Sharing Awareness

26 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Gender culture, Leadership, Subjectivity

Elemental Bonding

Every person is born into a family or some care-giving group. Every care-giving group has ways of presenting itself to the environment, ways of taking possession of places, property, and resources; of incorporating new members, making its mark, and celebrating itself. It has work assignments and categories of delegation, practices of supervision, judgment, and persuasion; practices of controlling its own structure, functions, and boundaries. All these ways and practices, as well as its resources, tools, facilities, and relics of its past, present new arrivals with problems and opportunities, but most of all they present new arrivals with a model and picture of human life: the way we live. To survive, a child must come to know that model of life and make a place for himself or herself within it, imitating its practices, crafts, relationships, judgments, and ways of talking about and valuing things. Culture is that model or image of life presented to people by operating around them and involving them.

Conversation

The most important technique for a shared expression of intelligence is built from imitation, and could be called a conversational form of activity. This does not require language. Language is possible because people enjoy conversational form in their mutual activities. To create a conversation we must move in the way of another person. That is possible because people are directional. Our sensitivities and moving body structures are clustered and directional, and we fulfill appetites, impulses of self-preservation, and inclinations to make a mark, for example, through directing our sensitivities and movements in ways especially relevant to those purposes. We see those same purposes in the direction any person faces and moves. It doesn’t take babies long to notice that people are directional and to discover how to put things in their way. Being together is created by presenting something to another, putting an object or gesture in their way. Every posture becomes a gesture, inviting attention and sometimes pointing out important features of the world, and everyone’s purposes are evaluated by people watching. In that way, any act may be communicative whether or not communication is its purpose. As soon as a person has a sense of being watched, there is the possibility of creating a conversation.

To create a conversation we must do something in the way of another person. They must notice what we do and subsequently do something in our way that imitates or continues what we did. The continuity or imitation communicates memory, a sense of relevance, and togetherness. Imitation is not conversation, though. The response must combine imitation with novelty and surprise, some distinctive characteristic or direction to contribute something new, a distinct other voice in the conversation. Novelty in the context of imitation communicates creativity and personality, playfulness, power, and challenge. After making such a reply, the other must wait in readiness for our reply to them. We must continue what was distinctive in their imitation at the same time as, again, adding something new to it, and yet continuing the voice we have already presented. That is the conversation game.

Intelligence as Overt Discretionary Acts

As people focus on us, direct movements, gestures, and material objects toward us, and respond to what we do, we form an impression of the qualities of personality or intelligence in them, their sensitivities, directional tendencies, memory, and internal motives to act, rather than sensing their moving from momentum and inertia. From encounters with people around us we get our chance to see at a distance an image of how we ourselves might have personality and intelligence. Intelligence as our nature is impressively revealed in other people. Learning how others manifest intelligence gives us an objective model against which to compare our own self-presentation and so to confirm that we are as we should be as compared with the others. The attention of another person gives us a chance to practice being human, to develop a potential we feel intuitively. One intelligence is drawn to others by that special opportunity to experience being intelligent and to develop a mentally stimulated persona and avatar. That opportunity for exciting self-experience attaches us to others.

Conversational Self: Personality

Every act in conversation has the double aspect of continuing things done by others and presenting a distinctive personality, including a set of sensitivities, appetites, and ways of making a distinctive mark on the environment. Being watched and having other people’s actions influenced by us gives us one kind of force of personality. Each person can have a distinctive presence by making contributions to collective attention that add-up to a distinctive and unified set. By declaring appetites and sensitivities, making gestures of claiming territory, interests, feelings, and distinctive observations we build up an impression of our personality and a picture of what life is for us. The mutuality, bonding, and force-of-personality made possible by the conversation game attract and attach us to people who will engage and play with us.

Productive Attachment

In any community there are regular, habitual, or customary practices of production, distribution, and consumption to accomplish vital as well as strictly cultural functions. These practices impose a shape on the experience of individuals. People feel mutually attached by performing work which makes a contribution to the life of their collective, by having a place in an arrangement of vital effort. A community must maintain productive processes through which individuals integrate themselves with the power and material benefits of interconnected efforts.

A person’s greatest assimilation into a social collective may be as a link in the bucket brigade, a structural piece of its survival effort. To attach to collective production, we have to sense a unity of purpose in complex activities and take on a segment of the task. We take up presence in the group by taking a place in the mechanism, by contributing to production and partaking in consumption, joining the collective rhythm of paying the cost in work and enjoying the pleasure of achievement. Although it may seem that people take up a function in the arrangement to claim a portion of the product, this is not the whole story. The main attraction is attachment with the intelligent pattern of the group. The energy, vision, and purpose in the co-operative effort can become part of each individual’s orientation. An individual’s sense-of-self will involve orientation within the whole collective task in which he or she participates.

Functional Self-Identification

In group activity, functions are defined by example and assigned to different individuals who then include their function in their personal sense-of-self. The specific self-roles made available by a collective’s specialties and division of labour serve as prefabricated short-cuts to a definite identity. People identify themselves and others (often too exclusively) by the function they perform. When people meet they want to know what each does for a living, what function each occupies in the social organization. Each function is granted a different degree of respect. The job or occupation we perform becomes our social avatar. Some of these identity packages are attractions for heroic involvement in a collective. Some people get to be kings, rock stars, celebrity artists, athletes, or scholars, army generals, incredibly wealthy C.E.O.s, wise professors, or daring researchers pushing back the veils of ignorance. Some people get to be clerks and cleaners, some homeless and unemployed. In market capitalism the outcomes are determined, at certain social levels, by a process similar to the hunger games depicted in Suzanne Collins’ novel of that title. When the means of production are private property, then when the agents placed in charge by owners do not like the look of you in some way, at the interview, or something about your job application, you are excluded from the production process. There is no right to work in capitalism. Most people are denied the opportunity to work most of the time. That is not freedom. Calling that freedom is an intentional distortion of reality, blatant Orwellian “newspeak”. Instead of being overtly murdered as in the fictional hunger games, we are marginalized and driven by the motivating force of hunger into pleasing potential employers, if we possibly can. Some never can. When accepted we are cast into roles which have been pre-defined. Taking a place in the community’s productive mechanism is taking on the character that has been scripted for that functional niche. Some functional roles have spectacular rewards that inspire people to compete, and fitting into a functional arrangement does achieve a sense-of-self in terms of particularity of place and status in the organization, in terms of results or effects produced, and in terms of a particular set of relationships with other personalities. There is a great deal of imitation in that kind of attachment, but there is a complex sense of place, personal contribution to productive work, and a sense of different personalities in relation. The attachment with others is appreciated and often provides occasions to create good effects from personal intelligence, and so to experience an extraordinary force of personality. However, people are generally misrepresented by their jobs and struggle to express personal powers and visions in other ways.

Imitation and the Herd

Part of our self awareness as intelligence is a sense of being exposed and open to inspection and interference by other intelligences who may be beyond our personal influence. However, if there are others in the surroundings that look the same as I do, they can diffuse the attention that might otherwise pick me out. When I am among objects that look like myself, I can be indistinguishable. The requirement is conformity of appearance and behaviour. By moving in formation with others, I achieve an effective camouflage, integration into a pattern larger than myself, and reduce the sense of being exposed and vulnerable. That kind of imitation is an intelligent way of forming a union with other beings, a way of being-with them. It is the amalgamation of individual animals in a herd pattern, sometimes elaborately structured, and we human animals do this regularly.

The Political Context

The importance to individuals of these examples of elemental attachments illustrates, for one thing, that there is more than egoism motivating intelligences. That is illustrated most spectacularly in first-language-nurture collectives. What parents, especially mothers, enjoy doing for their children, for each other, for other people’s children, for their parents, siblings, and friends is a conspicuous example of non-egoistic human interconnectedness. That the common distribution of mutual nurture has been ignored so consistently by social and economic philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, who insisted that egoism alone is dominant in individuals, shows that the intended audience of such authors was the collective of privileged males enjoying benefits from acting out the egoistic alpha-trophy-looting ideology.

The point that is proved by all the philosophical emphasis on egoism and self-interest, in combination with the common experience among mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is unknown and regarded with contempt by the egoist self-interest faction.

It is also noteworthy that none of these attachments requires language at the fundamental level. They require only intelligences acting toward one another. They enable creation of a shared system of cultural gestures which is a matrix within which language as a system of oral gestures can be elaborated.

These forms of attachment do not require personification of any collective or of any disembodied or analogically embodied entity. However, they create collective unities which have frequently had super-human personality ascribed to them. Individuals have a tendency to ascribe far too much personality to events they cannot identify as their own acts, partly from the habit of depending so completely on the external personalities of parents during the formative years of childhood. There is also the generally daunting human situation within nature that inspires individuals to shelter within collectives (posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky), and again to fall back into ascribing a parental kind of intelligence to something indefinite beyond immediate experience. Emphatic appreciation of intelligent attachments and interaction makes us vulnerable to extreme and exclusive outward self-identification. Those innate impulses make us complicit in our own self-alienation and objectification to such an extent that it is legitimate to ask: Does the political pressure from the faction of leadership and authority do anything that we ourselves don’t already do voluntarily?

As described in posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture, it is normal for people to pass back and forth between internal sources of gratification (creative expression) and then to outward sources, in a process or rhythm that partly depends on what happens to be going on with personal inspiration inwardly or with interesting developments outwardly. Also to put our outward fixations into context, we start off in childhood projecting parental personification into various aspects of the environment, indiscriminately, inappropriately, but as our experience accumulates we reach a level of maturity and sophistication at which we are ready, both emotionally and intellectually, to stop doing that. What the political pressure from the faction of leadership and authority does, that we certainly do not do voluntarily, is to interfere with that personal context within which we manage attachments with other intelligences.

The political force of the alpha-trophy-looting culture pushes the inner source of gratification in creative expression into disrepute, marginalization, and suspicion of criminality, at the same time as it stigmatizes maturity about projecting parental forms of personification into the environment. The ruling faction does its best to de-legitimize both advanced developmental maturation and creative self-possession, and in doing so it maliciously interferes with innate personal powers.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the interconnectedness built from those elemental attachments. People participate innocently because the interconnectedness helps stupendously with arranging sustainable lives. However, political unconsciousness makes us vulnerable as individuals because these attachments, especially the functional and the herd attachments, open us to exploitation by the pervasive dominance of a cultural faction, the alpha-trophy-looting faction, the intent and effect of which is to create a dependence on ideologically controlled collective culture, unbalanced by each individual’s self-awareness as a particular transcendence, a distinct universe of orientation built from inward freedom and creativity.

Interconnectedness is Shared Awareness

The crucial difference to be recognized is between the human commonwealth of shared awareness, created by mutual contributions from multiple voices, as distinct from a projection of parental sensitivity and caring onto institutions, analogically embodied collectives, or imaged ethereal entities. Shared awareness is the reality of interconnectedness. To share awareness with other people is to share something of their emotional particularity, some awareness of being in their life, along with some of their points of orientation.

Transcendental Humanism

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Political Situation of Any Human Consciousness

Any subjective intelligence will find itself within a social interconnectedness that includes a polarity between the culture-pods of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) and first-language-nurture (FLN). (Please see posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation.) Any political theory which does not identify the ATL cultural heritage and its relation to the FLN heritage is ignoring the most important division in the body politic. The gender based ATL – FLN polarity operates biologically and culturally within every family, and that patriarchal, alpha-dominated, family is universally used as a default model of ideal social and political arrangements in general, at all scales of organization. Confucianism is possibly the most straightforward declaration of that principle. A political philosophy, or any attempt to illuminate the situation of individual subjective intelligence, must recognize that there will always be ATL culture supporting a certain segment of the population to act out narcissistic compulsions to appropriate everything, and there will always be the FLN-based great human interconnectedness for ATL culture-pods to use as their medium of acting out.

The FLN culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival and linguistic engagement of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. Disrespecting any person is disrespecting all that sacred investment of nurture.

The political polarity between the culture-pods of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) and first-language-nurture (FLN) is going to exist in any human society, but philosophic humanism, individual-focused humanism, is strictly a European tradition with a unique origin in ancient Greek culture, in the two strongest vectors of ancient philosophy. Those vectors of philosophy are still elemental points of orientation and definitive of secular humanism. The first is a project to remove disembodied personifications from explanations of events in nature. “Nature” here refers to the material world conforming to the laws of physics, laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, conservation of mass-energy, and gravitational attraction, for example, and not nature in the sense of wildlife. A lot of wildlife is embodied intelligences, and so transcendent with respect to pre-determined nature. There is no denying the beauty and wonder of nature, but it is absurd to personify it. The second vector is a project to understand subjective intelligence as transcendent, to become self-aware as transcendent intelligence. The vector of ancient philosophy to understand the transcendence of personal intelligence (sometimes conceived as ‘mind’) is the flip side of removing capricious personalities from explanations of nature. The ‘understanding subjectivity’ vector was a recognition of subjective intelligence as a primordial blind spot in experience, a blind spot with the potential to be mirrored by some deliberate reflexive self-awareness. Philosophic humanism is not a claim that humans are more important than animals (since humans are animals), or more important then brute nature, but rather that embodied intelligence is always transcendent in every individual without exception and not more so in some special individuals, and strictly absurd in incorporeal entities. (Please see posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence.)

Confucianism sometimes claims to be humanism, but Confucian humanism is anti-egalitarian, like all Confucianism. Confucian “humanism” promotes the patriarchal family as a divine revelation and as the law of nature, and as such the only legitimate framework of personal orientation at every level of social organization. Confucianism is a variant form of father-religion in which any father figure is god-like. The force of European-style humanism is very different from Confucian filial piety toward father figures, and also, incidentally, from Buddhist pessimism (“All life is suffering.”). The message of European-style humanism is: “Nature is impersonal and individual subjectivity is transcendent.” Patriarchal forces (ATL forces) are currently on another offensive against alternative visions and so, if the future is to be saved from oppressive Confucian-style hierarchy and from the gloomy passivity of Buddhist-style pessimism, then it is time that philosophic humanism was re-asserted.

Humanist Individualism

There are opposing visions of individualism, each an active political threat to the other. One is the alpha-trophy-looting vision of winner-take-all star systems, in which only the most victorious get to be valued as individuals. That ATL vision is profoundly anti-egalitarian, based on trophy accumulation from defeating people. Although that is what Americans and market-commerce enthusiasts in general have been trained to promote as “individualism”, it is unworthy of the name. Authentic humanist individualism asserts the transcendence of every individual intelligence, founding value on subjective inwardness, and on bringing the freedom and creativity of inwardness out in projections into the shared world of physical determinism and political control. Humanist individualism is egalitarian, achieved in self-awareness and personal agency. Neither star systems nor egalitarian humanism can imagine surviving without the system of human interconnectedness forged in the endless working of the first-language-nurture culture.

The patriarchal ideal remains unquestioned in all societies other than the European, in which humanist philosophy was revived and preserved as a minority report at the centre of advanced literacy by a peculiar Medieval institutionalizing of antiquarian studies, Latin literacy, conserving a fascination with ancient Roman and Greek history and thinking. That peculiar high culture of literacy was cultivated for centuries by the European network of universities from around 1088, with humanism as a stowaway within patriarchal Christianity. That fragile legacy of humanism has been the most effective counter-force against the effects of the patriarchal family model in promoting, explaining, defending, legitimizing, justifying, and excusing the crimes of alpha-trophy-looting dominance and empire building.

The Political Situation of Humanism

Humanism, recognizing individual intelligences as transcendent, as the only transcendence, still has a mighty struggle for survival. The humanist vision of individual intelligences, projecting markers of their freedom and creativity out into the shared world of nature and culture, is both common sense and elemental, and yet nearly unthinkable because of the lingering dominance of father-god religions, which monopolize creativity in the personified father-god as an unquestionable stipulation of official rationality.

When common sense humanism is almost unthinkable then we must conclude that nasty political forces are responsible, forces nasty enough to sustain a reality-distorting campaign of ideology which has been effective on a vast scale. (Not many issues could be more intellectually intriguing than that.) Egalitarianism is what sets humanism apart as a force that certain interests would want to repress by means of reality-distorting counter-ideologies. As such, humanism faces the wrath of anti-egalitarian interests which are completely bestial in their aggression against all potential threats to their dominance and control. That is the political situation in which we people of modernity find ourselves, all revealed by the near unthinkability of common-sense humanism: individual intelligences, projecting markers of their transcendent freedom and creativity, frequently building mutual attachments in doing so, out into the shared world of nature and culture.

The Political Intent of Disembodied Personality

Disembodied spirits are never anything but inappropriate projections of human intelligence onto inanimate pieces of nature, or onto nature as a whole, or even ‘beyond nature’ into incorporeal presences. The ideas of will, teleology, moral judgment, or caring, are all meaningless without particular embodiment. Personality without embodiment is absurd, and so the idea of a dictator-father god has precisely the incoherence of a nightmare. Nobody has a special or exclusive hotline to divine will, because there is no divine will, just nature, individual subjective intelligences, and the projections of intelligences constituting culture.

Inappropriate projections of human intelligence normally serve a political function by ascribing the alpha-trophy-looting type of personality to the boss spirit, self-aggrandizing for the control faction, and intimidating for everyone else. The father-dictator-in-the-sky, caring, reliably judging and evaluating but unreliably rewarding, delivering justice, and meeting needs, is a cultural and psychological control device to prevent anyone from orienting within the transcendence of their innocent freedom. The effort to personify nature itself, or an imagined creator of nature, conjures up an overpowering and terrifying super-person within whom all the boundless and unmanageable forces of nature are enlisted to intimidate. It is training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, and mission definition. Fixation on an external father-in-the-sky-god combines the opposites of both vectors of humanism: personification of disembodied presences, and an outward focus for the identification of transcendence. That externalizing ideology has been a crucial force in a matrix of individual self-blindness and denial of self-possession, and also reinforces a universal oppression of women. Where the father-in-the-sky god is worshipped there will always be war and rumours of war and the basic military/ religious training to keep the general population ready for sacrifice.

War and Belonging

War offers an intense experience of belonging to a collective at the expense of personal agency and self-possession, and also at the expense of justice. In war much is looted from everyone. You are pushed around and disrespected. Your freedom is looted when you are controlled and supervised. There is a generalized operational assumption of radical inequality, secrecy, lies, and suspicion, and your personal agency is displaced upward on the organization chart, the chain of command. In military training, individuals have personal agency systematically undermined so that it can be replaced by totalitarian belonging to a hierarchical “brotherhood” of radical inequality. Posting 10, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality, describes the leadership myth which legitimizes the looting of credit for productive work. (Recognition of the situation in which credit moves up the organization chart, glorified as a “chain of command”, in which leaders are looters, is a useful point on an elemental re-orientation grid.) The corporate/ investment-friendly state is the war-making state that requires reverence and personal sacrifice from ordinary citizens and so requires the state to be accepted as a personified deity and leaders as his prophets. Authoritarian societies are good only for those who qualify to be advantaged, and such societies emphasize and value the radical inequality of separate social levels.

Brand Personification

The orientation grid of modernity is built on new variants of disembodied personifications, “brands” of national military states, political parties, and on corporate brands. That grid features national, class, and consumer pride, an economy of emotion where “brand” is a personification of something other than an individual human body, the same technique of political control pioneered by personification of father-spooks in the sky. The point of such strategic personification is to inspire emotional attachment between individuals and some personified fiction, disabling personal control over emotional responses. It is a technique for triggering the uncritical protective urgency normally extended only to family members and the closest of friends, which leaves emotional responses vulnerable to stealthy manipulation by the sophisticated agencies controlling every apparently benign brand. With the orientation grid of modernity, a control faction is operating a manufactured sensitivity to insults, threats, and injuries to national pride, for example, injuries to brands which seem to have extended a sense of inclusion, belonging, and personal value, as friends and family members really do. The control faction is establishing an orientation grid which, it calculates, will channel the emotionally-impulsive behaviour and psychology of people in exactly the way it plans and from which it benefits. If you are persuaded that you belong to a personified collective, then you abandon some crucial agency as well as your claim to credit for your contribution to the group product. The control apparatus relies on that psychological technique, but reinforced by police forces and prisons, as well as by military forces, spies, and police actions which bypass courts of law.

In modernity the animism of previous superstitions changed to personifications of national brands, class, linguistic, ethnic, religious, racial, commercial, and corporate brands. Western modernity is no different from previous spook-obsessed control arrangements in that way. The fundamental obsession with disembodied personifications is still very active and controlling. Personifying the ideas of such collective entities is the modern version of superstition, social control by the strategic use of spooks. Disembodied personifications are all malicious fictions. Ignore reports of your national or religious brand being insulted. It can’t be insulted because it does not exist. It’s a fraud. The alpha-trophy-looting ethos of radical inequality (inequality of control) is the driving force in all that.

Two Specific Assaults

Just as the alpha-trophy-looting god is a device to control adult mentality into subordination-to-external-authority and accompanying self-blindness, the selection of history we are taught is a device to legitimate the control structure that currently reigns, the status quo of capitalism, the corporate-military state, and patriarchal religion. Whatever noble values the control factions profess in public, their incumbents are quite openly dependent on two vicious and anti-humanist practices. The first is pageants of radical inequality, highlighting their own superiority. Inequality itself is the central incentive and reward of alpha-trophy-looting orientations. It is the origin of the need for so much money and conspicuous consumption. Trophies are symbols of inequality, and all the special occasions, the official rules, stages, costumes, roles, postures, gestures, speeches which legitimize the awarding of a trophy, are all the pageantry of inequality. The second anti-humanist practice is the technique of promoting brand loyalty, subordination of individuals to disembodied personifications such as corporate brands, religious brands, national, regional, ethnic, and linguistic brands. Such personifications are always fictions, spooks, created with intent to control people through fraud and deceit. Both of those practices effectively resist the egalitarian force of every individual’s coming to know his or her own personal intelligence as transcendent.

Political Consciousness: The Corporate Control-Ethos

It is no secret, and nobody could deny, that, very much like national states, religions and profit-driven commercial organizations do their utmost to control both their employees and the general ‘consumer base’ population. Developments in clinical/ academic psychology and social science have added considerable sophistication, effectiveness, and stealth to those control efforts. Academics do not work for free, and large scale investors and corporations control the money. The same impulse-to-control connects like-minded investors and holders of power, privilege, and wealth within an overarching control faction ethos. Messages from government, business, employers, schools, and nearly all other faces of wealth, authority, and power, are intended to glorify the eternal and exemplary superiority of the alpha-structure, the control faction. The parts of that system of emotional manipulation that touch us continually are the ads. “People will love you better when your life looks like this.” “Everybody cool thinks this.” “It is normal to need this surgical improvement, this medication.” We are manipulated aggressively and stealthily through advertising media. There is also a carefully pruned depiction, by big pervasive media networks, of the world and its troubles in a montage of news stories. There is the careful selection of research and scholarship that gets funded and celebrated. Behind all is a vast pool of organized wealth and old, semi-conscious alpha-trophy-looting ideology. Wealth is organized by the financial industry: investment ‘banks’ and various commercial and private agencies for speculating on owning debt, equity, or derivatives, with the intent to gain by buying cheap and selling dear, without adding value. Wealth is organized also by charities and foundations. The political wings of organized investor forces are not just delivering low tax and limited government, balanced budgets, precarious jobs, and shopping opportunities, but also radical inequality, war, as well as secret controls, secret operations, and secret intents in the processes of power. (Suggested reading: Google Plutonomy and the Precariat by Noam Chomsky.)

The pitch from the alpha-structure is that you don’t need much in the way of inward self-awareness to enjoy perfect freedom. All you need is an unregulated commercial market which produces some choice of consumer products to shop for, including policy packages from political brands, and a personal chance to compete for the scarce goods and treasures of life. (“May the odds be ever in your favor.” Thank you Suzanne Collins.) It is crucial to that alpha-story that the goods and treasures of life are scarce, and progressively scarcer as their value increases, so only the most worthy, divinely endowed celebrities, achieve the holy grails. It is such a beautiful story. The problem is that the greatest treasures of life are subjective intelligence and its expressive voice, powers freely intrinsic to everybody, and so the alpha-pitch is a total scam.

Capitalism Subsists on War

If you squint as you look, you can almost see capitalism without a war industry, without the financial industry laundered money from organized crime, without unproductive fortunes sucking value from the economy by financial speculation. However, capitalism, war, and organized crime are inseparable. Capitalism subsists on the war industry. Claims that capitalism is just the laws of nature organizing the human collective are insults to human creativity, as well as attempts to conceal the cultural/factional (as distinct from natural) forces sustaining capitalism.

The “business friendly” faction announces that it is leading the politico-economic situation of the world, the overall situation of adult experience and general welfare, toward a best possible state, a state of dynamic opportunity for human potential. In fact, the control faction has not the slightest idea of the reality of any such optimal condition. What the control faction actually does is disempower anyone who is not enrolled into supporting its ideology. The control faction is moving heaven and earth to strengthen its own controlling power. The current baby-boom cohort of the control faction has finally revealed the ultimate triviality of its mission and values. We know its addictions to self-aggrandizing, gambling, and the profits from war and from human vice and misfortune. It is impossible to progress to an optimal human situation on the basis of war, gambling addictions structured into the financial industry, laundering of profits from organized criminal trafficking in slaves, drugs, weapons, and money. The control faction feeds on all of that crime and truly has no other mission than to maintain the revenue streams as they are, and to increase them. We know that power chooses to dwell in conspicuous and grandiose material representations of its own glory. There is nothing of value to be learned there, nothing to envy.

The death-grip control intrinsic to alpha-culture is exercised by an obsession with objectivity, and contempt for subjectivity to discourage everyone from drawing the full potential of pleasure and action from inward intelligence and creativity. To objectify something is to remove it completely from any claim to transcendence. The result is a culturally-induced state of subjectivity-phobia, self-blindness, and disconnection from personal sources of creative power, not to mention political suppression of the natural social influence of the first-language-nurture culture which is considerably more subjectively focused.

Science

In modernity, the other cultural force against the thinkability of common sense humanism is the ideology of science which asserts that everything is unfree and totally determined, that freedom and creativity are impossible.

Science did not begin as an anti-humanist force, but rather as one vector of ancient humanist philosophy. Science began as the vector to create ways of explaining events in nature without animism or personification, without ascribing personality to the causes of such events. That ‘scientific’ vector was only half of a duality, originally joined to the project to understand mind or intelligence as known subjectively, which was commonly experienced as transcendent in a way which inspired the kind of investigation possible by reflexive self-awareness. The scientific, “natural philosophy”, half of the humanist project revealed a great deal of power and became so successful that it attracted the interest of previously existing social control factions, forces for weapons development and military based radical inequality, and under that influence the collective culture of science came to the conviction that science was the only source for understanding everything. It lost the ability to be aware of subjectivity (where questions come from) as its blind spot. When military and commercial control factions took over science, the other vector, the more philosophical vector focused on self-awareness of intelligence as transcendent, simply became a liability because of its tendency to distribute transcendence universally rather than concentrating it in the controlling factions. So science became one of the four thugs of totalitarian, reductionist, objectification: father-in-the-sky religion, military-based sovereignty, market-culture, and science.

AI: Counterfeit Intelligence versus Spontaneous Intelligence

The discrepancy between the pop-star buzz around artificial intelligence, AI, and the nearly total absence of discussion about common spontaneous intelligence reveals the self-blindness of science. Since developments in computer technology in the 1970’s, there has been a well publicized effort to create artificial intelligence. Nobody hesitates to discuss artificial intelligence, but at the same time nobody discusses intelligence that is spontaneously occurring in ordinary human persons. In respectable discourse, any approach to inward experience must be limited to concepts appropriate to the determinism of outward experience, a lethal reductionism operating on a cultural and political scale. Conversations that drift toward thinking processes soon drift onto something else. However, without the spontaneous intelligence we take for granted in ourselves and people around us, there would be nothing for the investor/ research community to counterfeit.

Spontaneous intelligence, subjectivity, is profoundly mistrusted and poorly understood. It is so mistrusted that we hardly ever want to face it in ourselves, to own and explore it, to face the subtleties and profundities of personal subjectivity. It is actually frightening, indeed one of the main terrors of philosophy. (Philosophy is absent from school curricula because certain people find it terrifying, not because it is imprecise or pointless.) We are largely disabled from reflexive self-awareness by the needs and demands of capitalist-commercial organization, demands to be “career oriented” and to live in imitation of officially recommended role models. Yet everyone is a personal instance of spontaneous intelligence. Everybody has privileged access to an intelligence unmediated by questionnaires, mazes, experimental design, and hypothetical assumptions.

The discrepancy between the buzz around AI and the lack of buzz around spontaneous intelligence is the result of the dominance of science. Spontaneously occurring intelligence is personal subjectivity, and personal subjectivity is creative, which is to say that it cannot be reduced, ultimately, to material cause-effect clockwork. Since science is nothing but the craft of removing personality by reducing experiences to material cause-effect, science hits a wall at spontaneous intelligence. However, only subjective intelligence generates curiosity, original questions, awe at patterning and beauty, and ways of overcoming its own particularity, and even though such forces are the entire foundation of science, science cannot account for the forces that are questions, for example, either for questions in general or for the particularity of specific questions: subjectivity is science’s blind spot.

The scientific effort to create artificial intelligence is another effort to reduce the concept of intelligence to materialist clockwork. Specifically, the effort is to create, in mechanisms crafted by human design, behaviours which are indistinguishable from what passes as intelligent behaviour in people. That effort is nothing new. Since at least 1600 and the emergence of mathematical rationalism within the European Ancien Régime, there have been similar intellectual projects. The reductionist intent of the AI effort means only that the subjective side of spontaneously occurring intelligence is being stipulated by Dr. Frankenstein as irrelevant to the game he wishes to play.

Intelligence is Situated Politically

Since the political forces just described perceive benefits for themselves in perpetuating self-alienation in every intelligence, the prospects for self-awareness or self-knowledge by any individual are largely a matter of political consciousness. The political forces bearing on intelligence must be identified and disabled on a personal level before self-awareness is possible. The ideological repression of humanism is the repression of freedom and creativity in every individual, and such an effect can be carried off only by rigorous training in self-blindness, self-alienation. Father-god religions (sometimes in the Confucian variant in which any father figure is god-like) and science ideology are two ways to accomplish that rigorous training, and both are impressively pervasive and sophisticated. Capitalism, the exclusivity of consumption and inequality itself as values in market commerce, is also a very effective system of training in anti-humanist inequality and self-blindness.

Multiple Universes

Each embodied intelligence is a separate universe of self-positioning (orientation, bearing), each vectoring within a personal grid of non-actuality, each an ever more complicated, self-elaborating question, and yet all marooned together within, and each passing like a storm system through, the same elemental world of natural laws, forces, and structures, and in that world building interpersonal attachments under the influence and example of language and nurture communities, ethnic communities, political forces, and intimate personal interconnectedness.

Transcendent Embodiment

Each embodied intelligence is already a complete person prior to, and always transcending, engagement with and acquisition of cultural ways of living, language, and the issues of a time in history. We need the personal powers of embodiment and basic intelligence to build interconnectedness with others, and in doing that we enter the political currents and influences about assignment of values, roles, and tolerable appearances, for example. Those currents of influence and fashion within the interconnectedness almost alienate our orientation from its innocent embodiment and intelligence experiences, but never totally. Political inducements pull us toward conformity with certain general types or ideal categories, but we never completely lose a grounding in our particularity. We have a personal voice prior to, and continuing after, learning languages.

A voice is not the same as the language or words uttered. A voice is also more than the sounds of physiological vocal organs. In addition to the language and the vocal organs there is a composed musicality to each voice, emotionally expressive qualities from an intelligence in a life-situation. The voice expresses a personal style-competence, a continuity of inventions and choices, deliberate acts of self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments. As such, the voice carries or expresses a character, persona, or avatar in addition to any meaning that might be denoted or connoted by linguistic sounds.

Since rocks and bushes do not speak, there appears to be a transcendence revealed by the speaking of subjectivity. The speaking of subjectivity has, therefore, inspired a great deal of interest in language. Language is certainly larger than any individual, but is also a kind of red herring. Curious investigators of the human situation have widely assumed that understanding language would bring with it an understanding of the transcendence of subjectivity, of intelligence, but it has failed to do so. It has also failed to explain away the transcendence of speaking and of speakers. Voices have instead been ignored, as bookshelves groaned under the weight of grammars, dictionaries, and theoretical linguistics. Without particular voices, language would cease to exist; but not the other way around. Voices have inspired study of language, but not the other way around.

Because of how important culture and interconnectedness are in our survival, “being in the world” is a political situation. Intelligences are embodied in such a way that survival depends absolutely on social attachments to family, friends, nurture and support providers, to opportunity providers. The necessity of attachment carries with it the learning of language and other cultural systems, “the way we live in our group”, always including a political situation that involves tension between gender cultures, specifically an ATL faction doing its utmost to own and control everything, and especially to control the FLN faction, in every family and at all levels of social organization. The challenges and obstacles that make self-awareness and thinking about “being in the world” difficult are mainly the political effects of father-religion, military-based sovereignty, market-culture, and science, constructed deliberately and specifically by ATL enthusiasts to distract everyone from self-possession.

The personal use of philosophical thinking is inherently political because it is self-possessing. It exercises subjective powers of self-directed re-orientation, including personal curiosity, gratification, questioning, skepticism, and rational doubt. In doing that, it is a direct rival to external controlling forces such as patriarchal families, schools, profession guilds, religions, employment organizations, and military states, all expressing alpha-trophy-looting ideals and controlling individuals by, for example, flashy incentives and by personifying various disembodied entities, often collectives. As a counter-force, self-directed re-orientation draws on an individual’s particularity of sensitivity, embodiment, and expressive voice.

Disengaging from the matrix of self-blindness puts all the certainties of ATL modernity into question. However, that is not to abandon or damage the great human interconnectedness, but rather to make better lives for ourselves and everyone by reducing the cultural and political oppression that is currently imposed within the interconnectedness. A crucial part of that oppression involves the dishonouring and disempowerment, by the alpha-trophy-looting uber-system, of all other cultural sub-systems, including even introverts. The interconnectedness needs to be nudged toward a new orientation.

Transcendental Humanism

Two oppressive practices by leadership collectives are specific assaults against individuals to defend against in building an alternative orientation. One way to begin is with the two vectors of humanist philosophy. First, remove disembodied personifications from your mental construct of the world. Disengage emotionally from the official grid, the current system of animism in collective ‘brands’ of all kinds. Second, come to know the transcendence of your own personal intelligence. Replace externals with self-awareness as transcendent intelligence, a personal creative process projecting constructs into nature and culture. You are an original, continuously self-constructing question, a surprise horizon, a time-well into non-actuality, a projector of particular freedom. The transcendent intelligence of all other embodied persons follows from personal acquaintance with transcendence, and that disables the value of inequality as an incentive and reward. Inequality is the entire substance of ATL motivation and value. Detach from a focus on property, consumption, and celebrity as achievements and markers of personal identity. Pageants of belonging through brand attachments, encouraged and rewarded by competitions for personal validation from trophies, are all unequalizing distractions from self-awareness as transcendence, and distractions from a universal distribution of dignity and respect based on recognition of intelligences in other embodied persons. Instead of attaching emotionally to spooks and icons of celebrity systems, build a more equal distribution of respect for ordinary embodied personalities. That is nothing more than the implicit program of ancient humanism.

Humanist re-orientation eliminates the core pillars from the alpha-trophy-looting belief-system, pillars such as father-figure-worship, hierarchical meritocracy, personification of the military nation, and the self-sufficiency of science, which some people have cherished as substitute parental figures, as places to just stop in thinking about the complexity of being in the world and in assessing one’s own ability to make sense of it. Defenders of the military-Christian tradition, for example, focused as they are on generic “human nature” (as carrier of original sin) instead of on individuals, promote the view that common sanity requires externally provided supports for mental stability, adult substitutes for the unquestioning trust that children place in parents. That assumption is very popular and especially popular among the leadership faction, generations of which have been promoting it. That vision reaches a point at which the legitimacy of power or the truth of religious claims is completely irrelevant because, it asserts, without unalterable belief in external authorities and the certainties they proclaim, people would plunge into nihilistic insanity and complete social disorder. Fortunately, the alpha-trophy-looting vision of life is not the only one. The humanist journey is a place and orientation free from the lies, manipulation, and disempowerment projected from the control faction without being left with the wreckage, ruin, and powerless despair predicted by its conservative vision.

Social Order

The guarantor and binding mechanism of social order and human communication networks is not the authority of the star-system meritocracy, nor police forces, armies, guns, or prisons. Social order and interconnectedness are products of the informal non-family collectives which groups of mothers form with their children to have the children play together and learn to speak the communal language: the first-language-nurture cultural system. Those groups build on and extend accomplishments from the countless hours that mothers spend engaged with their children, one on one. The whole first-language-nurture cultural system builds on the elemental pleasure and mutual inspiration that particular intelligences experience in connecting with each other. There really is a robust first-language-nurture culture providing real parenting, belonging within personal interconnectedness, language skills, and mutual adult support. Re-thinking humanism requires recognition of overriding importance in the first-language-nurture culture, especially in creating the human interconnectedness that is so easy (under alpha-trophy-looting influence) to take as merely given by nature. It is not a given, but a continuously constructed collective work of intelligences.

Renaissance humanism, unlike ancient Hellenistic humanism, existed in the Christian context of an overbearing idea of transcendence belonging to the father-god. The power of individual intelligence was conceived, in Renaissance humanism, as limited to self-specification or cultivation, the power to make something particular of yourself, or not. It was an alternative to total slavery to original sin and dependence on divine grace, but strictly limited.

Contrary to the promoters of external pillars of inward stability, there is far more reliable and elemental inward experience on which to ground effective sanity, namely the grounding of personal embodied transcendence. When personality is attributed to disembodied entities such as spirits in the sky, human collectives, institutions, or corporations, all efforts at understanding transcendence collide with an impenetrable wall, because there is no transcendence out there. When transcendence is recognized at its source, individual subjective intelligence, then the whole approach is altered. Instead of transcendence inspiring wheedling fear and cowering beneath an angry looming father, it now inspires creative self-expression, and the approach becomes, “we should all be having fun with this.” If disembodied personifications and inequality as such were to lose their celebrity status and reputation there would be completely novel opportunities for self-awareness and a more universal respect for human dignity and the value of individual peculiarity. Transcendence is a personal experience, subjective, inward. “I am here and elsewhere.”

Embodiment as a Political Grounding

We find our innocent grounding in embodiment experiences and the force of intelligence, basic positioning and active effectiveness in mobility and endurance, the energy flows of a particular embodiment. Re-orientation processes are grounded there. Intelligence is rarely aware of its own transcendence. Authentic self-consciousness is consciousness of the bearings of intelligence. The accumulating bearing is an ever more complicated question, with sensitivities, vigils, and directions of force. It is continuously renewing from a gushing fountain of pretend orientations, questions, curiosities, conjectures, and impulses to play with particularity. Transcendence is always the relationship of intelligence to the brute actuality of nature, but noticing that relationship requires a degree of active innocence. Innocence is a certain condition of intelligence, a frame of orientation bracketing out culturally (politically) stipulated features. Innocence and awareness of transcendence are the same region of experience. It is possible to think what innocence is and to reach it. There is an inner source and voice there at your personal surprise horizon, not just passive consciousness. The subjective surprise horizon fountains out a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. A voice exists only through time. Embodied intelligence is the ultimate innocence beneath social attachment, linguistic convention immersion, and cultural conditioning.

The Elements

In an elemental reorientation, the elements are individual intelligences, along with nature and culture, and within that ever-changing culture, the political factions and especially the first-language-nurture faction and the alpha-trophy-looting faction.

Humanist philosophy is an invitation to a personal journey of elemental re-orientation, and it puts at risk every part of a ATL-approved orientation, for example, your sense of your political situation. You were told it was an equal opportunity melee, a free-for-all competition, established and maintained because it is the only realistic mechanism to authenticate and legitimize the most worthy and ablest meritocracy. In fact, it has been a rigged game forever, with a control faction which acts to improve its own control, reaching down to the individual level. You are not the objectified avatar you have been influenced to assume, and the effective history of your world is not what you were taught in school. Instead, effective history has been the assaults launched by the self-perpetuating ATL faction against other cultural factions such as the faction promoting humanist personal transcendence and the faction of first-language-nurture.

The elemental orientation grid is a counter-force against standard cultural tags which impose a definition on each person. Let the outward tags of identity be muted, socioeconomic niche, job title, life-style, clothing style, neighbourhood. Identify subjectively your sustainable-life-building bearing, adjusting a personal path within the rigid structures of nature, culture, and personal attachments. Identify the surprise horizon in your subjective blind spot, your private doubts and curiosities, the kinds of play you find to be fun.

Having an elemental orientation grid is something like the experience some people have their first time seeing the night sky in really good conditions, with clear clean air and a total absence of nearby lights or tall obstacles on the ground. The milky way disk spreads out before your eyes. All your life you have been a creature of turf, mud, rocks, and bushes, held to the ground. Now you are a creature of stars and galaxies, of that mysterious black void behind everything. This is where you live. You remind yourself to breathe. It is an elemental enlargement of personal and human dignity. General improvements in dignity, such as that inspired by the spread of proletarian literacy and direct access to vernacular Bibles, have had great historical consequences.

Violence Doesn’t Work

Only crime families and religious cults benefit from anarchy, and they always combine to bring actual anarchy to a nasty end. Violent revolutions don’t work because they create their own elite of official criminal violence and have to defend the superficially successful new order against all conceivable forces of anarchy and counterrevolution, typically by repressive social supervision and force for a long time. That point is illustrated by the three great revolutions of modern times: United States of America (1776), France (1789), Soviet Russia (1917). They all end as top-down, centralized, and militarized societies. Such considerations shed some positive light onto certain aspects of the modern system of democratic legal jurisdictions with assigned responsibility to protect civic society and individuals against crime families, religious cults, and repressive supervision. Governments can be assessed on how well they remove those forces from their field of influence.

What Comes After Declining Capitalism

Capitalism is a mental construct which focuses attention on conspicuous consumption and transferrable wealth. It’s a massive distraction from self-awareness and self-possession. Changing that on a grand scale will not be easily done. However, consider that nobody had a pre-constructed alternative to the tyranny of Church and crime families in feudal Christendom, but the Christian construct lost moral credibility, and that liberated individuals and groups to invent alternatives piece by piece over a long period. The protestant reformation and rationalist philosophy eventually brought down the mental structure of feudal Christendom. Literacy and classical Greek humanism gave some reality to the idea of equality in the European cultural system and humanist elemental re-orientation is again a promising possibility. Cultural/mental constructs do change and adjust to events and developments, and capitalism is losing legitimacy.

In dealing with the question of the specific design of a better future, an approach might be borrowed from the movie, The Matrix (released in 1999, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski). Near the middle of the movie there is a scene in which a child sits on the floor with a silver spoon in her hand. The spoon is bending into different shapes. Neo accepts the spoon from the child to try to do the same. Nothing happens. The child says: “Do not try to bend the spoon. It’s impossible. Instead, just try to realize the truth.” “What truth?” asks Neo. “There is no spoon,” says the child. In that spirit, we are in no position to design an entire alternative future right now. That should not be used as an excuse to restrain our thinking in re-orienting ourselves within our political situation. Building a better future will proceed as we do our best to realize the truth. The spoon will bend.

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Each intelligence is transcendent as a distinguishable universe of temporality and creativity. Transcendence is being not-limited-to-actuality. There are parts to that. Any person’s main bearing is almost completely beyond actuality since it is oriented to the whole personal past (which does not actually exist) of this intelligence, and also toward a completely fictitious and increasingly remote and improbable future. There is also a subjective surprise horizon within that main bearing, fountaining new questions, for example. Part of transcendence is the indefinability or unplottability of intelligence within actuality. It isn’t only embodiment experience that trumps cultural embeddedness and linguistic determinism, but also the powers of intelligence as described in blog posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence, the power of intelligence to pretend and orient itself in non-actual time.

Those different universes of orientation (individual persons) are very much dependent on the shared actuality of pre-determined nature, and on mentally constructed interconnectedness with multiple different universes of orientation (individual persons), so they cannot be called autonomous. However, the transcendence of each one as an intelligence does have some crucial subjective grounding with which to establish a profoundly self-possessed orientation. The individual cannot do without human interconnectedness, or culture, or nature, but neither is the individual ever completely a creature of those sources and influences.

The human interconnectedness is excessively oppressive at present due to widespread unconsciousness about its basic operating elements, namely individual intelligences, nature, and culture, but also because of unconsciousness about the basic political antagonism within the interconnectedness, the antagonism between the culture of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) versus the culture of first-language-nurture (FLN), and because of the dominance of ATL control operations. So far in political and social theory, the concept of political or civic power has expressed only the ATL ethos, completely excluding the worldview and rational claims of the FLN faction based on the FLN contribution to social interconnectedness. Religion, sovereign power, capitalism, science, are all expressions of the ATL ethos or worldview, completely in denial of the whole FLN construct of society. The FLN culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. Disrespecting any person is disrespecting all that sacred investment of nurture. The FLN cultural inclination to be egalitarian clarifies the incompatibility and hostility between ATL and FLN in the most fundamental operation of human societies, and also suggests why the ATL forces want to explain language and social interconnectedness in any way that avoids mention of FLN operations and effectiveness.

Nobody would want to abandon or damage the great human interconnectedness, but it is only rational to consider how to make better lives for ourselves and everyone by reducing the cultural and political oppression that is currently imposed by the interconnectedness. A crucial part of that oppression involves the dishonouring and disempowerment, by the alpha-trophy-looting uber-system, of all other cultural sub-systems, including even introverts. The interconnectedness can be nudged toward a less unbalanced condition.

The distribution of self-awareness as individual transcendence is a window on, and an index within, the political situation within the interconnectedness. Right now, the generally low level of popular self-awareness reveals the effects of ATL dominance aggressively stifling self-knowledge in order to maintain its ethos of radical inequality. The ethos involves aggressive interference with individuals by the use of cultures of disembodied personifications (‘brand loyalties’) and pageantry of inequality. The market culture headline is “gratifying consumption” but the story beneath is “bitter inequality”. It is all competitions and comparisons. Some people do enjoy those activities, and there is nothing wrong with sensual pleasure. However, the competitions are nothing but pageants of inequality used as control mechanisms, incentives, rewards, inducements. They declare that the way to define and measure your worth and substance is in the melee of specified competitions. All that pageantry reveals a lack of acquaintance with personal transcendence in a personal creative process. Self-definition by competition is just as much a distraction from self-awareness as is identification with disembodied spooks, exploiting the appeal of sheltering within a powerful personified collective. The ATL control faction uses brand loyalties, including the national belonging excited by war, to externalize, again, individual self-definition. Since disembodied personifications still dominate the cultural landscape as ‘brands’, science has failed its primary mission to move society beyond animism.

Self-defense is legitimate against such interference, and it is the subjective grounding available to individuals that enables self-defense. The control structure is very prepared to win every contest based on violence, and that is sufficient reason to avoid violence. The main reason to avoid violence is that violence disrespects its victims as well as all the nurture that supported their survival. Instead, find the ideological blind spots.

Reality is Three Givens*: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture

14 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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(* Previously I have called these “the three graces”, but they are graces in the sense of data, given. These graces are entangled with one another in the sustenance of lives, but without manifesting any caring nurture in an ultimate giver. They are given without a personified giver.)

The meeting of three elemental givens presented here is a common sense understanding of any individual’s situation, yet almost unthinkable because of cultural fashions. ‘Three givens’ is an elemental humanist alternative to other models of reality, an alternative to culturally dominant orientations such as materialist science or father-in-the-sky religions.

In posting 28, April 19, 2012, How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism, there is a presentation of an account of freedom given by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) including the following observation about two irreducible aspects of experience: “Even though the impression that human perceivers have of the objective world is pervaded with their own psychological contributions, on Kant’s view, he remained convinced that the impression still bears some unidentifiable relation to a thing-in-itself which exists externally prior to being experienced. Consequently, even though there is inward experience of freedom in intelligence and outward determinism in nature, it is not legitimate to impose the system or principles of one side on the other to declare a tidy monism. You can’t justify an exclusive preference for inner experience or outer experience as the grounding of everything, because doing so always loses profound features of experience. Embracing that irreducible discontinuity for the broader understanding it enables is exemplified also by the Stoic treatment of logos, Luther’s inward leap of faith, and Schopenhaur’s explicit double-aspect reality.”

Something crucial is implicit in Kant’s vision of inward freedom facing outward determinism, that he did not develop. Decisions made by individuals in the freedom of moral choice are applied as acts and practices in the world. They become projections of an inner freedom out into the shared world of phenomena. Although freedom may begin from inwardness, it must be expressed in the outward world of material determinism and political control. It certainly reduces the pre-determination of the objective world when individuals generally are understood to project the freedom of their intelligence into the shape and events of that world. Very much in the phenomenal world comes from such origins, including all cultural features. Culture is various kinds of shaping projected onto nature by intelligences, and then imitated. Culture accumulates and takes on an enduring presence that is no longer either nature or subjective, and so must be counted as a third given for any individual intelligence.

That means, for example that injustice and oppression are not the products of “laws of nature” or the strict determinacy of nature, but rather they are the products of human freedom. As such, they are vulnerable and removable. Other forces of freedom can be exerted against injustice and oppression.

One way of describing the resulting reality-as-three-givens (nature, subjective intelligences, and culture) would be to say there are multiple connected universes. There is what Kant called the world of phenomena, the shared universe of material cause-effect, of nature and culture. That one is a common presence in all the other universes. Additionally, each person has his or her own subjective universe in which to conceive personal freedom. Each person’s freedom in time-consciousness is increasingly their own artifact, so each intelligence is a separate universe of temporality. Calling each subjectivity a separate universe is justified since, unlike the situation of nature, the orientation of each subjectivity is shaped on a dimension of time, and each one differs because of its unique point of view, powers of access to surroundings, assembly of memory, and assessment of probable futurity, for example. Embodied intelligences are separate subjective universes, separate temporalities, separate time-wells. Each subjectivity builds a unique time-world, a totally encompassing universe within which to position or situate itself, all of its own sensibility. It orients itself in a world which cannot exist in nature because, as an orientation grid, it is extended in time, and subsists independently of nature to that extent.

Individuals project their subjective freedom into the shared world of scientific pre-determinism, and they separately re-shape that world in both small and large ways. Individuals project their internal re-assemblies of the world, often knowingly pretended ones, into the actuality of nature and culture by specific movements of their bodies and by vocal utterances, by projecting a voice. So, the shared world that we all move through and depend on is far from being ‘all natural’. Along with pre-determined and unalterable nature, there is a complex of projections from within the subjective freedom of innumerable separate individuals.

It could be said that the world of shared phenomena has many horizons of freedom over which unpredictable creations are injected into perfectly predictable nature. There are multiple temporalities and one world of actuality, nature. We arrive at the necessity of these multiple universes by starting with Kant’s distinction between the inward experience of freedom and the outward world of phenomena in which everything is pre-determined, because the inward realm of freedom is individually unique subjective intelligence.

The Kantian observation of an irreducible duality of inward freedom versus outwardly pre-determined phenomena is included in the three givens schema:
1) Nature is the pre-determined structure of phenomena.
2) Subjective intelligence is the inward experience of freedom. Moral choices are exactly projections of inward freedom into practical action among phenomena.
3) Culture (and psychological interconnectedness) is outwardly rigid but originates in projections from subjective intelligences, projections which are then deliberately imitated as a social declaration of intelligence.

The idea of reality as a meeting of nature, subjective intelligences, and culture (the three givens) includes the idea of individuals projecting their particular inward freedom into the shape and events of nature and culture. Embodiment is both grounding and mechanism projecting freedom into nature and culture. Multiple subjective universes of freedom interconnect through the common universe of pre-determined nature and rigid, but gradually transforming, culture.

Individual subjective intelligences inject themselves into the triple-nexus of reality in a couple of different ways. 1) by continually re-assembling an orientation within reality from a question-based selection and integration of perceptions and sensations. Blog posting 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity, deals with the subjective re-assembly and construction of orientations. The other way, 2) is by projecting its freedom, its overcoming of particularity, into the objective world of nature and shared experience by acts of its embodiment.

There has never been clarity about the differences between individual subjective experience (force of personality); wild/brute nature; and culture as a collective human creation. Indeed there has been a (rationalist) preference to emphasize unity among them, attempting to make the three into one. The three givens line up with the rationalist metaphysical congruity of: nature; rational thinking/ knowledge; language/ geometry/ math/ logic. When that theory of an underlying congruity and ultimate unity breaks down we are left with three irreducible categories which continually impose on each other: nature, subjective intelligences, and culture.

The nature vs culture opposition is commonly discussed, but individual human creative power is not contained within that dyad. Culture is recognized as specifically human, as distinct from the great manifold of nature, but normally the individual human is overlooked in elemental constructs of reality. The reason that the philosophy elaborated here In The Blind Spot is called political is because it shows that every intelligence finds itself in a political situation and every individual is an element in any legitimate political theory and in any legitimate political system.

No Monism

The two strongest vectors of ancient philosophy had a combined effect of defining humanism. The first of those vectors was to remove disembodied personifications from explanations of events in the world of nature. There is no denying the cold beauty and wonder of nature, but it is absurd to ascribe the subjectivity of a human body to it. The second vector was to understand intelligence as transcendent, as the only transcendence. The two tendencies of thought, to soar into the transcendence of intelligence and to dig into the muck of culture and nature are both undeniable. Although there is some tendency to prefer the triumph of one over the other, it is difficult to find a compelling reason for a preference. Both must be considered together as a package. On such a view the individual human energy bonds together two realms of activity. On the subjective end is curious and discretionary, responsive, intelligence, the energy of personality. Subjectivity opens and encounters a world of non-discretionary energy, a world that shows no responsive personal intelligence, no curiosity or inventiveness (except with the notable exception of other persons). No monism or meaning of being can reduce the incongruence between intelligent subjectivity and non-intelligent nature.

1) Nature or Beautiful Unintelligence

Please see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky

Not everything fountains up from subjectivity, or expresses intelligence. Specifically, there is wild nature, brute nature, which is not an intelligence in the following sense: rocks and bushes do not imitate. There is a measurable world with shapes and processes, an objective flow of forces and structures provoking subjective irritations and gratifications. There is certainly something other than individual psychology in the determination of experience. Those other presences are nature, culture, and other individual intelligences. Nature we recognize as separate and not-self in experiences of work, feeding (hunger), and breathing (shortness of breath). The depletion in work is evidently not from the self. It is difficult to question the elementality of the resistances my muscles must strive against continually. The structure of my kinesthetic exertions makes up the shape of the world for me. There is a structure of metabolism: I must eat certain amounts of certain foods within certain intervals if I am to have the energy to move through my familiar openings, along my familiar ground.

Respect for nature requires an acknowledgment that we can never quite grasp it simply and entirely as it is. Anyone’s impression of the measurable world will be edited and evaluated in terms of their subjective point of view, biases, projects, needs, wishes, and fears, acquired mainly from ambient culture. There are personal and cultural distortions. However, objectivity is very clear in one sense because it involves everything with an appearance, everything that can be mapped and measured. The world of appearances that resists us and costs us, feeds us or at least contains raw materials, and generally proceeds unconcerned with our needs and desires, is not difficult for us to apprehend in our immediate locality. It dominates us so much that we abandon some of our dreams and desires because they find no place to thrive.

Although we experience that things move, grow, die, and decay in the objective world, philosophers and scientists search out eternal natural laws, mathematical patterns, or underlying elements that do not change, eternal foundations within the objective world through which change is reducible to permanence. So the objective world can seem to be the source of knowledge of eternal truths. That knowledge in turn can be used in controlling what happens in the world, projecting from subjective origins.

The gusher of creative personality was often sensed in nature, in storms and waterfalls and such, thought to be animated by spirits. Only secular modernity recognizes that nature specifically lacks personal intelligence, a momentous advance in understanding the human situation. That is how nature is distinct from personality. However, just because nature lacks personality does not mean intelligence needs to destroy it. Due respect for nature does not require a lie, no matter how noble. It is not helpful to personify objective nature.

Beyond Self-Absorption: Rationality Saved by Work

People have original impulses to play, to make a mark, and act on their curiosity, and those impulses inspire engagement with, and learning, the structures and processes of the environment, a system of restraints and resources surrounding any individual and not breakable by the individual’s own powers, desires, or imagination. That system draws the individual creative process into calculations of cost and work. What is real is that which costs energy, effort, thinking, work. The structures of work are the grounds on which individuals distinguish between wishes or impulses and achievements. The cost-shape of the world imposes itself on the muscles, metabolic system, and memory of the individual human body as well as on the action-oriented bearing expressed in movements of the body. There is not a pre-existing congruence but a mental orientation accepted and built from the encounter between human questioning and effort and objective surroundings, and that orientation stands as a structured base of rationality.

Muscle Memory

Muscle or kinesthetic memory includes practical or instrumental skills of manipulation and control of objects including a person’s own body. Language is not required. Muscle memory is acquired by trial and error, imitation, practice, repetition. Although such knowledge comes from the need to satisfy basic impulses and routine normality, it is objectively focused. It is the repetitive routine of work within world-openings, and also an enduring shape in expectation, intention, and bearing of an individual. Practical facts accumulate in a globalized orientation.

Muscle memory is part of direct personal acquaintance with nature and culture. The work-cost of gravity is a personal experience, just like the work-costs of object mass, inertia, and momentum. The sense of a cost-shape of familiar routes through the world is blended with sensual embodiment, the ebb and flow of energy and fatigue, personal pleasures and displeasures.

Metabolic Cost

Work is the fundamental way of knowing the surroundings. Sensations of movement and muscle-strain are especially important because they are measurements of cost. People use the decrease, and increase, of personal energy to measure the shape and scale of the world. The strength of everyone is reduced by effort, and we can feel the reduction. The feeling of effort is the experience of a cost against our strength and energy. We gauge the strength we have remaining in every effort we make. In a great effort we feel a quick depletion.

We learn to sense how much energy we can expend before needing restoration, and how far any particular exertion takes us toward that need. For example, by climbing we learn the specific decrease of vitality it takes to reach the top of a certain hill. If we discover something up there like a peach tree or a beautiful view, it may make the cost of the hill worth paying from time to time. Roughly speaking, the more distant a place is the greater the cost of reaching it. The farther it is to the store, the more reluctant I will be to walk there because I know the cost in effort and vitality that long walks require. Without comparison or reference to other kinds of perception we can sense the expenditure of quantities of personal energy. That cost is an absolute standard of separation in human experience. We have only a limited supply of energy to spend and that is part of the particularity of embodiment.

Embodiment brings the necessity to work. Human living has to be maintained continually by effort. We need to be taking in food, water, and breathable air which are all unevenly and thinly scattered in the landscape of the world. The survival of a human body requires special shelter and consumption of continually new supplies. Considerable effort has to be put into arranging a meeting between vital necessities and our body. The effort costs us readiness for further action, at regular intervals. We always reach a point at which we must rest and nourish ourselves again. Our ability to overcome the hold of gravity requires that we make up reductions in energy by feeding and resting.

The cost sense involves the ability of muscles to exert effort and the ability of the whole metabolic system of the body to supply and support muscles exerting effort. A particular person’s ability to absorb oxygen and digest available food is part of the process. If there is something wrong with the supply of food or air, a person will be tired even though their muscles are rested. The cost sense involves a whole system of supply and metabolism, a person’s placement, orientation, and practices within the environment, and their structure of muscle, bone, and sensation.

Perception of Space

As we casually look around a room we sense the distance to objects in terms of the cost in effort-through-time of reaching them. Yet that accessibility is not itself visible. Our sense of it is constructed from the experience of movements of muscle and joint and body, aimings, pushings, and fetching-up against resistances, all related to one another in their points of origin, direction, force, and duration. The experience of working to move about builds our mental grip on the shape and opening of the world around us. The shape of open and accessible passages and places that we learn from movements and efforts provides the structure for making sense of other sensations such as vision and sound. The cost-shape of accessibility is more important than the way things look.

Visual perceptions would be useless if they were not related to the experience of moving around by specific exertions. Although we have an accumulating memory of experiences of effort, at any moment our muscles cannot encounter places beyond the few meters within reach. Eyesight is a powerful auxiliary to effort-awareness because we can recognize visually the presence of doors, gates, passageways and destinations, for example, at a considerable distance. Sighted people go by visually sensed markers in orienting our movements, ‘aiming’ them among the other objects in the world, and those markers are useful because of muscle-metabolic knowledge of distances and costs.

Any collection of elemental experiences must include the embodiment experience of effort or work, the cost we experience in moving objects, including our own body, from one place to another. In ordinary experience, objects do not move without a certain cost being paid, and the cost, as sensation in human experience, is an effort of our muscle and metabolic system for some time, an effort that depletes us very specifically. It is exactly work that is the necessary connection between cause and effect. The idea ‘cause and effect’ includes this event of work being done or a cost being paid. That connection is perceived in a mode of perception not identified by the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), namely, the sensations of the muscle-bone-metabolic structure of the body.

2) The Second Given is Subjective Intelligence

See posting 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction
Two other postings, 23, March 8, 2012, The Brute Actuality of Nature, and 32, May 17, 2012, Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular are specifications of some bedrock of subjective intelligence.

Inward Re-orientation

Re-orientation by an intelligence is not done entirely with reference to outward markers. There is always an inward bearing from accumulations of past discoveries and previous efforts, directed around discoveries, in the cause of building a sustainable life. The rational impulse of subjective intelligence learns the structures, forces, and cost-structure of nature and also the utterance-forms which operate the cultural edifice of language and social gesture-systems in general. In that way rationality learns to serve as a bridge between hard nature and other intelligences channeling collective culture. Into that construct of personal intelligence, that bearing under construction, come inward inspirations, novel orientations and impulses, doubts, questions, and desires which shift the bearing, shift its vigilance and its probing of external information.

There is always the inward quest for a sustainable life and for self-awareness as a force of intelligence overcoming the particularity of embodiment. The force which re-orients is a questing force, holding and modifying a bearing that it has built over its life. Re-orientation is done, therefore, with reference to the whole past of this life, which does not exist in nature, and so with reference to much more than outward markers. There is an accumulation of complexity in a person’s bearing or vector, as curiosity, questioning, and inspiration engage with nature, culture, and other intelligences.

Subjective intelligence has re-orientation power, learning power, and also aesthetic conception, creative power to pretend different situations, and executive effect in embodiment. Freedom is self-directed re-orientation motivated from inward questions, curiosity, conceptions of possibilities and improvements.

Rationality and Bestiality

The main bearing of subjectivity attaches pretty strongly to hard nature and cultural norms, simply to survive day to day. The ongoing impulse to continue with that is ‘rationality’. However, that rational bearing takes many alternative impulses into consideration all the time, including those that were called ‘lower’ human nature, associated closely with the self-absorbed bestial body, instincts, appetites, quick-twitch reflexes and triggers of fear, anger, excitement, aggression, greed, laughter, or awe. The rational bearing calms many of those impulses but also builds their expressions into its pattern.

The Fountain of Subjectivity: Creative Process as Grounding

There is lots for intelligence to think about other than objects. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing. Action does result and skepticism does not apply. Individuals have a rich innocent subjectivity, an effortless gusher of curiosities, questions, and creative impulses to change things in specifically meaningful ways.

The internal flood of ideas and questions, of orientation change, is ultimately more interesting and productive than travel, conversation, trophies, luxurious consumer goods and services, or height on an organization chart. Individual curiosities, questions, and impulses to change things create, within an individual’s orientation, openings to objects and places and they form authentic attachments to the surroundings. The internal creative fountain has no use for competitions, ambition, prestige, standing, or comparisons of any kind. It does more than keep a person engaged, it can keep a person grounded against mythical entities glorified in culture, against fads, feuds, and fashions. The richness and creativity of individual innocence is capable of grounding a person in spite of the dominance of cultures, including language, in spite of the importance of cultural embeddedness and human interconnectedness.

An individual’s creative process is not motivated by competitions, or incentives and rewards. It is not motivated by forces outside the creative person but by the person’s intrinsic force of personality. It is a particular person being the particular person they are. The Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) is an example of someone whose creativity was such a valuable experience that she endured with very little recognition or reward for her wonderful paintings.

Making a Mark: Projection of Freedom

A person’s questions can be effective as well as searching, sensitizing, and receptive. Intelligence is fundamentally self-declaring. Sometimes the quest is for an external, objective presence such as a distinctive mark, gesture, or product. Intelligence is creative or inventive in making marks on the environment to make itself a distinct presence. Part of the product or mark is always the body itself, exceptionally so for bodybuilders, movie stars, and fashion models. More often the product or mark is a result of a person using his or her body-forces to shape materials in the environment, and so to experience power in accomplishment. The reward from work is both experience of force of personality in expressing personal emotions and thoughts, and a particular identity definition from the objective results. The pleasure of inventive work is obviously from self-declaration, but also from savoring body music, energy, sensitivity, and effective skill, the joy of being a lion, or of making spaghetti sauce.

The will to make a mark on the world is more than mere competition. It is an impulse to original creation of the world or parts of it. Builders can be competitive but they are also motivated by visions and plans of what should exist and still does not. Craftsmanship and design realize creativity, artistry, in particular materials.

In the self-expression of an individual, work is part of thinking. Efforts of the body are fundamental in the orientation and re-orientation by which a person realizes himself or herself. An idea is a feature of orientation, a vigil, a particular quest or question. What a particular person’s effect or mark will be depends on his or her inclinations. It might be a twist on pre-modeled accomplishments such as building a tower, a road, or a garden. It might be pyrotechnics, or tidying a room. It might also be something previously unthought. From whatever particular works invented, the worker achieves awareness of living a body, measuring surroundings, and force of personality in achieving an effect, all pre-cultural intuitions of an intelligence’s particularity and freedom.

Re-orientation: Perceiving Motion is Self-awareness

The sense of perceiving motion is a kind of self-awareness, because there is no motion in nature. Motion requires extension in time and that does not exist in nature. The sense of perceiving motion is awareness of personal re-orientation with respect to the objective surroundings, and since re-orientation is an act of intelligence, it is self-awareness. If you seem to disappear inwardly, if you can’t find yourself, it is crucial to remember there is no time in the brute actuality of nature. The experience of time is all experience of yourself: “I am experiencing time passing, therefore I exist.” The time-scape you inhabit is the self-creation of your personal intelligence. That is not to deny the unstoppable, relentless newness and incompleteness of our situation, the continuous necessity to keep reorienting to newness and incompleteness, the relentlessly increasing remoteness of every act of intelligence. Even in the awareness of temporality there is that grounding which is not self-imposed.

Emphasis on time-consciousness and on the cost-sense of metabolic-muscle-frame embodiment specifies the pervasiveness of orientation, and removes the false belief that language is the foundation of mental processes. Basic embodiment and the movement of intelligence to overcome its particularity in constructs of temporality, orientation, and development or building in time, are always dominant and pre-linguistic. They are the pre-cultural innocence we always can find as a grounding of freedom.

The Body is a Beach: Embracing Dualism

The individual human body is the encounter, the beach, between a complex and fruitful subjectivity with no appearance, and objective nature and culture. The body itself is an effective appearance, unique placement, powers of metabolism, a locomotive structure with mechanical abilities, a voice, and force of expression. The body’s particular sensitivities are also crucial, and they are inseparable from placement, structure, movement, and metabolic functioning. On the objective side of the body is the cost-shape marked out by work, duty, and other intelligences, everything with an appearance, everything measurable and chartable. The body’s unique placement is a feature of that situation.

On the subjective side we have the individual gusher of questions, curiosities, appetites and desires for self-preservation, pleasures and pains, gratification and suffering, creative impulses to mark the objective world, mental powers of opening, memory, bearings into the increasingly remote future including a sense of possibilities, probabilities, and negations. There is transcendence of objective nature and culture in the subjective gusher. Subjectivity is very poorly understood, partly because of traditions that identify subjectivity as tainted by original sin and as such demonic. It would be helpful to build from a more Epicurean integration of higher and lower in subjectivity, along with a balanced understanding of subject and object in their encounter and interaction.

3) Culture, Other Intelligences, and Interconnectedness

Please see posting 30, May 3, 2012, The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence
and posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations

Culture is, for one thing, accumulations, from an increasingly remote past, of human declarations of intelligence projected onto nature. Culture and interpersonal connectedness have been in philosophical work as political philosophy, ethics, searches for elemental foundations of civil society, religion, the logic of natural language (laws of thought?), and considerations of beauty, art, music, literary form, and fashionable taste. So, in spite of not being included in what I have called the two vectors of ancient philosophy, culture has always been a focus of philosophy, although not always recognized as part of a collective creation of human intelligences. Any individual intelligence will soak up everything we can of “the way we live in our group” but in addition to being exemplary, those cultural forms are experienced as restrictive norms or rules to be imitated and fitted into, sanctioned by incentives, rewards, and punishments, as exterior forces and structures not from the inward surprise horizon but from the external surprise horizon. They frequently constrain and restrict personal accomplishments, personal marks on the world, sometimes even dreams and pretending in day dreams.

People have a natural, innate, or innocent gift for spontaneously creating social attachments. Acquisition of spoken language is part of that talent. It is a robust gift and an easy accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are not ‘unnatural’ in any way and do not require leadership, supervision, religious revelations, visions of heaven or hell, gods or demons, codes of law, threats of insult, injury, or death, or any other special intervention or extraordinary circumstances. There is no social contract and no need for one because social attachment is a casual accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are based on deliberate acts of imitation as expressions of intelligence. Rocks and bushes do not imitate. Although imitative culture is not unnatural it is not preordained or “hard-wired” either. Culture is largely accident and spur of the moment invention, ad hoc, and provisional. It is software, updating continuously in patches. However, an accomplished pattern of behaviour will exert a force of attraction as a model, and will tend to be imitated. The ways of life, language games, and ways-of-being practiced in any group have a strong force of attraction as models to be imitated as a way of attaching with a clear and distinct manifestation of intelligence.

Everyone has a great store of knowledge about their personal language community and how, within that community, it is possible to function and play with language. Social attachments embed individuals in sets of imitative activities which constitute cultures. Adults generally are sufficiently embedded to be almost entirely determined by cultural influences. The menu of life narratives and scripts made available by a particular culture has a determining influence on how an individual understands and relates to his or her environment. As ‘objective reality’ is always approached from within that sort of cultural narrative it is always edited, selected, and interpreted to serve the narrative. Experience is profoundly conditioned or qualified by cultural influences in ways which blur the distinction between culture and nature. Very much of what is taken to be brute nature is actually mutable culture.

It is normal for people to construct a personal identity avatar from cultural models, a presentation of identity that is a construct for engagement with cultural systems, a social construct in that sense, a display of ascriptions of status and dignity, or lack of them, to enable some sustainable free-passage and even co-operation in social and economic arrangements. That ego-construct is a schema to hold up a gravitas score, placement on a culturally defined scale of worth, the outcome of social competitions. It is an objectified manikin often masking the inward richness of a person.

Other Intelligences

Culture is recognized as a set of resistant forces from beyond the self in the weight of duty, of fitting in, playing the game, sometimes even in grammar rules and word definitions. A person’s whole body serves as a social gesture, something that is in good taste and pleasant, respectable or not, decent or not, respected or not. Also, in the play of conversational imitations we recognize intelligences that are not our own. When we personify objective events we take them as declarations of intelligence, declarations of something with a questioning, curious, and caring sensitivity to its (and our) surroundings, of something that can anticipate probable variations into an increasingly remote future. When we personify events we take them as revelations of a particular will, as discretionary expressions of a program of intentions, of moral judgment, and as emotional reactions. Another intelligence is also something that can penetrate our personal subjectivity by making sense of our location, appearance, and actions. It is something that can be aware, to some indefinite extent, of our personal orientation grid and our bearing out of a past and into an increasingly remote future. It is often assumed that disembodied gods and spirits are aware of everything about our subjectivity.

Seeing other people creates another freedom. It enables a broader range of possible behaviour than purely spontaneous personal impulses.

Explaining What Happened Without Science

Desire, purpose, emotion, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been acceptable and often preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations, so great is the vigilance and sensitivity of an intelligence to find others. In ordinary conversation, explanation of events based on the motives of personalities as forces in the world has been privileged over material cause and effect. “Somebody did it.” “A ghost or demon did it.” “God did it.” These are all still accepted among educated people as sufficient accounts of why and how something happened. There is even an inclination to fall back onto such act-of-personality explanation where it is clearly not appropriate: “There is a little guy inside the machine who counts the money you put in and drops out the change.” Anyone who claims belief in god, gods, or a deity is irrevocably committed to personality and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything.

Empathy is often difficult in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be very common. We are ambivalent about separate intelligences because they often interfere with us, even strive to enslave us, but on the whole we treasure them since we experience intelligence most distinctly in the challenge and response that gets going among separate intelligences. Toward the disembodied personalities identified as gods, people do not feel empathy but wheedling fear. Still, beings moved by questions, separate universes of orientation within temporality, sometimes shelter each other from the terrifying boundless darkness of our situation, uniting by respectful imitation as well as by physical closeness.

People have ascribed personality to objective events far too often. Given that humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees and storms, there is no reason why we might not imagine personality in computers and robots. Certain natural phenomena were seen to be moving under their own inner motive force in coherent patterns and misjudged as being ready or capable of normal intelligent imitations. The storm was seen to act out an angry outburst by a terrifying father. Fathers do not do that because of their ‘hard wiring’, but because they must imitate a certain social role. Seeming intelligent is not a matter of being structured and ‘hard wired’ so that you cannot help but behave in ‘human’ patterns, because most ‘human’ behaviour is based on imitation of currently fashionable models in the ambient social system, and not on physical structure or nervous system ‘wiring’. Humans judge intelligence by an entity’s ability to imitate variably, and so to act out social roles and form social attachments and build conversations.

The two strongest vectors of ancient philosophy counteract the over-application of personification. The first of those vectors was to remove disembodied personifications from the explanation of events in nature. The second vector was to understand normal embodied intelligence as the authentic transcendence: humanism.

So we have work, duty, language rules, and the challenge-and-response among many intelligences to ground us against isolation within our own day dreams. Those forces all surprise us, impose upon us, resist and bestow gifts, in ways we could not do ourselves. When skepticism about the objective world, even solipsism, is proposed, we have available as individuals experiences of resistance from unalterable forces that are not originated from our subjectivity and which we must learn to operate within.

A Portal in Common Use

Social attachments and the subjective well of inspiration create a tug-of-war against each other in every individual. Normally the social attachments win out and mute the gusher of individual creativity. However, the personal gusher of curiosities, questions, and impulses to change things can be a way out of the mind-set of hegemonic culture, and legions of individuals use it routinely without necessarily identifying it. There is not a lot of public discussion of that mental exercise, whereas there is a tsunami of public discussion about engagement in the market culture of consumption, for example. People have access to both sides of the portal and engage in one side or the other more or less as attractions and gratifying enterprises emerge on one side or the other. The culture of freebooting reading and writing often assists the inward value portal. The public culture of market values has had a great run of both bread and circus attractions, but environmental damage as well as personal injuries from its narrowness in expressing humanity are piling up and setting off alarms.

We see here the context of a pendulum swing in cultural history. Sometimes there is a general sentiment to avoid individuality and to meld with the human herd. At other times there is a widespread rage to throw off the collective weight and grip the world with the innocence and power of individual mentality. Ordinary people must regularly draw on both the culture of their community and their own innocent powers.

There has always been clarity about the separateness or objectivity of nature and since language is not the creation of any individual there has been an assumption that language is an objective phenomenon arising from nature and from the human nature which connects mental activity to the world at large. A similar assumption influences thinking about ethics. On the traditional approach to questioning nature, logic, and ethics in philosophy the purpose is to show their unity. They are really supposed to be one metaphysical item. However, they are not one item, but three, with profound irreducible differences between individual power and experience, wild/brute nature, and culture as a collective human creation.

Transcendence and Dualism

The idea of transcendence has a dualism built-in or pre-supposed. If there is to be a ‘rising above’, there must be something below from which to begin the ascent. The higher-lower dualism can also be seen as an inner-outer dualism, such that inner (subjective intelligence) is higher, and outer (the objective world of bodies) is lower, but the close entanglement of those two givens really removes the taint from what is not transcendent and tilts the whole vision toward optimism.

Environmental Alienation

People despise dualism for seeming to disconnect and alienate us from our natural environment. “Cartesian dualism” is cited as the root cause of industrial pollution and corporate degradation of habitat for all forms of life. However, those calamitous trends are not the result of dualism. Materialist monism has turned everything into mechanical clockwork and in doing so has ‘in theory’ removed subjective intelligence from individuals as such, and from humans collectively. Monism does not merge the living human essence with beautiful nature, but instead hacks off real intelligences altogether. Without minds we have been encouraged to live as zombie avatars consuming everything in our path. Monism has transformed the world into a ‘virtual reality’ which can be destroyed with impunity because everything is already pre-determined, already dead. Transcendental dualism is a means of regaining agency, intelligence, and creativity and breaking the reign of forlorn scientific reductionism.

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Gender culture, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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As an individual subjective intelligence, you wake up in innocence and look around to get your bearings. You concentrate on discovering your situation, where you are and what’s going on around you that bears on your welfare and prospects. In that process you discover culture and politics, and you discover that you are in the middle of a raging war that is, in effect, a great secret because hardly anyone notices it. It is a psychological war, a war of incompatible visions, and it looks like the bad guys have the upper hand.

This blog, In the Blind Spot, generally explores the history and current state of that war, the rivalry and combat between two visions of the human situation, two very old enemies. On one side is the philosophical vision of people as individually transcendent intelligences, the tradition of humanist rationalism and Stoicism, for example. My attempts at interpreting and extending that tradition are typically in aid of clarifying the overall situation of individual subjectivity: in aid of self-discovery, self-possession, personal empowerment, and voice. Postings of that kind include:
Encountering subjectivity
Existential non-appearance
What is being called thinking?
The transcendence of intelligence
The brute actuality of nature

If we can characterize modernity roughly as the era of state sovereignty, science, money, human rights, and proletarian literacy, then the presence of the last two items means the vision of individual transcendence has not been utterly defeated. In humanism, the legacy of classical heroism is manifested in a narrative of the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, classical heroism turned inward and made universal. That has been an influence against the legitimacy of slavery and abuse. We could not call any society modern that accepts slavery. The ownership class claims the freedom to enslave workers (value them less so to achieve and depict radical inequality in material displays), but in modernity the freedom to enslave confronts humanist individual dignity. Literacy also has been crucial because voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence. Authorship engraves and extends a voice beyond the ephemerality of conversation and speech. The literary voice is both public and private, internal and external, straddling the distinction. Reading and writing, literacy, has been a technology of honouring individual voices. Having a voice is godlike, that is, transcendent. Holy books have been thought to carry the divine voice.

The opposing vision in this great war is the religious vision of monotheistic divine dictatorship and the radical inequality that follows from it. That vision of divine dictatorship is cultural malware which infects and infests the great human interconnectedness. With the spread and dominance of the monotheistic religious traditions over the homelands of Hellenistic humanism, there descended a philosophical dark age that began under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I (347-395 A.D.). The dark age extended roughly from 380, when Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity the only legitimate religion of the Roman Empire, until well after Martin Luther (1483-1546) began a revival of something like Stoic humanism. That long age was dark because there were insane punishments for thinking unorthodox thoughts. The thirteenth century struggle in which the Roman Church exterminated the Cathars of Languedoc was a defining moment in which the Church revealed its mission of death-grip social control. In the case of the Cathars, the Church first applied its old technique, launching a crusade (1209-29), and then followed up with a special invention for the purpose: the Inquisition (1233). The murder of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), executed by burning alive by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, is a late example of that same vicious repression. Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as such did not burn anyone, no matter how much disagreement there might be. Burning people was a Christian speciality.

The debate or war between the monotheistic worldview of divine dictatorship and the philosophical tradition of individual transcendence is a clash of cultures within western civilization itself. That culture clash is as lethal as any between different civilizations. It is also asymmetrical warfare, since the divine dictatorship fable was, from the beginning, and continues to support, a projection of the archaic alpha-trophy-looting model of predatory masculinity. The war is not a contest for power, but rather a lust for and possession of power on one side against an urge for self-possession and freedom on the other. Capitalist alpha-trophy-looting culture (ATL) is the modern face of the ancient malware that is divine dictatorship, reinforced in post-Roman Europe with a glorification of looting by nomadic invaders from the north-east. Capitalist sovereignty draws its brutality, energy, and orientation from that tradition, and has been extending its dominance. Nothing is gained through stopping the vision-war by giving up, but only by defeating the oppression. Blog postings that map out that historical drama are:
The Two Traditions
Reality as a Construct for Concealing Class War
Gender Culture in the Political Situation
Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom
Theological Black Holes

The war of visions is not a closed system, however. A third cultural force and tradition was identified in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations, and then elaborated in posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation, namely the female-carried culture of first language acquisition and nurture (FLN – first-language-nurture). First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it continuously day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. That third force carries far more antiquity, energy, and potential than the philosophical tradition, and it would be hopeful if those forces could be allies in creating alternatives excluding the common enemy.

The raging of the vision-war came into focus in the original attempt to find bearings as a subjective intelligence, waking up in innocence and concerned about the prospects for a satisfying life. The vision-war is of crucial importance but is not the whole story in the problematic situation of any subjectivity. There is something like an innate subjective imperative to discover itself, arising from the fact that subjectivity seems to have a blind spot and in fact itself resides in that blind spot. The elusiveness of self-identification highlights the fact that both inward and outward investigations are crucial in the effort to establish personal bearings. A special sort of mirror is needed to show a blind spot containing a force with no face, but the project of inward investigation has been marginal among commonly respected human efforts. There is a cultural history in that as well, the same history that features the war of the two visions. A primordial failure to reflect on subjectivity, inwardness, maroons us on a kind of surface of subjectivity, stranded within external surroundings. Lacking the grounding of self-awareness, we are enabled to feel and grasp our own being only by accomplishing overt gestures and representations, often shaped by the needs of simple survival, and often grandiose demonstrations supposed to defy any hints of uncertainty, to express contemptuous rejection of elusive inwardness. That orientation became a shell, comfortable, habitual, and culturally normal. Within that orientation of strident outwardness the heroes and exemplars of confident human power would always be the alpha trophy accumulators, who then project their own version of personification onto the cosmos as the father-god, the ultimate dictator and war-god. The counterweight to that can be only the assertion of inwardness, and so we are brought back again to that first set of postings on interpreting and extending the tradition of individual transcendence.

This narrative is a small catalog of reference points for an alternative, elemental, orientation.

The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Narrative, Subjectivity

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The situation of any person is far more complicated than location in a material environment (being-there), although placement in a material environment is elemental. Every person is also situated within a human environment and the human environment is always in an historical drift. It is useful to pick out ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ aspects of that human environment, but political aspects are just particular features of the cultural situation. Considering both the human and material features of the environment, what any individual encounters outwardly is material determinism and cultural and political control. That is the context in which the question “How can freedom be possible?” has to be answered.

The Social Life of Intelligence

In general, any person seeks to maximize the experience of intelligence or personality through creating mutual reflections or resonances with other intelligent entities. Although questioning is peculiarly individual, we all have questioning, voice, and existence-in-time in common as intelligent entities. Culture is poorly understood, but builds from this: imitation communicates intelligence; rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is a declaration of intelligence, an odd sort of self-declaration: “I can re-create from myself all that is external. As intelligence, I contain everything.” It is the beginning of the human social-nature. Imitation has such power just because rocks and bushes do not imitate. Imitation is an intelligent act, a communication of deliberative intelligence. That is the whole basis of culture. Conversation is an intelligence game, acts of clear repetition, but each with a relevant novelty thrown in as a personal contribution and as an invitation for a further collective movement. Music may focus the natural rhythms of the body, but it takes them into a game of abstract expectation and surprise, a conversation of pure intelligence. The experience of intelligence is a subjective value, that is, we keep wanting more.

In addition to forms of subjectivity such as curiosity, appetites, and expressive impulses, there is that force of mutual attachment which is neither gravitational, electro-magnetic, nor nuclear, but a force peculiar to intelligences. The force of mutual attachment has different aspects, including an orientation toward sources of attention, kisses, help, food, and the reflection of intelligence. We experience our nature best, in some ways, in resonance with other time-conscious entities, and so we come to absorb ourselves in relationships with and imitations of other people. An enlargement of the sense of intelligence is accomplished by imitating socially modeled activities: the way we live in our group, and that situates the imitating person as the medium needed by cultural forms to propagate through yet another generation. Mutual stimulation is natural to time-conscious entities, but the resulting attachments take forms which are imitated unconsciously, and take on an importance which is more enduring and more apparent than individuals.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, postures, gestures, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Although we might be born free, we have no choice about social participation. We need a caring social group to ferry us across infancy and childhood. That caring group itself needs others for mutual support in dealing with the indifferent environment. Both the immediate group and the larger one assign us objective categories such as boy or girl, good looking or not, strong or sickly, good or bad reader, good or bad athlete, good or bad singer, good or bad. Quite early these groups assign us tentative economic roles such as tinker, taylor, soldier, sailor, clergyman, teacher, driver, cook, cleaner. Those roles and categories have fixed characteristics. They have the face of objectivity and eternal validity as varieties of human nature. So individuals are objectified by social participation.

The Great Interconnectedness

Social interconnectedness is essential for humans, and in many ways the greatness of humanity resides in the web of our conscious interconnectedness as a collective creation. As isolated energies we are dramatically more restricted to a locality, less powerful, less expressed, less happy, and in many ways less free. We look at the world out of interconnectedness. The feat of visiting the moon was accomplished by a human interconnectedness, and not by a few individuals. The foundation of that interconnectedness is language. Learning a first language, accomplished in infancy, sets up habits of conversation, conversational skill, pleasure, and readiness to converse which enable a lifetime of personal connections and bring a vast collective sophistication to the individual. Culture generally is both product and mechanism of interconnectedness.

The interconnectedness of consciousness across multitudes of individuals is different from culture, and separately important. Every individual’s orientation toward news, gossip, stories, textbook presentations, or popular culture, in the family or village, at work, in the nation or the world, is part of the great interconnectedness. That orientation connects each single intelligence to all others with attention on the same range of information, as well as to the persons and themes about whom the stories and presentations report. It also connects each individual to the arc of information that has gone before and which is expected to go on being renewed and enlarged, and so watched routinely, refreshed routinely.

Isolated lives participate in producing the great interconnectedness of intelligences. For that, intelligence needs deliberation but also cooperative attachments with other lives. An individual’s knowledge is enabled to go beyond strictly personal acquaintance to include what an untold number of others have discovered, thought, doubted, and imagined, the projection of possibilities and probabilities, and it enables the integration of an unlimited number of points of view on the world and the prospects of a life. Individuals receive many gifts from the social interconnectedness that surrounds and nurtures us through infancy. In return, families, religions, communities, and states make claims on the energies, talents, ways of thinking, and emotional allegiance of individuals. In addition, there are disorders of the grand structures within the interconnectedness of people, and there are injuries from too great a submission of individual energy to the web of interconnection.

The Ego-Avatar Constructed for Social Attachment

There are very few times or activities which do not involve social supervision. Childhood and formal education are almost entirely training in dependence on a supervised system of incentives and rewards. Any work for pay is supervised. Any act for spiritual salvation is supervised. Any society with a focus on religion or on work for pay is a supervising cultural matrix. Supervision normally involves an incentive and reward system, even if the reward is only praise or approval from an authority figure such as a teacher.

Organizations and informal groups exert influence on any individual in sight, sound, and touch of them in a number of ways. 1) There are norms, customs, feuds and fashions, ways of standing, walking, talking, playing, getting food, dressing, topics of conversation, menus of attitudes to express in conversations, menus of moves in the current conversation game. 2) Collectives have organized structures of productive work or effort into which individuals can fit and earn a place as well as vital rewards. 3) A big group ‘personality’ is a safe and powerful collective intelligence to meld with. The myriad social micro-patterns relate us to macro-entities: playing a category such as man or woman, for example, is training for belonging within the economic and political arrangements of a nation, city, family, or religion. Customs and norms are imitated more or less unconsciously, for intelligent invisibility within the herd-system, but when ignored they are enforced. We choose ‘the way we live in our group’ rather than exile into a wilderness of isolation and uncertainty.

There is a social construct, the ego-avatar, which is different from the subjective person. The ego is a display of tags of status and dignity, or lack of them, a schema to display a gravitas score, to display placement on a culturally defined scale of worth, the trophies of social competitions. This has much in common with Freud’s “superego”, a mental internalization of public authority figures or role models, which then act as a restraint on merely personal impulses. In the alpha dominated world of big brittle egos in pageants of competition, egoistic aggrandizement is a social and historical creation. Intelligence creates and builds ego-avatars but is not limited to avatars or to any particular avatar.

The force of mutual attachment is rewarding enough to challenge all other impulses and rewards, but cultural formations also manage to take on a force of their own by inspiring loyalty and personal identification in many people. From that emerges a custom of social control and enforcement based on intentional injury to people who do not conform. Basic inter-personal attachments shape an individual’s voice to what being-together with others will permit. It is easy to assume that a personal relationship is entirely the product of the participants, but not all bearings are direct from the pre-cultural self. The self also pretends, learns roles and avatars, and imitates. If anyone is bringing learned behaviour such as language to the ways in which being together is practiced, they are incorporating social pageantry and value assignments. We live in an environment of cultural value assignments, narratives, explanations, and rhetorical defenses of social collectives and the function-roles that structure them.

No individual has much control over the evolutionary momentum of big cultural entities such as states, cities, religions, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink. In that way they are similar to biological evolution. Our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for millions of years. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. The dead ‘momentum’ of social forms soon separates us from awareness of the originality of our personal intelligence.

It makes a crucial difference that innocent, pre-cultural, individual impulses are of the nature of curiosity and creative impulses to mark the world. The social nature of people brings with it a default cultural hegemony and a resulting alienation of innocent creativity. However, individual rationality in actual behaviour or practice does not require the social and cultural constraint, nor any occult congruence between knowledge, nature, and language. Nothing prevents even innocent individuals from appreciating the needs of others. In fact people do that easily and so are enabled to establish human attachments and learn spoken language in the first place. (Please see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.)

People have a natural, innate, or innocent gift for spontaneously creating social attachments. Acquisition of spoken language is part of that talent. It is a robust gift and a very early accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are not unnatural in any way and do not require leadership, supervision, religious revelations, visions of heaven or hell, gods or demons, codes of law, threats of insult, injury, or death, or any other special intervention or extraordinary circumstances. There is no social contract and no need for one because social attachment is a casual accomplishment for ordinary people. Social attachments are based on deliberate acts of imitation as expressions of intelligence. Although imitative culture is not unnatural, it is not preordained or “hard-wired” either. Culture is largely accident and spur of the moment invention, ad hoc, and provisional. It is software, updating continuously in patches. The ways of life, language games, and ways-of-being practiced in any group have a strong force of attraction as models to be imitated as a way of attaching with a clear and distinct manifestation of intelligence. Since ‘objective reality’ is approached from within some such cultural narrative, it is edited, selected, and interpreted to serve that narrative. Experience is profoundly conditioned or qualified by cultural influences in ways which are easy to misidentify. Social attachments embed individuals in sets of imitative activities which constitute cultures. Adults generally are sufficiently embedded to be almost entirely determined by cultural influences. The menu of life narratives and scripts made available by a particular culture has a determining influence on how an individual understands and relates to his or her environment.

Beyond Groupthink: Innocence

All this being said, we do not need to experience intelligence only in collectives. Self as innocent questioning, voice, and existence-in-time is already self-subsisting intelligence. We are blocked from that experience by our early involvement in collective intelligence. The sweet kick we get from bouncing off the voices of other time-conscious entities, is compromised by the bitterness of having intelligence confined, blocked, and forced to repeat endlessly its least powerful functions. A stronger experience of intelligence is available in deliberative self-possession, in reclaimed innocence. The normal absorption of individual intelligence within cultural forms makes sense of a project to reclaim innocence, to recognize pre-cultural intelligence and to re-think personal orientation to include that recognition.

(Note: The three graces are: nature, subjective intelligence, and culture.)

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Revival of Freedom

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

Freedom, and the Genie of Lower Human Nature

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

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

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

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

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

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

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

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

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynic Innocence

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

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

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

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

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

Truth to Power

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

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

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

Hellenistic Rationality

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

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

Hellenistic Transcendence

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

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

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

Materialism and the Gods

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

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

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

The Stoic answer is that individual freedom is achieved when a person cultivates and asserts his or her innate rationality. Rationality is difficult to define precisely, but there are fairly clear starting points. Rationality is linked to the quality of a person’s voice. A person’s voice is rational if it can be understood, matches norms of linguistic and logical competence, and shows a sense of relevance to the occasion. A person is rational when she can speak her mind and say what she means in a way others can understand. Rational thought can be spoken and understood by others. Existence in linguistic form gives it a kind of objectivity and graspability. It will hold its form while people reflect and evaluate. This is related to a broader meaning, something like “reasonable” or “in agreement with good sense.” Rationality stands up to reflective and collective evaluation and judgment. In addition, rational action, for example, demonstrates a functional awareness of the shapes, costs, and benefits in the natural and social environment. A person’s acts can be seen to have a reason.

Perhaps rationality is clearest in opposition to natural impulse, for example, an impulse to avoid working by simply stealing what you need. The account of Hobbes’s thinking in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era is exactly relevant to that point. ‘Will’ is the product of rational deliberation in evaluation of consequences, as distinct from merely following immediate inclination or impulse. Bestial reflex or impulse, pre-set by something like biological instinct, is not free, but acts of ‘will’ are discretionary expressions of deliberative calculation. Rationality empowers personal freedom by matching a person’s interests and expectations with the broader structures of the world and with verbal-linguistic accompaniments to acting in the world.

Stoicism was founded on experience of a personal force of mentality which can over-ride habit, appetite, first impressions, and impulsive passion or emotional response. Questioning those responses, delaying or denying action on them, magnifies consciousness of their force and of subjective forces which balance and modify them, specifically the force of rational intellect. That is strictly subjective virtue, a way to encounter subjectivity which bestows new meaning on appearances and objects.

Behind the common sense rationality of an efficient matching up of a person’s activities and vocal performances with features and occasions in their surroundings, there is a philosophical quest for a deep congruence uniting the objective world with the language which refers to its features and with subjective knowledge of the world. The Stoic idea of Logos was taken to imply such a metaphysical congruence or literal unity among matters of fact, knowledge as a mental state, and the linguistic presentation of knowledge. The logic of language was interpreted as the bridge, with rationality or intellect grounded in language. The inward mental activity of thinking was understood as linguistic and propositional, essentially the same in form as a conversation among a number of people, in writing or in speech. A rational self as the locus of thought, in the sense of knowledge of and practice of language, is a crucial piece of rationalism. On that view it isn’t only thoughts that manifest rationality. The objective world is also rational in being lawful, determinate, and predictable; and statements in language are rational when formed according to normal rules. Rationality is a characteristic of all three, just as Truth is. The idea of Truth expresses the fundamental unity of these three modes of being.

Virtue and Individuality

Stoicism was based on the idea of world-intelligence or Logos, which acquired the presence of a benevolent or providential God, identical with the whole of nature. Logos was an all-inclusive principle, completely pre-determining every detail of cosmic existence forever. Stoics attempted to identify some personal individuality within that framework of determinism, fatalism, materialism, and eternal recurrence of historical events. In spite of being officially materialist, Stoics emphasize a special ‘fiery’ nature in Logos. Stoics believed they were aware of that world-soul or ordering intelligence in microcosm in each person’s power of reasoning and choice. With events unfolding according to Nature’s Law the individual could control nothing but his or her own thinking, and could find freedom only in choosing to accept Nature by achieving as broad and inclusive a perspective as possible. Divine Providence determines human circumstances and behaviour to such an extent that the best a person can do is to love his or her fate, but individuals have the power to choose for or against assenting to and loving their embeddedness in nature. However, Stoicism was not mysticism. The desirable condition for Stoics was emotional aloofness from surrounding conditions and events, achieved by awareness of cosmic order and especially by self-control.

The metaphysics of world-Logos, the divine Word or Command, established a heavy framework for the very limited freedom or divine spark of each person. The fundamental insight is that Logos is experienced in two ways, both externally as objective nature, and internally as personal intelligence in which an element of freedom is exercised. Basic to Stoicism is a great divide between the outward world that is beyond the control of any individual, and the inward existence which is entirely under each person’s individual power. There was a core teaching dealing with the individual’s identification of and exercise of freedom. Their teaching was to minimize attachment to the external, and maximize subjective control. In order to develop mental skills, thinking, they used thinking to control attachments to external goods, properties, prestige, reputation, trophies, wealth, and even health, values arising from appetites and ambitions. They emphasized that even when worldly rewards and reputation are taken away, the dearest value remains.

Rationality against Passions, Immediate Impulses, and First Impressions

Stoics identified freedom with ‘reason’ and contrasted it with ‘passions’, and that can be taken as a higher vs. lower distinction. They came to identify abstract reasoning or calculation as the inward spark of divine freedom-fire. It tended to set up an identity between reason and order, law, rules, formality, and control. The focus of Stoicism turned to preventing or controlling flights of passion. Virtue was acting from a practiced process of reasoning. There is ‘pure-reasoning’, such as logic or mathematics, and also ‘practical or moral reasoning’ in decisions about action and behaviour, but on the Stoic view virtue requires a practice of mental calculation, application of principles to particular situations. Passions vs. intellect is an inner conflict. Thinking can achieve control of passions but the outer world is entirely the expression of Logos and beyond the control of any individual’s thinking. Rationality distinguishes between what can be controlled and what not, and highlights the indifference of everything that is beyond control, externalities. The higher vs. lower conflict translates into an inner vs. outer conflict. There is an absolute limit to determinism in Stoicism and that limit is the individual’s intrinsic power of will, understood as an executive expression of rationality.

Ancient Stoicism was officially empiricist. Knowledge was achieved from sense-experience, from the impressions made by sensations on the ‘blank slate’ of individual consciousness. Long before John Locke, Stoics understood persons as ‘blank slates’ onto which impressions were left by the sensations of the body. Sense-experience was the source of truth and knowledge, and not a realm of illusion as it was for Plato. However, since individuals could keep passions in their place by developing a practice of reasoning, the ‘slate’ of individual consciousness could not have been completely blank. A blank slate does not have the ability to reason, nor does it have forceful passions which compete with reason to edit and organize impressions of the body.

It would not be accurate to say that Stoics hated and feared nature at large, and yet they hated and feared nature in the passions of human subjectivity. Stoic acceptance of Logos meant that nature at large was a manifestation of divine providence, and a great accomplishment of thinking was to understand this sufficiently to accept acts of nature as providential. Although social and political role-fulfillment was considered necessary, Stoics practiced non-attachment, indifference, to events, objects, and conditions in the world, and that indifference has much in common with a rejection of ‘outer’ nature in favour of transcendence via a particular power of subjectivity, the inward spark of intelligence.

Intelligence as Virtue

Hellenistic Stoicism and other philosophical sects of that period attracted an important following, even though the world people faced then was hardly more horrifying or discouraging than what most people throughout history have faced. It was a creed that appealed to the powerful classes in the social order of the Roman Empire. Stoicism was widespread and influential in Roman culture during the period when Christianity was developing within the Empire, and made important contributions to Christian thought. Stoics approached ‘religion’ as a mental exercise of rational thinking, rule-governed calculation. The life of freedom based in rational thinking was considered happiest. Mental exercise was their portal to freedom, intelligence, and virtue or authenticity as humans, as well as their personal contact with the spark of divine Logos.

For Stoics, virtue was a focus on what is completely under the control and authorship of each individual, contrasted with ‘external’ conditions which the individual can never fully control. Stoic virtue was precisely subjectivity itself, aloofness from the effects of external objects and circumstances, and instead a concentration on subjective control in personal acts of thought. It was supposed to make a difference and accomplish something crucial for Stoics to do the small personal act of taking hold mentally of their own virtue by thinking about emotional reactions, impulses, and habits. No claims to surpass, defeat, control, lead, or exploit anybody else are involved. You recognize what is most certainly and undeniably your own, your intelligence, and give it a chance to exist. What can be completely authored by each individual is exactly what is most important and fundamental, an inward act of self-realization.

Freedom

Ancient societies were slave-labour based, and there was a very clear and immediate sense of freedom as not being controlled by a master in daily life. However, that common freedom was not the whole story. There were three levels of freedom: 1) not being controlled by a master, 2) strategic rationality overriding “knee-jerk” impulses in pragmatic situations, and 3) mental transcendence of nature. The most important freedom was conceived as freedom from nature itself, especially as represented in the body, associated with privation, suffering, illness, unquenchable desire, and mortality. Stoics can’t transcend all inclusive Nature, but they transcend the least fiery aspect, the strictly determined external aspect of Nature. Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics thought rational thinking was the route to that greatest freedom. Philosophical sects of the Hellenistic period all shared a program of development of personal rationality with a transcendent purpose, to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. In that state of developed intelligence an individual rose above the suffering of ordinary body-centered ways of life. It was a deliberate way of “being in the world but not of it”.

With Hellenistic Greek thinkers there was a rise of the individual as author of deliberation and strategic resistance to natural impulses. With Epicureans, the individual was also the sufferer of pleasure and pain. The individual as such was emphasized more than previously, so much so that this is perhaps the historically crucial conception of the dignity of the individual person which is definitive of western humanism. Classical Greece and Rome had strong literary depictions of individual personality in gods and heroes. Thinking sects of the period might be described as developing heroism turned inward.

See also the posting of October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence

Theological Black Holes

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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

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Martin Luther’s interpretation of the leap of faith went beyond divine Grace into individual creative power. Familiarity with the Stoic idea of freedom is plausible groundwork for Luther’s conclusion that you can’t be certain of anything except your own internal act of self-creation, self-determination, self-declaration. Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” is a slight recasting of that insight. Luther’s finding internal power to experience transcendence, overcoming the oppressive gravity of original sin and the taint of nature, showed a way for Descartes and other Baroque era rationalists to abandon the age-old terror of nature and apply rationality to understanding the laws of a merely clockwork nature. It also enabled Jean-Jacques Rousseau to experience a new kind of love of nature, initiating an important thread of romanticism in philosophy. The beginning of the change in the cultural attitude to nature was Luther’s overcoming original sin in human nature.

However, there were still tenets of religion, deeply rooted, that contradicted the tendency from Luther’s work to ascribe freedom to individuals. The natural progress of philosophical thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built on increasing appreciation of fruitful subjectivity, responding also to the increasing esteem for individual minds as literacy became more universal. For several reasons, however, philosophical discoveries about subjectivity did not have their natural consequences in the Euro-American cultural system. Instead of having a balanced understanding of subjectivity and objectivity we have totalitarian objectification.

Two metaphysical propositions of mainstream Christianity stand as barriers to progress. The first is the view, from Augustine, that human nature is so weak and prone to evil that it needs continual supervisory repression and intimidation to achieve a semblance of good. With original sin corrupting the inward person, individuals cannot be trusted to themselves and there is no basis for inward values such as creativity, which genuinely define individual persons. All virtue must be objectively defined and enforced with authoritarian systems of incentive, reward, and punishment. That ancient prejudice was re-invigorated in the backlash against the French Revolution of 1789, and has endured at a semi-conscious level as a bedrock justification for inequality and supervisory control of “the masses”. It has also served as an excuse for the powerful to torture, murder, and enslave. In addition, there is a bit of Christian theology or metaphysics common to monotheism, claiming creativity as a special and definitive attribute of divinity, so only God is capable of creativity. That rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In a cultural system still quietly dominated by Christian metaphysics there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. So, what prevents us from embracing the transcendent gusher of subjective originality, the real guarantor of freedom, is scraps of old culture such as father-in the-sky-religion which insists that only the high God is creative and good. In a culture still permeated by Christian assumptions it seems impossible to abandon the (only semi-conscious) theological principle that creativity is an attribute of God alone. The concept of God can be stretched and molded but not easily replaced by creative individual subjectivity.

Although Augustine’s Christianity still has a strong grip on western supervisory practices, its cultural dominance was affected by market-commerce and science. The transition to science was easy, as celestial father-god religions share with science a strong outward focus on eternal cosmic forces and principles. Reverence and deference toward external gods was so entrenched at the root of the Euro-American cultural system that this orientation imposed itself onto all new developments. Science became so prestigious in its mathematical precision and its rigour of measuring observations that physics and chemistry came to represent the ideal of intellectual power and legitimacy, and inspired imitation in all intellectual culture. Subjectivity, as the blind spot of science since questioning has no appearance, cannot exist officially. The consequence of scientific inability to comprehend a fruitful and complex subjectivity, in combination with the military and commercial success of science, is that modern culture is under the enchantment of an ‘objectivity fetish’ in which anything subjective or mental/ internal is suspect, and so the very reality of thinking as an individual process has been marginalized and ridiculed. Distrust of the non-rational or ‘lower’ impulses of subjectivity moves by easy extension to mistrust of subjectivity in general. Individuals have to be supervised in their obedience to military nation-states and market-wealth, the modern gods, and institutions representing those gods have much in common with ‘old regime’ patriarchies.

Market-commerce represents, in part, a revolt against the self-denial imposed by old-style Christianity. Everybody is gratified to some extent by having stuff, and after centuries of denial and an ongoing threat of denial, the glamour of consuming and having stuff became frenzied. Yet, market commerce shares with science a profound objectivity. In the market-sphere values are: accumulated property, status in corporate and professional hierarchies (quantified in money), and the glamour of trophies from competitive victories. Although these are gratifying, they are also self-denying in their own way when made dominant.

Another obstacle to recognizing creativity as the core of personal existence is the common observation that by far the majority of individuals blend perfectly into a crowd. That can be shown to be compatible with individual creativity by a study of culture and its suppression of some crucial individuality. The portal back to individual creativity is exactly to by-pass all cultural knowledge and sophistication with the goal of achieving a state of creative innocence. There is an echo here of the myth in which eating fruit from the tree of knowledge caused humanity to lose its glorious natural existence. The portal to innocence was pioneered long ago in Luther’s personal use of thinking.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Subjectivity

Sharing Awareness

Transcendental Humanism

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

Reality is Three Givens*: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

The Third Grace is Culture, the Second is Innocence

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

Theological Black Holes