Category Archives: Subjectivity

Freedom and Time

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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De-Legitimizing Human Parasitism

Posting 53, January 31, 2013, The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism, is a statement of basic political consciousness. It describes the results of a cultural history far more sinister than any mere conspiracy. There is room for optimism, but not in denying or attempting to evade the malaise of the culture or the difficulties for individuals in attempting to live in freedom and justice (equality). Bottom-up human parasitism, petty crime such as theft, has never been legitimized, is always recognized as vicious and criminal. However, top-down parasitism has been completely distorted by the most gifted apologists for oligarchy, distorted into appearing as a contribution to the human community. That is why top-down human parasitism merits special deconstruction and the strongest condemnation. If there were to be a collective institution established to protect the human interconnectedness, its purpose and function must be to disable top-down parasitism, to de-legitimize it, expose the viciousness of its many forms, dismantle it, prevent it from re-emerging. That would be the decisive force for justice, and the necessary focus of any authentic democracy, any institutional and political representation of ordinary people.

Freedom and Time

Political consciousness needs to be combined with consciousness of basic personal interiority, the elemental source of freedom and equality. Since one crucial intent and effect of top-down parasitism is to externalize reality, a required part of any defence is to prevent that with an effort to rebalance, to internalize reality with attention to interior powers, indeed to the transcendent freedom of interiority.

Time is a crucial issue with respect to freedom. Past and future do not exist in nature. All there is to nature is the strictly exclusive actuality of an infinitesimal present. Time as complex structures of a past aligning with future is entirely a feature of the interiority of particular lives, of individual intelligences, each surviving by projecting creative aspirations constantly onto the mutability of their future. Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, (innocent) inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Freedom (transcending unfree nature) is in the mutability of an individual’s future, under the force of inspiration, curiosity, and questioning from that interior horizon. Freedom depends entirely on a person’s self-adjusting his or her orientation by means of judgments of the probabilities of various events and developments in future time, judgments of a variety of personal powers and possibilities, and judgments of means for projecting aspirations onto actuality in the future. There can be no freedom of nature since nature lacks the past and future of intelligence. Every human intelligence is, therefore, an autonomous interiority of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. This freedom-unfreedom dualism is humanist dualism, basically the same as what is often called “Cartesian dualism”.

Humanist Philosophy is the Assertion that Thinking Matters because Freedom Matters

To say that the poisoned culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism has not pervaded humanist philosophy, is to say that it has not pervaded the experience of freedom available to every individual in his or her own interiority, which is the focus, the subject matter, of humanist philosophy: the freedom of the interiority of intelligence. Philosophy isn’t the source of that freedom, but only a record of recognizing it, a reminder of that recognition. It is also to say that the innate freedom of intelligence is an innocence which is never completely muted by an ambient culture poisoned by legitimized top-down human parasitism. In its innocence, intelligence is always free, and in its freedom, intelligence always transcends the poisoned culture.

Humanist philosophy is thinking about the encounter between freedom and unfreedom. “Interiority” is another word for thinking. The case could be made that philosophy is an effort to understand and practice freedom, and that thinking is the crucial act of freedom. Philosophical humanism is an assertion of the force and utility of individual thinking. If subjectivity or interiority has no innate force or foreseeable effect then thinking can’t be decisive in creating the future and doesn’t matter.

When someone suggests overcoming “Cartesian” dualism, the question that must be posed is this: Does this overcoming of dualism preserve individual freedom or exclude it? It is difficult to conceive an alternative to dualism that does not exclude individual freedom. People who are anti-humanist are, on the face of things, devoted to the idea that individual thinking as such has no original force and doesn’t matter. Thinking as an act of freedom is completely different from thinking as unfreedom (say, passive spectator consciousness). Moreover, such exclusions of individual freedom have been construed as justifications for oligarchic human-on-human parasitism.

There are only two historically familiar ways to evade humanist dualism: materialist monism and idealist monism. Materialist monism is the option illustrated by communism, for example, and is typical of science. On that view, all events are pre-determined by eternal laws of physical nature. In fact, dialectical materialism is an attempt at a science of history in which material laws of nature, including biological (Darwinian/ Freudian) drives, determine, in a dialectical causal chain, the formation of every economic system and institutional state, and drive the formation of ideas and ideologies. Individual thinking is not a force in the historical process, nor in creating personal biographies, in the view of materialist monism.

Idealist monism is illustrated in a philosophical tradition that could be called Fichtean Romanticism, in which the existence of “things in themselves” is denied, and all existence is a vast intelligence (an interiority of non-actuality) or some aspect of intelligence such as will (a will to live, to become self-aware, a drive to reproduce, the will to power). However, on that view, the force of the grand-scale cosmic interiority reduces the force of individual thinking to triviality, to merely a local eruption of cosmic Being, a conduit for messages from a strict singularity such as God or Logos, messages sometimes delivered through specially “chosen” individuals or groups. Again, individual thinking as such is not an effective force in the historical or personal life-building process.

Both of those exclusions of individual freedom are used to legitimize top-down human-on-human parasitism, in support of the poisoned culture, and neither one is any good on the issue of time.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Freedom against Power: An Historical Precedent

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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In previous postings there has been an identification of certain poisons in human cultures, namely legitimized violence, especially in acts of war, and radical inequality. Based on that, another way of identifying the poison in currently dominant cultures would be with the concept “power”, which is inseparable from inequality and violence. The most blatant mechanism of power in the world today is the government of the USA. Its public record of violations establishes unmistakably that what that government and its vast military and covert agencies are protecting is not the rule of law, responsible government, human rights, or anything based in bottom-up political power such as democracy. The only alternative seems to be that those institutions are projecting the will of an obscure but effective oligarchy which has nothing but contempt for such things as bottom-up politics, thus revealing a core malevolence. Malevolent oligarchy, corporatocracy, organized wealth, patriarchy, all refer to that same feature of modern social organization. As a whole, that oligarchy is not tightly enough organized to be a conspiracy, but it carries a certain cultural sense of predicament and entitlement, and a shared culture of dealing with its predicament. One way the oligarchy succeeds at controlling the levers of profound meaning on a mass scale is by constantly broadcasting the message that everyone benefits from accepting “noble lies” (rarely named as lies publicly) about a caring god with a divine plan for everyone’s life, about a meritocracy, a beloved leader, a beloved nation or tribe (usually under threat). However, the only real lever of profound meaning is the interiority of individual intelligence.

The idea of the transcendent interiority of individual intelligence enables a kind of Copernican revolution, since all human projections onto nature and culture originate as somebody’s individually dreamed up non-actualities. There certainly are plans, but all plans are the products of perfectly ordinary humans. There is no single centre, source, or foundation of meaning. From awareness of the interiority of intelligence we learn to look inward instead of outward for transcendence, meaning, and grounding. There is an intrinsic power of individual intelligence to critique the foundations of power and to construct an alternative elemental orientation. (Hegel and Nietzsche both wrote about a moral duality between master-morality and slave-morality, but there is a point of view which is neither master nor slave, namely the elemental orientation, which philosophical deliberation achieves. Living from a contemplative grounding is the alternative to the moral duality of master and slave.)

Christendom to Modernity

The claim that the interiority of intelligence (a rich subjectivity) can be effectively asserted to transcend or go beyond a poisoned culture and conceive a new culture is especially interesting and plausible because there is a precedent in history for the effectiveness of philosophy acting against propaganda streams promoting radical inequality and issued by the groups exercising power in society. The really dramatic social change that is closest to us in time, culture, and geography is the transition from Christendom to Modernity. That change is exactly the historical precedent for the culturally transformative force of rethinking Stoic interiority. The concept of innate deliberative power, a specific power of interiority, was dramatically effective, during the historical period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1650-1789) in changing the culture that was Christendom, and leaving things somewhat better. A cultural background of humanism, classical Greek cheerfulness, especially in the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters, also contributed to those transformative effects.

Philosophy in a Historical Context

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 coherently structured and regular nature, Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. The experience of intelligence as transcendent was a powerful incentive and reward for the study of Stoicism and philosophy in general in the Hellenistic era. An interiority within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated by that.

One link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on interiority 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 withdrawal of the Roman Empire from 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. The humanist philosophies were already somewhat familiar. 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 near the end of his life during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. It is still being read, and is peculiarly appropriate for consideration of freedom within a culture poisoned by legitimized violence.

One principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective is the one in The Consolation of Philosophy, namely a Stoic or Cynic indifference to outward circumstances beyond personal control, and concentration on inward mental conditions, powers, and operations which are (more) under personal control. Innate powers of deliberation are involved in achieving such consolation, and a rich and powerful subjectivity is affirmed. Humanist Stoicism is the best candidate as the eternal philosophy, and Stoicism is founded on an idea of interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the world of nature which is beyond control, entirely predetermined. Stoic philosophy includes the application of deliberative thinking to truths about the objective world and especially to self-knowledge and self-possession.

Another principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective, emerging especially after 1600 in north-western continental Europe, is “Rationalism”, an assertion of the power of individual intellect to observe and think out the truth about the world, founded on the idea of an elemental congruence (Logos) between the natural world and individual mentality. The core idea of that rationalism is not innate knowledge but innate mental power to distinguish truth from falsehood by systematic observation and logical thinking, such as with the recognition of natural causation as sufficient to account for events and conditions in the world, aided by use of such logical devices as Ockham’s razor, and valid forms of inference. However, those native powers and abilities can be repressed, twisted, or ignored by cultural and social forces. For example, consider Freud’s observations of the effects of cultural attitudes toward innocent sexuality, or consider the influence of various religious beliefs about the causes of events in the natural world. “Philosophy”, then, has been mainly either the exercise of native intellect in comprehending impersonal nature, or thoughtful self-possession of a personal intelligence that is crucially discontinuous from ambient nature and culture.

Critique of the Malevolent Christian Oligarchy

The crucial force in the change from Christendom to Modernity was the rationalist critique of Christianity as the foundation of all-controlling sovereign power. The Consolation of Philosophy was one crucial link between ancient humanism and Wycliffe’s movement of proletarian empowerment through universal literacy and vernacular literature. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity, a chain of Stoic/ humanist influence, was continued in Renaissance humanism (individual self-development for literary and artistic accomplishments, or for power politics and business ventures), then in Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the rationalist enlightenment, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but the dualism inherent in the discontinuity between nature and the interiority of intelligence 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”.

