment, as will be explained in postings to come.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Strategic thinking

Dissent by Metaphysics

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

Social Contract as Hive Mind (3)

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

Embodiment and Two Spiritual Vulnerabilities

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

A Philosophical Consciousness

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought