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.

Intelligence as a Creative Force

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

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

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The question presented in the comment to the posting Working, November 21, 2012, offers an opportunity to explore certain elements of a set of ideas I have been calling ‘transcendental humanism’, enough that an answer qualifies as a whole new posting. (Please read the entire comment attached to that posting.) The question is:

“Aren’t the “crime-family cultural values” you mention rooted somehow deep down in the fabric of human being?”

Answering the question can be approached with reference to a distinction made in ancient philosophy between nature and intelligence. Two vectors of ancient humanist philosophy were: 1) to remove gods, demons, and spirits (disembodied intelligences) from conceptions of nature, and 2) to understand and experience the ordinary intelligence of individual people as transcendent. There is no caring in nature, no reasons, no morals, no justice. Caring, reasons, morals, and justice are all peculiar to intelligences. Nature is not intelligent. The world of brute nature is not static, but its movement is only a continuous, pre-determined, kind of falling, just falling. Embodied intelligences, as bodies, are certainly falling with it, but by projecting outward from the subjective interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality, we can turn the falling, to some extent, into flight. Although there is no justice in nature, identifications of justice and injustice are important to many intelligences. Intelligences transcend nature and reshape parts of nature all the time, transforming parts of nature into culture, overwriting nature with culture. We cut natural tree trunks into timbers and build houses that are outward projections of intelligence, but which are not otherwise in or from nature. The individual creativity of intelligences makes nature fly instead of merely falling. Humans have created far more elaborated cultures than any other known species, which makes us more free of nature than the others. Human cultures have a history of restless transformation. Intelligences are among the forces that shape that transformation, and it is plausible that certain influences of brutish nature that have so far dominated cultures, such as crime family values, can be displaced by creations of more caring intelligences.

What Can Be Said

Explanations of things based on fundamental necessities sometimes include an unstated assumption that those necessities are the expression of a cosmic will and intelligence, a force that is dangerous and impious to question or resist. However, our clear and foundational acquaintance with intelligences is ordinary persons, embodied in very specific local structures. The analogy by which the cosmos as a whole is a person in a grander and more august form is so implausible as to be silly. All that can be said about the cosmos as a whole, other than strictly scientific measurements, is something like this: Inexplicably, there is something instead of nothing, and it seems that the various features and complexities of that something constitute a single whole in some sense. The anomalous feature is a discontinuity between the wholeness of beautiful but unintelligent nature, brute, predetermined actuality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the interiority of intelligences, each its own universe of non-actuality. In spite of that radical discontinuity, it is undeniable that actuality and those multitudes of non-actualities are profoundly entangled. The non-actuality of intelligences is routinely projected onto the shapes of actuality, and brute actuality contains materials that unreliably sustain and restrict the intelligences, who are otherwise discontinuous universes.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnecteness of intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendence of intelligence. This is one way in which it becomes possible to think that war and slavery in all its forms can be ended.

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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

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An Analogy

Mythology about the power of astrological demons, specifically the sun, moon, planets, and constellations of the zodiac, is a fair allegory of the individual’s exposure to the cultural power of reality-distorting ideology and emotional control mechanisms. Proponents of astrology (Hermetism, Cabalism, and Gnosticism, for example) are completely wrong in ascribing supernatural personalities to astral phenomena (angelic or otherwise, mainly intent on controlling and toying with the lives of humans), but they are not wrong about humans being born into a controlling and oppressive system in which freedom involves finding an understanding of the situation that goes deeper than the commonly accepted construct of reality.

It doesn’t take very much reading of history to learn of the historical dominance of crime families and their alpha-trophy-looting bias. Crime family culture permeates the whole idea of merit-based inequality structured into social and economic hierarchies, and that is very popular culture. To go beyond the social and cultural dominance of crime families, to wake from that history, we have to out-think the oligarchy by finding ways of orienting ourselves independently of the propaganda and messaging from their media. Having a critical awareness of relevant thinking from the past helps establishes a framework for orientation, a thinking space for interpreting current messages delivered with the intent of manipulating our energies.

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

Every incumbent of power clings to the myth of the noble lie, originated in Plato’s Republic, the myth that everyone is better off accepting inequality, maintaining the stability of hierarchies, even though every hierarchy, every system of inequality, is founded on lies, usually some variation of the assertion that inequality is ordained by the God of creation, and ordained because it is best. However, that whole perspective and assessment of what is best is a cultural peculiarity of crime families who have no other purpose than to secure their own advantage over others. How can freedom still be possible? Freedom is possible by waking from history, specifically the history of cultural dominance by purveyors of the lie of inequality. Political and historical consciousness is the dawn of that waking.

Political consciousness is consciousness that all claims of radical or profound inequality are lies. Political consciousness is recognition that cultural influences which proclaim the “noble” lie, inequality, are deceivers, manipulators, and exploiters, and as such, enemies. Political consciousness is identification of that enemy as a particular faction with a particular history, carrying the ethos of inequality, the source of the hostility in the cultural context of any person. Culture is an historical accumulation. Without historical narratives a person’s experience of the world resets to elementality. Without history, cultural presences reset to non-natural shapes without any story other than, “this part of actuality was shaped by an intelligence, by an impulse to play and to create a sustainable life in hope of long duration”.

“I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

(Please see the brief introduction to Descartes in posting 22, March 1, 2012, Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom.)

There are parallels between the adventure of discovering the ground of equality and the method of progressive and systematic doubt by which Descartes found himself through questioning ordinary certainties, as described in Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Not much is more personal than doubt. Doubt is a marker of a personal intelligence, the entity with an original questioning voice, the existence of which is unquestionably asserted by every question and every doubt. Descartes’ process of systematic doubt in search of an elemental grounding in a situation possibly pervaded by unidentifiable manipulation and control, illusion and deception, is an algorithm built on a link between freedom and undistorted knowledge (truth). Freedom and undistorted knowledge are inextricably linked. The question is this: Is it possible to be free enough to discover, recognize, and live with the truth? Rather than “The truth will make you free,” we have “The accessibility of truth, the unquestionability or immediacy of some knowledge, is the test, the proof, and the measure of freedom.” Freedom is the power to live with undistorted knowledge.

In that aspect of his work, Descartes represents a stream of practicing philosophy as the craft of waking from history by encountering an immediate and elemental orientation grid. Starting from an encounter with the entity of your personal intelligence (elaborated by, for example, posting 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction). The perspective of such philosophy is an alternative to the perspectives of any socioeconomic class or ethnic “identity”. It is possible to find and know the ground of equality by re-orienting to that philosophical perspective.

The philosophical journey departs from the middle class comfort zone (or any class comfort zone) and finds a way to abide in the elements: nature, culture, monadic interiority (subjectivity), and the deliberate interconnectedness of intelligences. What is gained by casting off from standard cultural moorings is a mature innocence which is a revaluation of elemental reality, a new appreciation of monadic interiority, of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, of other intelligences with their own creative and unfathomable interiority, of the efforts and strategies required to build interconnectedness with other intelligences, the limitations of interconnectedness, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness.

To recapitulate and proceed from Descartes, the basic “I am thinking, therefor I exist” corresponds to monadic interiority: doubt, questions, curiosities are blossoms of a coherent entity of creative power. There is authentic personal identity in the unique non-actuality of each monadic interiority. Creative process is more than interiority, but not in the sense dear to American consumerism. When the economic atoms (persons) of capitalist theory think about creative dreams, of “dreaming big” they think the American dream: winning a new car, selecting property or distinctions to covet or desire, acquisition of external property or some other conspicuous symbol of being better than others. That’s a crime family perversion of the creative process. The creative process, understood in its transcendence, is its own reward. Creative process is more than interiority, without ignoring the intrinsic rewards of interiority. Monadic interiority is projected onto the forms of nature in a creation of culture, a transformation of nature into culture via the force of monadic interiority. Personally doubting everything possible, we still have the agency of a creative process guessing at and projecting a sustainable life among the elements, into increasingly remote and improbable futures, deriving meaning and grounding from the inner horizon, the force of creativity.

Equality and Monadic Interiority

With creative interiority there is no ground for hierarchy, and so the universe of monadic interiority is the font of equality. The genius of the non-actuality of interiority is its own reward, and equally so for everyone, establishing everyone’s justification by creative projection. (Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55): Subjectivity is truth.) To embrace your peculiar universe of elemental non-actuality is to make your creative process your new best friend, and not your only friend. Elemental reference experiences include the riches of embodiment and the creative process of intelligence, personal bearings and reorientation processes, an internal fountain of re-orientation possibilities (questions) building a bearing and expressing its voice. Practice a creative process, a voice-expressive process, and celebrate it in others.

Identity

You don’t lose identity in casting off from an ethnic cultural setting because identity is intelligence, the spiritual entity of monadic individuality, the entity holding and building your quests, vigils, and bearings. Intelligence is an embodied particular, an entity of individual agency. You don’t lose identity but instead you reclaim an identity which was previously hijacked by a hostile cultural setting. When you cast off from the moorings of control-faction motivational manipulation you aren’t left with nothing, but rather with a launch pad of political consciousness in a grid of elemental orientation. To have political consciousness is to be aware of yourself and every transcendent monad (person) as elemental in the political situation. Political consciousness is also awareness of the ideological force obstructing that vision of equality, awareness of the pervasive ideology which rationalizes the worldview of crime-families, the worldview of inequality, of the display, celebration, and enforcement of inequality, of factional control and motivational manipulation. The journey of political consciousness brings you away from culturally prescribed moorings and off on the quest for elemental moorings. When your motives are not being manipulated by promotors of the ideology of crime-families, you have a chance to develop your personal voice.

Descartes moved quickly from the brilliance of his self-discovery, impossible to doubt, to the dubious deduction of a benevolent God. He then used that finding as the basis for other comforting platitudes. Since Descartes went off the rails so quickly, it remains necessary to re-think the re-orientation he was attempting. From the encounter with monadic interiority, you can remodel a broader orientation from the other elements, resistances which draw us out from, or stand as a setting for, our own universe of non-actuality. (See posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture.)

Philosophy is the search for an elemental re-orientation grid that enables disengagement from cultural myths and narratives that depict a reality that is specifically distorted to serve the interests of particular factions such as the partnership of crime families and religious cults. That is the sense in which philosophy is a search for truth. Freedom is possible by undertaking the transcendental adventure, the philosophic journey to touchstones of reality beyond the distorting force-field of alpha-trophy-looting culture, to elemental experiences enabling a reorientation to a more reality-based sense of the situation, abandoning grids anchored to the dictator-alpha-god and his institutional avatars.

In an elemental re-orientation you have cultural-reality as a severely biased political construct, social hierarchies as mountains of counterfeit transcendence. Release that tainted grid by disengaging emotionally from the cultural matrix of inequality and personifications of non-embodied persons. With respect to those, freedom is disorganization. What you gain by casting off from the moorings of conventional ideals is your own monadic spiritual entity. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every social/cultural/economic category. That is a very substantial gain. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is all other human beings as transcendent, as monads of non-actuality, freedom and creativity, able to project original visions into nature and culture. That is a considerable promotion compared with their being cashed out as inmates of boxes on the economic hierarchy. What is gained is sensitivity to the transcendence of everyone around you, all universes of creative non-actuality. What makes sense in that reality is a nurturing attitude to people and honour for those devoted to nurturing.

As explored in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness, we retain our elemental engagements with other people, built from innate intelligent embodiment alone. Any two people can re-invent language from scratch, (language is inapplicable to a solitary intelligence) and since we always do some degree of that re-invention, society is not monolithic. Every family, friendship, partnership, and personal association is a separate cultural unit to some degree. Such units turn inward and motivate themselves. Human motivation doesn’t come mainly from above, from leadership, the civilization, or the nation. Those factions manipulate and prey on motivation that originally comes from individuals, partnerships, groups of people personally devoted to one another, and groups of mothers and children who collect and depend on each other for support in nurturing, for example. Withdrawing from the moorings of tainted political influences does not harm the basic engagements of interconnectedness and especially the conversation with children. As a force for social stability, the most vastly undervalued asset is children. Couples often reach a point of wanting to part company, but it is very rare for anyone to want to separate from their children until they reach the natural independence of maturity. Even parents who become alienated from adult children reach out again when grandchildren appear. The bond with children seems to be the strongest in human experience. (Children also keep re-inventing language instead of just passively learning it.) As a social foundation, then, we retain a focus on arrangements around the conversation with our children and the innocent love and playfulness they offer. That includes the reality and force of first-language-nurture culture, authentic attachment, elemental bonding, and sharing awareness. (Please see posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations.)

Also crucial among assets gained by elemental re-orientation is a newly innocent appreciation of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness. We have the calculus of work-costs and the need to construct a sustainable life with our powers of thinking, building a bearing, bearing into building a bearing. As explored in posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky, we have our embodied engagement with nature and a work-based cost-sense of reality as a particular, personal, situation. That mature innocence of intelligent embodiment is an intense appreciation of what it is to be alive.

Being Political

Elemental re-orientation brings a certain cultural and political mission, a re-conception and revaluation of freedom and equality. There is widening awareness of vicious intent in addition to incompetence and conceptual bankruptcy on display in the multitude of failures of the controlling faction. Since elemental re-orientation is based in intelligence, we have strategic thinking in our collection of assets: recognizing the enemy, and the enemy’s blind spots. From political consciousness there arises a clear vision of progress: cultivating and asserting the perspective of philosophic elementality, and bringing the orientation of first-language-nurture operations into balance with the lethal alpha-trophy-looting orientation. The problem is to think how it is possible to divert energy from the omnipotence of the ruling crime-family faction when it has projected its ideology so deeply into universal culture. The first strategic advance has to be withdrawing consent from the leadership of control factions, and assuming personal responsibility to re-orient to a realistic assessment of the political situation. The category of assets retained and re-valued also includes cultural elements, literacy and the free market in books and ideas, freebooting reading and writing, especially within the currently open blogosphere.

At the same time as freedom must be projected into the world of physics and politics, an individual’s happiness cannot depend on saving the world, on objective incentives and rewards, or on some possible future evolutionary development. Happiness must derive from expressive agency, bringing good things into the outward situation from the gusher of inward impulses, curiosities, and ideas. Everybody needs some stuff from markets but you can channel creative energy from within with relatively little of the stuff controlled by the hard-boy alpha-structure. It is possible to think of ways to work around the game being run by that structure.

The System of Reality

When we talk about freedom, we don’t mean anything involving separation from human interconnectedness and shared awareness. Rather, we want certain re-valuations, as outlined above, within that sharing of awareness. The system of reality is the political situation of intelligence: Multiple universes of freedom and creativity (monads) projecting into a common world of pre-determined nature and historically accumulated culture, the cultural elements of which generally prevent awareness of being one among multiple universes of freedom and creativity.

Because of the reality distortions essential to the cultural and political dominance of alpha-trophy-looting culture, there is some knowledge (truth) which is subversive. You don’t have a serious theory of knowledge without accounting for that, without including a political philosophy which traces the effects of the dominant factional ideology. Since politics is the dynamics of power and control over people and resources, including over what people are permitted to know, knowledge cannot be separated from politics. Fundamental questions of knowledge (including self-knowledge) cannot be separated from questions of the freedom enabled by individually innate power to elude cultural conditioning and find a grounding in personal innocence.

Individualism and Government

One proposal for individual action to reclaim self-possession in the face of the superstructure of control in modern societies is libertarian individualism. The libertarian individual is very much an alpha-trophy-looting type male, with a few surface modifications. This individualist is a self-sufficient, gun-toting, trigger happy, homesteading separatist, hoarding supplies for the fervently desired collapse of civilization. The only moral advantage of this figure over Genghis Khan, exemplar of the ideal alpha-trophy-looting type of cowboy, is that the libertarian’s declared ambition is self-reliance and self-sufficiency, harming no one unless they trespass on his hoarded property, of which he claims absolute possession, and which he is anxious to defend with his beloved guns. However, that moral advantage is fragile and mutable, since it contains enough self-absorption, self-admiration, and contempt for others to justify looting a few trophies and controlling other persons he considers unworthy of liberty, which is most other people.

As described in the sketch of sovereign law in Episode One, it is true that government as such has thoroughly questionable historical roots. However, efforts to sublimate the predatory impulses at the core of government have had some praiseworthy effects. If the sovereignty of law, the rule of law, could be based on a truly democratic foundation and (cautious) refresh mechanism, then the enforcement of sovereign law looks like the best way of constraining the predatory hostility of hard-boy crime families and religious cults. Those predators are never going away. Unfortunately, current mechanisms of representative democracy have been subverted and brought under the stealthy control of crime family capital, and so innovation in the mechanisms of democracy is necessary. For example, legislatures and parliaments should be conceived as juries and picked the way juries are picked, a random sampling made by lottery of the people governed. That would at least do away with financial and ideological control over hegemonic political parties and bring everybody into the political process. History has now demonstrated that elections do not produce democracy. Participation is more effective than representation.

Transcendental humanism forms the strongest foundation for democracy. If you want to assert bottom-up politics, as opposed to crime family politics, then you have to come from the equal transcendence of every individual as the most thoroughly authentic justification. Current models of democracy are compromises between the ruling crime families and people who perceive benefits from bargaining with them. The point here is that the total rejection of government that is fundamental to libertarian individualism is based on an assessment of government that is fatally over-simple, and on an assessment of individual human value that is inherently hierarchical. It seems likely that libertarians are a movement of nostalgia for feudalism, who reject government exactly because it might be a little democratic, and so contemptible on their view due to representing “everyman”, to whom the libertarian feels vastly superior. Libertarians insist on eliminating the nurturing functions of government but not so much the manly war-making functions.

The rugged libertarian is not the only alternative to Genghis Khan as an individualist. Transcendental humanism conceives individuals as transcendent, each a creative source of futurity, for example, but immeasurably enhanced by interconnectedness with a social arrangement prepared to nurture children and adults, and by contributing to a cultural accumulation over generations. The overall arc of transcendental humanism is a switch from the modern orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from absorbing everything from the outside environment (everything from consumer goods, to life agendas, and even personal identity and visions of reality) to an opposing orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from fountaining out creations from within. The term “self-possession” in transcendental humanism is meant to point at the latter orientation. That emphasis on universal ‘justification’ from within, as distinct from an emphasis on eliminating government, transforms the notion of individualism.

You can stay with the Dursleys if you want, or you can come to Hogwarts.

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking

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Culture Consciousness

In the science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye, from 1974, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the imagined system of space travel involves something like ‘worm holes’ which are shortcuts between fixed points at widely distant areas of galactic space. One especially important worm hole has an opening so close to the surface of a star that any ship emerging from the hole without appropriate shielding is immediately destroyed. Considering this as an analogy, individual intelligences arrive into cultural interconnectedness in a similar way, and almost literally soak up with their mother’s milk a culture shaped by a hostile ideology of alpha-trophy-looting design.

Given the enormous joys, pleasures, and advantages for us monads in sharing intelligence by forming attachments (as described in posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture and in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness), it is inevitable that structures of artifacts, imitated gestures, and ways of living are going to accumulate rapidly in clusters of people. Soon every infant arrives into a situation of vital support already richly elaborated by a culture made from the creative projections of past generations, most of those projections now alienated from their ad hoc, accidental, and personally inventive origins, and consequently now stipulated as sacred traditions divinely pre-ordained or as necessities of nature.

Every child monad (that is, an original locus of creativity and freedom) is engulfed on arrival by brute nature through embodiment, but every child is also engulfed by the culture carried in the bearings of the caregiving individuals who nurture and share awareness with him or her and who depict “the way we live” by carrying on their lives within the child’s sensitivities. The long hours of first-language-nurture face and voice time with mother, the bonding and shared awareness from that gesture-imitation play, accumulate for an eternity (the passing of time speeds up dramatically with increasing age) before the child begins to use his or her own body to move about and explore the cost-benefit shape of nature. So interconnectedness and some culture come before the full-bodied encounter with nature.

(The Mote in God’s Eye, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Published by: Pocket Books, Mass Market Paperback: 592 pages, ISBN-10: 0671741926, ISBN-13: 978-0671741921.)

Law as a Microcosm of Culture and History

Sovereign law is connected by history to two deeply suspect social phenomena, namely religious cults, especially those with written teachings of a prophet or divine avatar, and crime families which exercise control by force over the population of a certain turf or territory. (By far most human societies prior to modern democracies have been brutal dictatorial empires controlled by some variant of a crime family in partnership with religious cults.) Both religious cults and crime families are parasitic on self-subsistent groups of families carrying within themselves a cultural heritage of surviving and raising children within the indifferent environment on the surface of planet Earth. So, religious cults, crime families, and self-subsistent first-language-nurture collectives are three fundamental engines of culture and history.

A religious focus on divinely inspired writings tends to interpret those writings as containing divine commands (super-parental commands), an original paradigm of law. The three Abrahamic religions all exemplify how cultures, organizations, and traditions of scholarly study, writing, and ongoing interpretation of holy books grow into a bridge between refined religious orthodoxy and the control of general communal behaviour by pervasively applicable laws. Related to that, law historically exemplifies the mystique of written language. Words were once widely thought to be the mechanism of divine creation and of divine action in general (Logos). The rule of law is the rule of words engraved in a medium which points toward eternity, a work of cultured craft achieving a sublime unification of ethereal words with an elemental and enduring material. Such engraved figures or characters were suspected of sharing in the power of charms and talismans.

Another, closely related, paradigm of compulsory (parental) command is the decree of the effective local warlord, chief of the most powerful crime family. Such organizations reach a point of wanting to regularize, institutionalize, and legitimize their control over a population by supplementing the personal whims of the alpha-chief with enduring public lists of decrees to form an orderly and predictable framework of expectation and performance in the relationship between parasitic crime family and host population, and even impose their ideas of order within the primordial subsistence collective which is the effective grounding of the whole social arrangement.

Such is the origin of law. The organizations of the religious source and the crime family source tend to co-operate and form a partnership to mutually strengthen one another and share in enjoying the “surplus” produced by the primordial collectives under their mutual control. All along the primordial collectives carry on with their focus on raising children.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by: Anchor (October 11, 1977), Paperback: 340 pages, ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. (Plagues and Peoples specifically identifies aristocracies as parasitic plagues. See pp. 7-13.)

Infant Monads

That brief overview of the origins of law in human culture is a portrait in miniature of the universal history of culture. From time immemorial, we monads arrive as infants into a culture in which the most extreme and grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, in the form of crime family ideology, has over-asserted itself to the detriment of the whole system but especially to the detriment of the first-language-nurture segment of the social system. The fundamental parental duality, alpha-trophy-looting father versus first-language-nurture mother, projects itself onto the universal politics of human cultures. Human culture is so dominated by the crime-family caricature of masculinity that the natural influence and cultural expression of the common feminine focuses is disastrously suppressed. There is almost a sense of biological determinism to this problem as an obstacle to be encountered by any interconnectedness of monads which is embodied and gendered on the human model. Societies which have the sense to re-balance to give the feminine first-language-nurture segment equal recognition and cultural expression get to survive and advance. Societies that get stuck in masculine over-assertion reach a point of effective self-destruction.