Next: Finishing the Job of the Enlightenment

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

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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.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Poisoned Culture

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The human interconnectedness has been poisoned by a violently rogue cultural faction, resulting in endless wars among communities, and violence between classes, genders, and individuals. That poisonous faction, which imagines that it benefits from controlling and perpetuating violence, has been successful in convincing everybody that violence is simply the working of nature, and so inevitable, pre-ordained, and ultimately good and wholesome as an ultimate test of health, fitness, and value. The deception works by misidentifying culture as nature, and very much which is presented as nature is merely human cultural conventions, and as such replaceable. That is the context in which the rich interiority of individual subjectivity (Stoic interiority) is of crucial importance. The human interconnectedness has been so poisoned by deceptive culture that there are no trustworthy foundations of profound meaning available there. Science, engineering, art, music, architecture, literature, religion, business, journalism, institutional research and teaching, the professions, and government are all infected by and carriers of the cultural poison. However, the intrinsic transcendence of individual interiority means that there is no need for external tests of value, meaning, or fitness. Deliberate individual innocence, strategic innocence, is a potent corrective force available to everyone. The ultimate dignity of knowing and feeling the human situation is available directly to every individual, experienced inwardly.

There are groups who believe their best interests are secured by taking advantage of the helplessness of others to control them, which is an incentive for those groups to do as much as possible to create and maintain widespread helplessness. Those groups conceive the advancement of their own interests in doing all they can to weaken individual autonomy and then making use of that weakness to exercise control over community events and developments. In support of their malevolent cultural program, those groups have encouraged development of cultural messaging over the vast infrastructure networks of television, radio, movies, religion, and education, that are powerful influences on popular behaviour and thinking. With the most sophisticated science supporting them, they are completely confident that anyone and everyone is being controlled using those techniques, combined with acts of violence for the broad manipulation of fear and trust, and the elimination of probable threats to their dominance.

Posting 48, December 19, 2012, Rethinking Stoic Interiority may make dry reading, but it is important because the interiority of intelligence provides the defence against, and a portal beyond, the streams of psychological messaging effectively distorting reality within the influence of politicized culture, and pretty much all culture is politicized.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Rethinking Stoic Interiority

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Following-up the previous posting: Intelligence as a Creative Force

The Interiority of Intelligence

There is an old philosophical idea which is best identified as ‘the interiority of intelligence’. Ancient Stoicism was one of the first explorations of that idea, since it is founded on a peculiar interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the external world of nature which is beyond control and in fact entirely predetermined. What is entirely predetermined cannot be controlled, by definition, and therefore what can be controlled is not predetermined and as such offers the potential for freedom.

By “intelligence” neither I nor Stoics mean any special genius or even any specialized mental function, but just the ordinary engagement with life of an ordinary person. The interiority of intelligence is not sensitivity to the interior of the body. It is not a spacial interiority at all. It is strictly peculiar to intelligence, since it is an interiority of non-actuality (everything in measurable space is a brute actuality).

The ancient philosophical observation that “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist c. 490-420 B.C.) is another statement or declaration of the interiority of intelligence, because the measuring done by persons does not create or put limits on nature. Nature rolls along quite independently of being measured or not. However, “man” as a particular intelligence is the measure of things becoming internal to that person’s orientation or direction of force in the world. The action efforts of individual intelligences are a sort of sonar or radar which reflect back to intelligence a digest or construct of the shape and quality of the environment. That is the sense in which “Man is the measure of all things”.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is another statement of the same insight. The “eye” in which beauty has its being is not the anatomical eye but rather the interiority of the beholder’s intelligence.

As another example, the take-away lesson from Leibniz’ monadology is the interiority of intelligence. Although there are multiple beings in Leibniz’ vision of the world, he constructed a description of individual subjective experience as entirely self-contained as a windowless ‘monad’ with no access to other beings or anything but phenomena injected by God strictly for the interiority of each particular intelligence.

The Non-Actuality of that Interiority

A common concept of knowledge is one in which consciousness is a receptive slate upon which is stamped, little by little, an imprint of the world beyond the self, the features of objective nature. However, perception exists within an individual’s taking action in constructing a sustainable life; for example, speculating on probable futures, imagining, remembering, searching and selecting, feeling gratification, irritation or desperation, and striving to make some imagined possibility into reality. There is vastly more to learning than soaking up data and facts about the world. Every individual’s innate mental process or intelligence radiates curiosity, questioning, and changes of orientation. For choices of action, there is far more than immediate responses stimulated by sensory perception. Intelligence has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions or pretended scenarios and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents such as elaborate memory constructs and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its orientation, its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote and improbable future, intelligence has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations, none of which are present in the strict actuality of nature. Temporally remote events do not exist in nature, but are inseparable from the normal orientation of an intelligence. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions by fragmenting and isolating pieces of the deluge of sensuality, and re-connecting selections of the fragments by various principles of relevance, involving conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern fabrication and projection, and extrapolation, for example. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing, and questioning: the need and readiness for knowledge. Action does result but skepticism does not apply.

Rather than merely opening to let the world in, a person executes a process of construction that relates brief and fleeting sensory stimulations to more enduring mental expectations, patterns, dreams, and narratives which are simple, schematic, and ideal. You search for dandelions in your grass and you don’t see any, and don’t see any, and then you see one and then another and then lots that must have been there all along. A curve drawn on paper does not have to be perfectly round and regular or completely closed to be seen as a circle. An observer will ‘fix’ imperfections, and see a circle. We ‘read’ that mark drawn on paper on the basis of the briefest possible encounter, the quickest impression, and read it as ‘meaning’ a circle. No one is ever aware of nature or culture except as sampled, probed, filtered, and then re-constituted, remodelled, or re-mixed by their struggling intelligence in desperate flight. These are normal operations of subjectivity. Each individual is a source of selective questions and structuring creativity in combination with a specific and limited capacity to sense and make sense of externally supplied data. Awareness of limitations is part of the ‘desperate flight’ of intelligence.

“Man is the measure of all things” refers to the fact that anyone’s interior impression of the measurable world will be edited and evaluated in terms of that person’s location and sensitivities, as well as biases, projects, needs, wishes, and fears. There are personal and culturally influenced filters. There is no such thing as a pure disinterested blank slate, no ‘pure’ cognitive rationality. All consciousness weighs and measures the impediments and resistances which enclose and restrict its getting further.

The Non-Actuality and Transcendence of Interiority

Freedom is specifically not a feature of the actuality of nature, and so freedom is one way of defining the interiority of intelligence. It was the Stoic way of defining that interiority. The transcendence of us entities of intelligence is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within our interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and bearings away from dreaded possibilities. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (past and future) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of creative discretionary construction, for example. The intelligence entity that continuously re-orients itself is also a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The freedom and creativity of such monads is in being outside actuality in their unique interiority. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any intelligence constructs and continually refreshes its bearings, orientation, or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking.

The interiority of intelligence is invisible to scientific measuring instruments because it is an interiority of non-actuality. Since we are dealing with a kind of interiority that is not in the space of the common objective world, an interiority which is discontinuous with the space of actuality, we have to describe each intelligence, each orientation within a life, as its own separate universe of non-actuality. Each intelligence is a universe of non-actuality in relationship with a common exterior world of strict, non-intelligent, pre-determined actuality, the world of nature. An intelligence can never be specified as a particular determinate thing (nor as a cluster of “objects of consciousness” as hypothesized in phenomenology) because its essential nature is an interiority of incomplete and continuously renewing non-actuality.

Freedom Makes Intelligence Transcendent and Discontinuous with Nature

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the design and execution of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for their relevance to self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows intelligence with a unique public voice. A person must have a voice before acquiring language. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences. Intelligence manifests an individuating personal genius with deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Intelligence as a Creative Force

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by 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.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity

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In childhood the interiority of subjectivity is vastly more complex and immediate than impressions of stable external structures. It takes many years for a child to accumulate personal knowledge of a structured environment into which to project intentions. All the while the subjective interiority of each child is very rich and very active with invention. The process of maturation is a gradual but unrelenting increase in mental impressions of the external world of metabolic costs and benefits, and increasing complexity of orientation by reference to external place markers. Without the adult attachment to making a living and cycling through cost-benefit routines in the environment, the child retains a huge absorption in creative subjectivity. With age and experience the balance of richness between interiority and exteriority shifts as the child learns the structures of larger and larger swaths of the environment along with the expectations of social surroundings. The utilitarian narrowness of adult mentality which results from immersion in the external confines of actual nature and culture is not even possible for the child. For the child, thinking, the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, is and has to be its own reward. Sometimes knowledge is a form of power, but freedom is a consequence of the non-actuality of subjective interiority, striving in the way unique to intelligence to create a viable opening between the brute particularity of nature (embodiment) and the ethereal, impersonal universality of ideas. The experience of childhood seems to be the high point of the human experience of freedom of thought, and adults value conversation with children at least partly because it maintains direct contact with the freedom of ascendent interiority, at a peak in the mentality of children. So it is no wonder that adults keep re-creating childhood and childhood mentality, not as a gift to some future community of the faith or of the nation, but to help balance the lives of adults in the present.

Since the market economy draws the most energy and value from individuals if those individuals are exclusively devoted to and fixated on market production and consumption, the value rhetoric of market culture specifically diverts people from the power of non-actuality that each has in personal subjective interiority (monadic interiority). Thinking, creative interiority, is assigned a low value in market culture. Competitive sport has all kinds of incentives and rewards from the earliest stages of education, but creative thinking, not the same as remembering the answers to test questions, is rarely explored seriously and certainly never glorified as sport is. If thinking were not assigned such a low value then certain kinds of knowledge would be commonplace instead of being culturally marginalized. Knowledge of the foundations of equality is an example of that, and also historical knowledge that sovereign power and governments developed directly from crime families and religious cults. Philosophy itself, the craft of personally re-orienting to an elemental orientation grid, is also marginalized knowledge.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by 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.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Waking From History, Episode Two

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Belittled

The hostile environment into which every infant monad arrives is one in which destiny for everyone is pre-determined by cultural forms. That is not to say that a particular destiny is pre-determined for every individual, but that personal destinies are conceived as fitting within cultural categories, within the social hierarchy of personal worth marked with accumulation of trophies or various tags of dignity or esteem. Whatever niche a person finds to occupy in the hierarchies, others take that niche as a license to stick a particular value to the person. Ordinary socially and culturally stipulated roles and assumptions limit individuals to categories each valued as more or less stupid, uneducated, culturally ignorant, petty, dull, slow, powerless, untalented, timid, uninteresting, confused, hopeless, and contemptible, all generally lined up with the categories of social class, racial and ethnic heritage, age, gender, property possession, and power level in the economic-institutional hierarchies. No matter what category a person falls into, it constricts, diminishes, writes off, and actually condemns every individual by assuming that they are contained and revealed by, and actually fit within, that category; but nobody does. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every cultural category.