Energy Control and Hard-Boy Gangs

Freedom in the world of physics is largely a matter of controlling the movement and application of energy, from sources as various as (but not limited to) food, the muscles of animals, flowing water, coal, and oil. Disputes and rivalries over control of energy on a large scale have been dominated by gangs of hard boys. The ordinary individual has little-to-no leverage against those gangs, and no one should have their day-to-day happiness depend on fixing the hard-boy problem. People equipped to tackle that problem directly become the next dynasty of gang-boys. Strategically, that is why revolutions don’t work, but reformations sometimes do. Significant progressive change in economics, politics, and culture was accomplished from small beginnings around the arrival of text printing technology in the middle of the fifteenth century, culminating during the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven by ideas of individual dignity and empowerment from literacy and philosophical ideas of human rationality. Some, but not all, of that has been blunted or rolled back, and the hard-boy regressive forces are still operating.

To this day, even in the most modern and scientifically advanced nations, the ethos and ideology of the class of people which owns and controls capital, the leadership or control class, is a tweaked version of crime family ideology. The core ethos of the crime-family faction is monopoly, full-spectrum dominance by violence and the elimination of potential competition and alternative visions, the alpha-trophy-looting ethos. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than suppress alternative and dissident voices, especially the values expressed in the segment of society devoted to nurturing children and engaging children in the learning of their first language. The result of the dominance of the hard-boy faction is a narrow-spectrum conception of what is possible, resulting in futile political discourse within nominally advanced and democratic political entities, all due to factional control by an ethos dedicated to celebrating inequality as such, to celebrating the dominant faction’s omnipotence and transcendent immunity (a mockery of authentic transcendence).

Transition to Modernity, the Schematic Version

Cast of characters: 1) rural-military crime families, 2) urban-commercial-financial crime families. The post-Roman hegemony of 1) in Europe was eventually followed by the rise and hegemony of 2), but 2) continued to use the mechanisms of social control employed by 1), which were mainly the strict organization of war and religion. In addition, 2) added some of their own techniques such as alienation from land and total dependence on markets, debt, employment for wages, and new commercial narratives delivered outside churches via novel mechanisms of communication.

The controlling faction is more stealthy now than in historical periods when the sovereignty of the most powerful crime families, aristocracy and monarchy, was overt. The new crime family oligarchy is far less open in its economic and political control, masked by the trappings of democracy. Also, a more elaborate legitimizing ideology has penetrated the worldview of all classes through the agency of mass media, commercial advertising, glorification of the Olympic Games and professional sport, and the vilification and dehumanization of dissident or alternative political visions. Mass media have become incomparably more penetrating into individual consciousness, and the predominance of messages carried, not only in explicit sales promotion, is controlled by concentrated media ownership. The educational and research systems are similarly controlled by the necessity of direct funding from private or investor/ donor controlled organizations, which also arrange behind the scenes for restrictions on public funding of education.

Leadership Incompetence

The current twin crises in global economy and in geopolitical conflict clearly establish the incompetence of the control faction. The economic/ financial crisis blossomed in 2007-08 after decades of incompetent public policy, and the geopolitical conflict might be said to have blossomed after 2001, but really goes to the core of American ambitions boosted in the wake of WWII and again after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Keep in mind that, in accordance with the theory proclaimed by the leadership class, the leadership structure is a meritocracy, so those with the most power, influence, and effect are the most talented leaders, the best of the best. It cannot be contested, then, that the ongoing crises just mentioned reveal the incompetence of the best of the leadership class.

Neither the economic crisis nor the geopolitical crisis have been brought into being by the desires and efforts of the common majority of people in any country or from any ethnic cultural tradition. Both the economic crisis and the geopolitical crises are manifestations of a general cultural problem, namely the excessive power and influence of groups expressing a particular ethos, an ethos hatched in the history of crime families, and now faced with a global situation beyond its competence.

The incompetence of the leadership class is firmly rooted in the basic value system they champion and express, namely the crime-family derived alpha-trophy-looting worldview. The heart of that worldview is revealed in academic economic theory and social philosophy, in which self-interest and egoism are advanced as the universal human motivating forces. The point that is proved by the philosophical emphasis on egoism and atomic self-interest, in combination with the common experience of mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that academic emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is regarded with contempt and so largely unknown by the egoist/ self-interest faction. The incompetence of the leadership class is an inevitable expression of the narrowness of its competitive egoistic culture.

First Language Nurture

12 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Strategic thinking

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Right-Wing Political Hegemony

The alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) system of social control, as presented in posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (presented as the enemy of transcendental humanism), is what political conservatives wish to conserve, essential right-wing political practice.

Nurture

One thing that emerges from Transcendental Humanism, is the vital importance of intimate human connectedness. From birth through the years of infancy there is hour after hour of face to face eye contact and vocal engagement between a child and (mainly) its mother, a primal meeting of separate intelligences, involving both costs and rewards for both, but special costs for the adult since the mutuality of that particular kind of attachment is limited, especially at the beginning. For the infant intelligence, it is crucial to learn to attribute separate intelligence to what happens. Normally that is accomplished so well that far too much of the world is personified. Perhaps infants initially attribute intelligence to all events, and gradually replace some of that attribution with the inertial work-cost of unintelligent nature.

The Divinity of Mind

The idea that the human mind shares the same nature or essence as a divine mind is perfectly accurate, but not because God created man in His own image. Rather, humans projected aspects of their own subjectivity into imaginings of a super-parent who always cares, who always knows and does what is best. God was made by infant humanity, in the image of parental humanity, optimistically tweaked.

Mothers share their language with their children to enrich the individual voices already there, and not to impose a generic voice. An authentic sense of personal belonging derives from attachments between individuals, experienced primordially in the context of the first-language-nurture attachment. What is always missing from studies of language is recognition that language is made operative by the creative agency of individual human voices. Language is sporting equipment, with no power whatever until some people come along with ideas about how to express some small piece of their creativity with it.

Imitation is one of the distinctive operating principles of intelligence. It distinguishes intelligent beings from objects in the grip of inertia and momentum. Intelligent beings imitate the looks, sounds, and shapes in their surroundings. We do it for fun, to play, because it is intelligent to do it, and because it expresses intelligence overtly, declares intelligence. Imitation is the first declaration of intelligence and, when another person is imitated, it declares unity, sameness, or attachment with that person. The continuity or recapitulation in imitation declares memory, a sense of relevance, and togetherness. The interests of babies and adults are quite different in many ways. A baby can’t participate in the mature interests of an adult, but the adult has some infant interests on which they can be together. They can be together by imitating one another, taking turns handling a toy, for example, or making the same mouth-noises or facial expressions. Imitation is the bedrock upon which the whole edifice of human culture is founded, and it plays this fundamental role because it enables a combination of individual intelligence with personal enlargement by attachment to others.

The fact that the adult companions of children must interrupt their most adult engagements in order to play on common ground with children is always some degree of adult self-denial and a partial self-alienation which is experienced as a stress, a cost, when it comes to dominate an adult’s life. This does not detract in any way from the observation in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations: “The innocent love of honest attachment and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Children are crucial contributers to the vitality of the human conversation.” As much as parents love to be with their children as they develop their powers and voices, adults have to be supported by other adults to continue their own adult development, to sometimes rest from exercising their important skills of operating within their child avatars.

The Meaning of the Invisibility of First-Language-Nurture (FLN)

Under ATL culture, the political marginalization of the FLN culture is so extreme that the arrival of a continuous stream of new persons, linguistically and socially equipped and competent, is taken as an event of brute nature, a given like minerals in the ground. Women, who mainly do the work of building fundamental attachments among separate intelligences, are discounted as fauna, operating under biological compulsions, “maternal instinct”. The fact that the FLN culture and operations are not recognized as the foundations of social order is the real revelation that nasty political forces are at work, and an index of their nastiness.

Every intelligence is intrinsically free in virtue of a partial (creative) detachment from the brute actuality of nature and culture. Ultimately, freedom is creativity. Not-being-controlled is the flip-side of that coin of freedom. Creativity is the perfect case of not-being-controlled. Having an apparent choice of properties to consume is the most meagre possible freedom. Freedom does not come from a market. However, since unfreedom is mainly a collective artifact, there is a collective dimension to freedom. It’s all very well to say that a personal re-orientation is the enabler of freedom, and it is, but something has to be done about the vicious distortions of reality maintained by the hegemonic ATL cultural institutions and ideology. In particular, something has to be done about the part of that distortion of reality which is the political invisibility of FLN operations.

Intelligences are essentially embodied and creativity has to be projected into the world of political forces. Strategic thinking expresses a certain kind of freedom. Freedom is possible by taking up a strategic political orientation in opposition to forces of radical inequality and reality-distorting control. Taking up the political orientation against collective unfreedom creates a cultural and psychological shield in the shelter of which is an opening of not-being-controlled.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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

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How can freedom be possible? Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

The mission drift from escaping misery to escaping determinism for a profound experience of freedom developed with the gradual success of the project to remove disembodied personalities and intelligences, spirits, from descriptions of nature. The project eventually extended to human nature. The strength of the process became irresistible when combined with the modern reiteration of determinism by Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza attempted a thorough ‘disenchantment’ of nature. In his philosophy the world was completely pre-determined and unitary. All was one “God or Nature” and all features and events were considered logically necessary, like steps of a proof in geometry. There is some irony in the fact that Spinoza’s philosophy generally looks like a re-statement of Stoicism in terms of seventeenth century mathematical reasoning and emerging science, but it muted the Stoic emphasis on an individual spark of freedom.

The answer to scientific determinism was created by philosophers still working with the Stoic tradition of humanist rationalism. Stoic double-aspect theory, emphasizing a discontinuity between outward experience and inward experience, is crucial in their account of how freedom can be possible. The answer to this version of “How can freedom be possible?” is substantially this: Since the evidence for determinism is deliberately cherry-picked from a narrow range of experience, freedom still can be encountered directly as both possible and actual on the basis of an enlarged survey of experience.

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a providential Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. A realm within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated. A link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on inwardness is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity was continued in the work of Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but it runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

The evidence for determinism is entirely outward, and selectively disregards, without convincing justification, the inward experience of immediate freedom. Spinoza did not demonstrate how inward freedom is reducible to the determinism of objective nature, but only declared his preference for pre-determination, in the spirit of Calvinism which was “going around” at the time.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Revival of Freedom

Kant was responding to Spinoza’s vision of total determinism, which still loomed as the central philosophical challenge a century after Spinoza’s death. Influenced by the rationalist tradition also via Leibniz, as well as by Rousseau and Hume, Kant argued that individuals are nearly trapped within our own psychology and our own creativity, and consequently have no perception of objective things-in-themselves. Leibniz and Hume had presented versions of that same isolation from nature, and in a sense Kant was trying to get the genie back into the bottle, trying to justify philosophical thinking and a life of duty and virtue within an orderly society even when ultimate Truth and Knowledge were not achievable. Kant was responding to Hume by following Hume’s own investigative procedure, which might be called reflexive self-consciousness, an intentional consciousness of the ordinary course of subjective activity and experience, with a special interest in distinguishing subjective contributions from those imposed on experience from outside subjectivity. The mental activity encountered by Kant in that process was far richer than what Hume had reported. For Kant, the apparently outer world of appearances or phenomena is not the be-all and end-all it appears to be, since the structure of phenomena is largely supplied by a perceiving subject, by requirements of any possible consciousness, such as a requirement to identify substances, space and time, cause and effect.