The currently dominant reality-construct sanctions such grotesque distortions of reality in everyday discourse. The invisibility of the first-language-nurture faction as the foundation of civil society is another distortion, the glorification of war and war heroism is another. Behind all is a totalitarian ideology of the value of radical inequality. The very idea of political or corporate power is saturated with a grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, a crime family cultural tradition. That idea of power nearly excludes responsibility to others (nurture), and has far more in common with the idea of divine incorrigibility, as revealed in the leadership culture of secrecy and immunity from ordinary social norms.

How Can Freedom Be Possible in a Hostile Political Context?

The Olympic Games of London 2012 displayed perfectly the obsessive futility of lives based in the value system which celebrates inequality as such, measured with trophies. The consequence of the current obsession with destructive wars and other criminal activity demanded by alpha-trophy-looting cultural dominance is a state of being stuck as a civilization. That is echoed in the stuckness of ordinary adult mentality, the repetitive, obsessive monotony of aspirations and forms of life under this cultural regime.

A problem with the anti-war movement, in spite of its unquestionably legitimate and courageous aspirations, is that the ideological understanding of war and militarism that informs its operations is inadequate. If you want to come to terms with deep politics then it doesn’t get much deeper than the contradictory historical forces of alpha-trophy-looting culture against first-language-nurture culture. It doesn’t get any deeper than the contradiction between the profound equality of individually transcendent monads each worthy of nurture, and the top-down hierarchical constructs of alpha-trophy-looting ideology, truly fulfilled only in the march to war. The peace movement must face this question: how much middle-class self-admiration and assumed entitlement to privilege has to be given up along with the war industry?

The Comfort Zone

The crime family trophy-inequality culture is completely dominant, has always been dominant, and is currently advancing aggressively. In addition, the vast majority of educated, actively literate, people is deeply reluctant to leave the mental comfort zone of an orientation anchored to alpha-trophy-looting ideology, imitating reverence for a dictatorial father-God in some selection from: national patriotism, reliance on the legitimacy of institutional authority, and respecting meritocracy and the professional middle class as role models grounded in legitimizing mechanisms such as markets, money, and ultimately nature as depicted by scientific research and the system of education. (The adventure will be to leave all that behind forever. Does that stack up to a week in space?)

Prospects for adult mentality are stuck in those tired repetitious forms of self-blindness. It isn’t nature that interferes with our freedom, but the weight of culture. Educated skepticism and critical thinking are not enough in the current situation of overwhelming psychological manipulation by cultural messages. Freedom is possible only by undertaking a wholesale mental disengagement from the distortions of reality constructed throughout history, a releasing of all moorings to the standard reference points listed above, and a journey of re-orientation to a very different set. There is an ocean of creativity to be released when we shrug off the energy-sucking weight of leadership ideology in an adventure of personal transcendence.

Culture Consciousness and The Transcendence of Monads

Thinking through the distinction between nature and culture (as in posting 33, June 14, 2012, Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture) soon establishes a mental condition of culture-consciousness. In culture consciousness you have culture tagged in such a way that it can be bracketed to leave a remainder of innocence in pre-cultural embodiment experiences, metabolic measurement of nature, for example, the basics of orientation. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is your own transcendence, the transcendence of intelligence with respect to the brute actuality of nature. The transcendence of us monads is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within a monad’s own interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and away from others that are dreaded. The monadic entity that continuously re-orients itself is partly a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (stretch or reach) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of deliberate mutability, for example.

The freedom and creativity of monads is in being outside actuality in that way. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any monad constructs and continually refreshes its orientation or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both the interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences.

Surprise Horizons

People have an ongoing conversation about the objective world as a beautifully designed creation, inspiring wonder because we can’t experience the process of creation. We encounter actuality as a mystery (Why this instead of nothing?) and so as a horizon which blocks perception of creation. Whenever there is creativity there is a surprise horizon. The world of nature and culture is a surprise horizon for everyone, the centre of business and attention and yet crucially unpredictable to some extent, but there is another surprise horizon, namely an inward blind spot of subjective intelligence. Discovery of that inward horizon can be a vertiginous self-consciousness that has nothing to do with the way you appear to others, the social implications of your appearance or your accomplishments. That is why subjectivity is fundamental in spite of the great importance of social interconnectedness. Shaking loose from the self-presentation coaxed into a shape by social relationships, officially approved role models, and economic incentives and rewards is a crucial step toward taking possession of surprises from the personal horizon of non-actuality.

Creative Process

A truly remarkable part of writing almost anything is starting sentences and paragraphs without any distinct idea of what the ending will be, and then having something, something that makes sense and serves the purpose, arrive over some horizon of dreams. For example, the “language is sporting equipment” analogy wasn’t part of the original ideas for posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture, but it turned up when the sentence was launched, half written, and needed a sensible particular. Starting with nothing but a hunch about stages ahead is a way of prodding the inward surprise horizon and getting the creative fountain gushing a stream with a particular relevance. (Such a ‘leap of creativity’ looks like a general process of which Luther’s “leap of faith” is a particular instance.)