Freedom, and the Genie of Lower Human Nature

Kant’s work focused on freedom, very much following issues raised by Lutheran Protestantism. Kant’s identification of freedom used the subjective experience of moral choice as its occasion. There are moments when a person can be aware of the freedom to act either according to a principle that could be willed as a universal rule or entirely from immediate self-interest. In those moments a person can be aware of freedom to take the leap one way or the other. That moment of moral decision is direct acquaintance with freedom. On Kant’s view, exactly that freedom is the thing-in-itself as experienced inwardly. The ultimate principle is one thing-in-itself, freedom, as experienced directly by individuals in the subjectivity of their moral decisions. It is in stark contrast to the world of outward phenomena, the world of objects present in perception. In that outward world of measurement and science all is found to be determined by the principle of cause and effect. For Kant, phenomena (outward appearances) display a complete scientific determinism, but the moment of moral choice, the choice between acting from a universal principle of justice instead of from a self-gratifying impulse, can be experienced undeniably as freedom. The main duality in this vision seems to be between ‘inward’ experience of freedom and ‘outward’ experience of determinism, but the higher vs lower conflict is still present within inward experience. It is present in the alternatives the free chooser must consider: the moral rule or simple self-gratification. Of course in Kant a choice of the moral rule manifests the higher human nature, and self-interest a lower humanity. Since the exercise of moral freedom is transcendent for Kant, it is a vision of transcendence on the level of the individual.

Kant’s idealism, with freedom as thing-in-itself or metaphysical nature, reduced “body” or “substance” to a misunderstanding or a mistaken impression. Fundamental reality became spiritual or subjective, what it is that can exercise freedom. In Kant, the direct personal experience of freedom is immediate awareness of identity with the ultimate thing-in-itself. For a person facing a moral choice to be truly free, the leap one way and not another must be created in the instant of decision. The assertion of rationality was not dependent on cultural norms but on individual creativity. The free agency of subjectivity is identified with strategic rationality creating a balancing force against animal impulse. Acting on the principle was always the actuality of freedom, the higher power, in Kant, but it is especially discernible when noticed against a contrasting self-interested impulse. Acting on the principle would never happen on impulse, because a mental process of inventing a rule had to be accomplished first. So acting on the principle is always deliberate. Freedom requires creativity. The individual is the author of moral choices and actions. Creativity for Kant was not very colourful but it was fundamental and crucial, and his idealism rests on it.

Even though the impression human perceivers have of the objective world is pervaded with psychological contributions on Kant’s view, he remained convinced that the impression still bears some unidentifiable relation to a thing-in-itself which exists externally prior to being experienced. Consequently, even though there is inward experience of freedom in intelligence and outward determinism in nature, it is not legitimate to impose the system or principles of one side on the other to declare a tidy monism. You can’t justify an exclusive preference for inner experience or outer experience as the grounding of everything, since there is such a stark discontinuity between them. Embracing that irreducible discontinuity for the broader understanding it enables is exemplified also by the Stoic treatment of Logos, Luther and the inward leap of faith, and Schopenhaur’s explicit double-aspect reality.

Kant’s response to Spinoza and Hume, both of the latter ‘philosophizing’ aspects of Calvinism, inspired a great pulse of philosophical creativity, especially in Germany. Kant’s identification of a subjective experience of freedom inspired subsequent German idealism, Romanticism, and Existentialism all the way to Sartre at the middle of the twentieth century. In answering scientific determinism, romantic philosophers, originating with Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) tried imposing the inner subjective side of experience onto everything, in a mirror-image of Spinoza’s declaration of his preference for outward determinism. Fichte declared preference for the subjective aspect of experience as a revelation of fundamental cosmic nature. The claim is that it is less denying of important dimensions of experience, more inclusive of the richness of experience, to give preference to the inward side, subjective intelligence, than to declare an objectivist monism. In romanticism, whimsy and creative spontaneity were the portal to the individual’s freedom over stark scientific determinism. On the question of the relative merits of rationality as compared to bestial lusts and impulses, romantics departed from the mainstream of humanist rationalism by expressing a certain contempt for strict rationality and an admiration for nature, unrestrained energy, and boldly quirky individualism.

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

Elemental Orientation

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity

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Personal Agency: Good Work

Finding and exercising your ability to create good things from within yourself, practicing individual agency, is an essential accomplishment. You can’t depend on the world for much of anything. Nature will be what it will be, and so will the human surroundings. As individuals we have some influence on the immediate surroundings, but sometimes not very much. The best thing about a good job is that it presents opportunities to create good things. However, it is often not outwardly personal even though the challenges of doing a job must be made intimately personal in order to be overcome. No matter how common or menial a work-product may be, it has taken up its portion of a worker’s life, personal intelligence, creativity, courage, and commitment to the effort. Most jobs don’t provide much experience of personal agency and reduce any fulfillment by alienating the product from the worker. The product is alienated when it is attributed to the organizational machine, and credit for the product’s creation displaced upward to the directors and the C.E.O.. In this way, leaders are often looters. Workers as individuals disappear into the machinery. Since jobs are so unreliable in that way, it is of absolute importance that individuals be able to cultivate for themselves the experience of competence, intelligence, or personal agency through a creative process.