Divine Mind

What distinguishes the intelligence of persons from the imaginary mind of God is the quality of absolute power. The imaginary power of God is infinite and unlimited. Embodied persons do not have that power. We lack absolute power over nature in a couple of different senses. We do not have the power to suspend or change the laws of nature, including the law of conservation of matter/ energy. Additionally, we do not have the mental power to totally understand the patterns and dynamics of nature, even collectively after more than 5,000 years of continuous species literacy. The power-within-nature of an embodied individual is strictly local, anchored to what a particular body, and its voice, can perform. Persons cannot create a new nature to replace the nature already given, for example. However, creative power is not an all or nothing proposition. All the time human bodies project into nature unique patterning from their interior non-actuality.

The Richness of Non-Actuality

The richness of the non-actuality out of which, or within which, every individual intelligence encounters the actual world is important because, for one thing, not all of that non-actuality is an original creation of the individual intelligence, although much of it is. Any individual’s orientation of non-actuality can be manipulated culturally and politically to contain serious and avoidable distortions, as sketched in Episode One.

There are consequences, conclusions to be drawn, from the direct acquaintance with personal transcendence as described just above. One of those consequences is that, since individuals are not confined to actuality, or even to depictions of actuality taught them from cultural sources, each has a grounding to assess and critique the culture that surrounds them, from outside it, and the power to conceive something better.

The idea of individual innocence is meaningful and important.

Another consequence is that freedom is shown to have both inward and outward dimensions. Freedom requires some degree of options and mobility in the world of physics and economics, but that is not sufficient. Freedom also requires the inward nurture of personal questions, curiosities, impulses, and inspiration. The sufficiency of mobility, for example, has to be measured by that force from within. Closely involved with the experience of freedom, the self-awareness or sense of identity of the entity of personal individuality has both inward and outward dimensions. There is an unfathomable, “unplottable”, self-possession of every individual that makes cultural trophies irrelevant to the substance and creative force of any individual. Nobody can be assigned a value, because all are equal in creative transcendence, all are actively in the process of becoming something more.

Another consequence is to discredit any account of human nature as an emptiness that can only be made into something, or fulfilled, by consuming and internalizing substances originally external to it. Personal transcendence discredits the economic conception of human nature as a bundle of deficiencies and compulsive drives such as egoistic diminishment of others.

Creative people are ordinary people.

Any sustainable interconnectedness or political order must recognize the rich originality and peculiarity (or monadality) of each individual as an asset, a source, a value, instead of as a problem requiring cultural categories such as heresy and treason. Individuals are contributors to culture and interconnectedness, and strengthened as such by appropriate nurture.

The currently dominant reality-construct of the alpha-trophy-looting cultural faction is a form of insanity, far more lethal than any kind of skeptical philosophy or existential uncertainty.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Monadology

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Idea of Monads from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was ended by a set of treaties, collectively called The Peace of Westphalia, achieved when Leibniz was two years old. In the course of that war, Leibniz’ native Germany had been devastated and significantly reduced in population by the presence, passage, and battles of numerous marauding field armies. Leibniz, like Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in France a generation earlier, was spotted as gifted as a child. Both were educated to be lawyers, but left enduring legacies as geniuses in mathematics and philosophy. Like Descartes, Leibniz was (just as Spinoza, and Kant) a lifelong bachelor. Leibniz was employed as an administrator, researcher, diplomat, and advisor by aristocratic ruling families in Germany. Although Leibniz was brought up in a Lutheran culture, he experienced scholastic/ Aristotelian (Catholic) influences at university and also shows distinctly Calvinist tendencies of thought. Leibniz dreamed of reconciling science with Christian orthodoxy, and even of arranging the reunification of Protestant sects with the organization of Catholicism to heal the schisms fragmenting Christendom, schisms which had been used as justifications for the officially commanded mass murder, pillage, and sexual assault called the Thirty Years War.

Mathematics and Philosophy

Mathematics has been one of the most powerful inspirations for philosophy, and especially for idealism and rationalism. Mathematics suggests an ideal world of perfect and eternal objects: geometric figures, numbers, axiomatic principles, functions, and operators. Mathematics belongs in a category of apparently ideal objects, but is special in supporting a set of rules, axioms, and procedures by which reasoning, calculation, and deduction can generate conclusions which must be true when the initial premises are true. The discovery of mathematics, to the ancient Greeks a realm of eternal truths somehow structured just “behind” the visible world, provided an invitation to remove the rowdy personalities of gods and spirits from the invisible transcendent world at the same time as recreating the transcendent as the proper object of rigorous thought. Mathematics suggests control of the inwardness of mental processes that forms a firm foundation for special knowledge of the objective environment.

The contribution of mathematics as an inspiration for philosophy has included serving as a model of transcendence or of transcendent reality. Mathematical systems of ideas have a certain kind of transcendence with respect to the work-a-day world. The mathematical type of transcendence does not have much to do with freedom or creativity as long as the mathematical ideas are understood as existing independently of the person thinking them, although Stoics might see such ideas as a refuge in which the rationality of personal intelligence could find a grounding from which to assert itself against disruptive episodes of emotion. Mathematical systems have the transcendence of incorporeality, perfection, and eternity, rather than the transcendence of freedom and creativity. (The transcendence of incorporeality turns up also in the meaning of “sacrifice”. To sacrifice something is to make it sacred (transcendent) by translating it from its corporeal existence into incorporeality, by burning it, for example.) The transcendence of mathematical systems is inseparable from ideality but only the passive aspect of ideality, whereas the more important transcendence is in the active agency of ideality, namely subjective intelligence.

Mathematicians, such as Leibniz, seem to hold special mathematical patterns and systems in their minds so vividly and elaborately that, within their experience, those systems have the reality of alternate worlds or even as worlds with a reality superior to the one normally perceived. When people with those experiences turn to questions about the relationship between ordinary impressions of the world and the kind of knowledge that can be justified by the strictest rationality, they often envision startling discontinuities between apparent reality and ultimate reality, as exemplified just below. That peculiarity of experience, probably shared by computer programmers and computer game architects, should not be disregarded or explained away too confidently. Although the examples of philosophical mathematicians tend to be privileged and pampered adult males, there is a certain kind of childlike innocence to their distracted engagement with the world of ordinary impressions, an innocence that has some common ground with everyone’s experience.

Monadology

Consider Leibniz’s idea of ‘monads’ as a way of conceiving individual subjectivities as separate universes, presented on this blog as the system of reality ‘transcendental humanism’. Leibniz’ idea of a ‘monad’ incorporates three previously familiar ideas: 1) Aristotle’s idea of particular substances, in which qualities inhere, 2) the grammatical (logical) subject, in which predicates inhere, and 3) everyone’s experience of personal subjectivity. The result is the monad, the ‘spiritual’ entity which is an individual person, a self-contained mind, an atomic theatre of experience. For Leibniz, monads are the entities created by God, the fundamental substances that make up the world. However, monads are not like the atoms of modern science that move about and transform, by electromagnetic bonding, into compounds with different characteristics. The Leibnizian monad cannot be said to move or to combine with others. It occupies a place without taking up space, in a way possibly similar to Platonic Ideas, whatever that may be. On the model of Aristotelian substances, each monad is unique, separate, and independent; but also, as “windowless”, completely closed to anything beyond itself. Each monad is a sort of absolute atom or separate universe, completely self-sufficient and independent of every other, and yet “mirroring” every other monad internally. For Leibniz, monads are reality, the metaphysical Being behind ordinary appearances of things in the world, and yet monads have no role in causing the appearances of our familiar world. All experiences of any monad (including your experiences and my experiences) are completely internal to the monad and completely pre-programmed by God, but programmed in such a way that the experiences are a “mirroring” of what is going on with the other monads.

For Leibniz, God, in his work of creation, calculated an exquisite balance between the principle of plenitude and the principle of simplicity to derive the best of all possible worlds, completely determined in every detail from the instant of creation. Inspired by the theory of ‘occasionalism’ proposed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), Leibniz accepted that physical cause-effect was a false impression from taking appearances too uncritically at face value. (David Hume (1711-76) was later to repeat that familiar denial of efficacy in cause-effect interactions, merely altering outright denial into skepticism.) On Leibniz’ view, every particle (Aristotelian substance) of the extended world was individually pre-programmed with all changes and movements it would ever have, and the whole set of those particles were coordinated in advance so as to appear as if chains of cause and effect were running their course. For Leibniz, “thought” in some sense is a fundamental feature of every particle or monad. Thought has no causal force, but rather is “reflective” of the ambient universe. That reflection of the world in the thought of every monad does not derive from contact or mutual sensitivity between particles. Leibniz’s monads must be entirely inward because they are windowless. The reflection of the world in thought is just pre-established in each mind by God the creator. The rest of the world cannot penetrate monads in any way. The only condition that prevents them from being truly separate universes or separate worlds is that they are each part of God’s work of creation, and in that sense all are coordinated in a higher-order universal Being.

Individuals are distinct, on Leibniz’s view, as isolated monads, but they have no power or freedom since their whole course of specific experiences is pre-ordained by God. The crucial dualism in the thought of Leibniz is between God and His distinctly lower creation. Leibniz’ vision did preserve the rationalist unity of language, thought, and (non-human) nature as co-ordinated features of God’s creation. Hume later presented, without appealing to the agency of God, another version of that same Calvinistic picture of the powerless isolation of every individual.

The discontinuity between Leibniz’ vision of metaphysical reality (the monads) and ordinary appearances was one of the most important inspirations for the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant was convinced by Leibniz and Hume on the point of individuals being very nearly “windowless monads”, but he could not accept the predetermined experience and the predetermined harmony imagined by Leibniz, nor could he accept Hume’s global skepticism. Kant’s transcendental idealism was an effort to transport individual freedom (transcendence) from the legacy of Stoicism (revived by Luther) into the mental scheme of modernity, to preserve the sense of transcendence and in doing so save modernity from descent into abject bourgeois philistinism. In that he was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). Kant followed up Leibniz by concluding that the real world (noumena) was so different from the apparent world (phenomena) that 1) most of what we experience as “appearances” is contributed by our own nature as entities of intelligence, and 2) it is simply impossible to say anything meaningful about the noumenal Being behind appearances.

The metaphysical system of monads conceived by Leibniz relies on the foundation of the Christian God, exercising an absolute power of absolute rationality, and that has to be recognized as an untenable fantasy. Reasons for rejecting any idea of disembodied intelligence have been presented in previous postings, such as posting 32, May 17, 2012, Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular, and posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism. However, what Leibniz got right was the internal uniqueness of each subjectivity, along with a high degree of internal self-sufficiency to the entity of an individual intelligence. Leibniz’ monads illustrate the extreme discontinuity between the internality of experience and anything beyond itself, the discontinuity between a sensed placement or situation, as experienced internally (subjectively) by a person, and the actuality of nature. Recall that each intelligence is a self-constructed orientation (a bearing) within a grid of non-actuality consisting of accumulated and integrated memories, more or less desperate hopes and fears, mutually exclusive imagined possibilities, judgments of probabilities, and intentions, for example, none of which exists in the brute actuality of ambient nature. The internality of any particular intelligence has very little immediate congruity or continuity with any actuality beyond itself.