Strategic Elemental Orientation

It isn’t news that in our age of pervasive advertising media, corporate ideological advocacy, and strident adventurism from the military-financial-industrial complex (adding ‘financial’ since war and imperialism require vast sums of money borrowed at vast sums of interest to pay dealers in weapons, transport, and support services of violence), in such an age as this, then, it isn’t news that the normal individual is on the receiving end of a blast of messages intended to persuade him or her to feel good about various causes and brands. It isn’t news, but it highlights the question of how an individual is to avoid being manipulated psychologically and politically into supporting causes and campaigns which, in the light of the whole truth, are diabolical. The whole truth is elusive when both advanced science and great wealth are devoted to a selective presentation of reality. However, there might be a groundedness, a strategic self-possession, focused on personal agency, within the power of everybody.

Pulling out of Corporate and Official Propaganda

To think is to re-orient yourself. We are always re-orienting ourselves in facing new situations with new information. (I am thinking, therefore I am.) However, some features of experience are more foundational or elemental than others. The identification of elemental features in experience grounds thinking in a system of intrinsic value. Perhaps no single one of these experiences is, by itself, a portal to freedom, moral certainty, or ultimate value, but a reasonably complex collection will be an extraordinary grounding. Personal agency is central in elemental experiences, and responsible personal agency follows from the kind of orientation being proposed here. The connection of a grid of elemental experiences within a particular subjectivity is a foundation for personal autonomy.

In every age people have been immersed in superstitions, family expectations, religious stipulations, and demands from a social stratum of dominance and wealth determined to prevent competition and opposition. In that context, philosophy has always been a feeling around experience for an elemental grounding. Being there on that elemental grounding has intrinsic value. If there is no reality-distorting propaganda stealthily engulfing us, then adding some philosophical points of orientation will merely add a bit of breadth to our outlook, doing no harm. However, if reality is being distorted by the stream of messaging through which we move, then there opens the possibility of removing ourselves mentally to a protected viewpoint.

An Elemental Grid

Some reference points:

1) personal agency, as sketched just above.
2) embodiment within nature: from posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.
3) Socratic innocence: “I know only that I know nothing.” see posting 16, January 12, 2012, The Two Traditions.
4) the transcendence of intelligence: from posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence.
5) disinterestedness: from posting 5, October 5, 2011, Contemplative Disinterestedness: the Vita Contemplativa, overcoming self-absorption
6) the three graces: nature, culture, subjectivity (more anon)
7) the eternal moment (anon)
8) political consciousness: understanding left-wing and right-wing worldviews (The first law of strategic thinking is: recognize your enemy.) (more anon)
9) this moment in the history of ideas (culture). The history of ideas has been a struggle between ideas of equality and radical inequality, between autonomy and control of adult mentality.

Changing the orientation grid in this way changes the overall project of building a life by striking a stronger presence of thinking subjectivity in relation to nature and culture. Innocent subjective creativity is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mental opening of experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities. The internal flood of questions and impulses is generally more interesting and productive than travel, professional conferences, luxurious consumer goods, winning trophies, or height on an organization chart. The internal creative fountain does more than keep a person engaged, it keeps a person grounded against the mythical spooks, feuds, and fashions glorified in culture. (How about that as a vision of freedom and equality?) It has no use for competitions, ambition, or standing, for personal comparisons of any kind, and as such is a threat to commercial values. The personal use of thinking could alter cultural values by radically raising the value of thinking itself, because thinking gives each person his or her individual genius and with it experiences of value which are prior to market value. Practicing a creative process is not best used as a gateway into the money economy but as an alternative to it.

Creative Process as Grounding Against Fads, Fashions, and Supervisory Systems

In modern market societies there is an important myth of institutional hierarchies as the primary organizing principle of life. Meritocracy is the most common modern form of oligarchy, and the cultural assumption is that there is no alternative, and so true individual autonomy is worthless and even self-destructive. Mental autonomy, autonomy of values or self-possession, is inspired unofficially by humanities studies (now under threat), but is thought to be dangerous by people within the cultural nexus of professional oligarchies. However, the much celebrated financial autonomy of commercial entrepreneurship is an illusion because money can do nothing but focus attention on the market’s incentives and rewards. Innocent subjectivity, non-trivial, dynamic individual personality is a ground to stand on that is truly independent of oligarchies. Identifying the elemental orientation grid is intended to blunt the dominance of the grid of official modernity which especially sanctions three reference points: the state, science, and money.

1) In modernity each military/ industrial state is a territorial religion manifesting an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force, demanding reverent devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedient behaviour as a framework for production of transferrable wealth (interest, dividends, speculative gains, for example), armed forces recruitment, and decisions of justice. The state is a protection device for accumulated capital (property and person) and also an internally motivating culture of social control, accepting worship as a transcendent arbiter of life and death. The state is focused on armed protection of a hoard of national resources, treasure, and weapons. The state is the framework in which politics is acted out, and politics is part of the mediation of class conflict.

2) Within science ideology the world is beautiful but entirely impersonal forces and structures, dead and falling, revealed by measurement, plotting, and calculation. This is a worldview of totalitarian objectivity. There is no transcendent questioning here, but since it builds from questions, science lurks in its own blind spot. The experience of questioning intelligence has been exiled from this current myth of reality, since there is no place for living creativity. However, as a system of denying the legitimacy of spooky disembodied personalities, science has considerable value.

3) An overriding emphasis on consumption and production for exchange, as structured into money-based competitive markets, is the mechanism by which the scribal class mediates and occults an underlying class conflict. Making a living in the modern state depends on accumulated capital, entrepreneurship, and the coordination of specialist functions, with vast consumption of the ‘found’ energies of nature. In the market or economic view of the person, human motivation and activity resolve into predictable and controllable natural drives without creative power, easily made obedient by incentive and reward. The controllability of ‘economic man’ is the basis of the scribal class’s confidence in its system of mediation. People have little acquaintance with transcendence, but there is some indistinct experience of this cultural system as a place of exile where subjective intelligence wanders unrecognized.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Strategic thinking

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

Intelligence as a Creative Force

Waking From History, Episode Three

Waking From History, Episode One

First Language Nurture

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

Elemental Orientation