Major renovations are required to make Leibniz’ monads suitable for transcendental humanism. First, the idea of complete pre-determination by a personified and disembodied super-parent has to be removed. However, if God is not the source of an individual’s experiences, then some other account must be provided for those experiences. In other words, without God’s (or some other source’s) total pre-programming, the monads can’t be windowless and still have anything like ordinary experience. Kant removed a need for God’s agency in supplying experience by finding two replacement sources, an internal subjective source which he called “concepts” (a manifestation of personal intelligence), and an external source which he called “intuitions” (of phenomena). Departing from the particulars of Kant’s replacements, another way of describing that would be as an inward force of questioning intelligence encountering and making sense of the hard ground of nature. In spite of the discontinuity between their sense of the world and the brute actuality of the world, monads have, from their embodied activities, some accumulated familiarity with, or knowledge of, a world around them. In transcendental humanism the monads are not windowless, but rather have the elaborate windows of active and sensitive embodiment through which to accumulate experience of opening within a single world of nature and cultures, which multitudes of monads all share, a world within which each monad finds himself or herself, finds other monads, and constructs interactions and interconnections with them. Monads have both windows and effective force in creating their own experience.

Homage

The impressions of historical persons and ideas presented in this posting were informed at various stages of their development by the following works, which I salute and celebrate as inspirations, as well as sources of pleasure and excitement. Nobody could share my experience of reading these books and then agree with the proposition that all life is suffering. Faults in any of these postings are entirely my own.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil in the Age of Reason, written by: Steven Nadler, Published by: Princeton University Press (Mar 15 2010), Paperback: 320 pages, ISBN-10: 0691145318, ISBN-13: 978-0691145310.
(This is an engagingly written and wonderfully clear presentation of philosophical issues in Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Arnauld, and Spinoza. It places these persons and issues very vividly in Paris during the 1670’s along with following developments.)

The Courtier And The Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, written by Matthew Stewart, Published by: WW Norton (Dec 27 2005), Hardcover: 320 pages, ISBN: 0393058980.
(The pleasure of reading this re-excited my interest in the history of philosophy after a lull. Stewart accomplishes the difficult feat of placing philosophical thinking within its cultural and historical setting in such a way as to recreate its drama and excitement for specific individuals and for the course of history, and making it a really good read. It inspired me to read the book listed next.)

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by: Oxford University Press (July 2002), Paperback: 832 pages, ISBN: 0199254567.
(I read this during the spring of 2006, and found it deeply absorbing. It was packed with information I did not know and it remained readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things. It covers a fascinating period that has been a cultural blind spot for a long time.)

My impressions of Kant have benefited from my reading these:

Introduction to German Philosophy : From Kant to Habermas, written by Andrew Bowie, Published by: Polity Press (Oct 1, 2003), Paperback: 304 pages, ISBN: 0745625711.
(This is another one of those accessible presentations of vast research and insight. It shows modern philosophy as entirely bound up with the social transfiguration from Christendom/Old Regime to Modernity.)

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (April 1, 2001); Paperback: 192 pages, ISBN-10: 0691086621, ( ISBN-13: 978-0691086620).

German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, written by Terry Pinkard, Published by: Cambridge University Press (September 16, 2002), Paperback: 392 pages, ISBN-10: 0521663814, ISBN-13: 978-0521663816.

The following books informed my overview of the history of philosophy.

A History of Philosophy (Book One: Vol. I – Greece & Rome; Vol. II – Augustine to Scotus; Vol. III -Ockham to Suarez), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 479 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230311, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230315).

A History of Philosophy (Book Two: Volume IV – Descartes to Leibniz; Volume V – Hobbes to Hume; Volume VI – Wolff to Kant), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 509 pages, ISBN-10: 038523032X, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230322).

A History of Philosophy: Book Three (Volume VII, Fichte to Nietzsche, Volume VIII, Bentham to Russell, Volume IX, Maine De Biran to Sartre), written by Frederick Copleston, S.J., Published by: Image, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (March 19, 1985), Paperback: 480 pages, ISBN-10: 0385230338, (ISBN-13: 978-0385230339).

History of Philosophy (Historia de la Filosofia), written by Julian Marias, translated from Spanish to English by Stanley Appelbaum and Clarence C. Strowbridge, Published by: Dover Publications; 22nd edition (June 1, 1967), Paperback: 505 pages, ISBN-10: 0486217396, ISBN-13: 978-0486217390.

A History of Western Philosophy, written by Bertrand Russell, Published by Routledge; New edition (2000), Paperback: 848 pages, ISBN-10: 0415228549, ISBN-13: 978-0415228541. (Russell claims special expertise on Leibniz.)

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), Paperback: 824 pages, ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

As a thoughtful overview of the history of philosophy set within a beautifully atmospheric story of mystery and discovery, there is this gift from Norway:

Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, written by Jostein Gaarder, translated from Norwegian to English by Paulette Moller (copyright 1994), Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (ISBN-10: 0374530718, ISBN-13: 978-0374530716).
(Gaarder credits the Roman author Cicero (106-43 B.C.) with forming the concept “humanism”, “a view of life that has the individual as its central focus.”)

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.