The Brute Actuality of Nature

08 Thursday Mar 2012

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

In every moment of experience, we are just arriving out of the past. This might be described as the newness of the moment. We arrive with expectations: looking, feeling, and listening for certain things. There is always a certain degree of surprise and the possibility of great surprise. We arrive feeling the force of contact with objects or resistances, sometimes fending them off, sometimes weighing on them, grasping and working them. Part of our energy is re-orienting, identifying, pushing and pulling against these immediate presences.

We arrive at particular localities and occasions partly as a result of work and effort. Some also come flowing upon us. We arrive in the act of leaving previous situations, with an expectation and attitude about what is here. An attitude manifests itself in what we find relevant and worthy of attention, in what we notice, and in our emotional bearing toward what we notice. Our attitude is the searching, vigilance, and direction of effort by which we are responding to imperfections and opportunities from before. It is a sort of memory which largely determines what is perceived. Incidents and occasions are streaking by, but something remains and accumulates in ourselves from them other than mental images, namely changes in attitude and bearing.

On one side we have the experience of arriving with an expectation of what will be here, searching for specific locations and resources. On the other side we have the experience of streaking through, streaking past this moment, going through it. The orientation of our effort is through or past what has already been identified, bearing down this corridor or street or into that room, lifting this bag of groceries, heading into the imaginary space of the future. We arrive working things toward a potential shape, pushing and pulling with the purpose of removing ourselves toward a future place. We are leaving whether we want to or not, whether we feel dissatisfied with the imperfection we sense here, or feel contented. This is the incompleteness of the moment which complements newness. The opening we sense as we look down the corridor is the future. This moment features a potential of going that way by the performance of certain work.

Taking both arriving and leaving together we still have nothing of the world but the instantaneous present. Although it has no duration, its newness and incompleteness point toward a world of context. The memory and attitude from which we reach down at the present, and the expectation we have of getting through and beyond it, are the context, and it is much richer and more extensive than the duration-less present ever can be. Questions, emotions, and dreams make up the rich context from which we reach down to the meagre wafer-presence of nature. The force of opening and vectoring into the future is exactly questions and dream-fulfillment, emotional responses to what was. Here are the ideal models by which we read the fleeting sensual impressions which are all we ever have of the world. Indeed we take up and grasp the present as we do because of that context. Nothing could have meaning and sense for us without memory and expectation, but in what way are they with us? How do we have them or sense them as part of the world? They are, by definition, things not being perceived and we do not have them in the same way as things perceived. They are not floating about separately either. They exist in a bearing or orientation built into perceptions of things, in the directionality and force of subjective intelligence.

For everything perceived there are two modes of presence intersecting: a part present by sensation, and a non-sensual context of questioning. That non-sensual context is the intelligence that is perceiving, the project or orientation within which the act of perception is performed. Memory and expectation are features of an instantaneous mental act of thinking sensations of the world. A subjective orientation or bearing is intersecting with something not originating from the self, something objectively resisting the self.

The experience of time is built into what is present instantaneously. Past and future are structural elements of the instant of experience. The past is only the newness of any instant and the place of memory in that newness, reference points receding into ever increasing remoteness from this moment’s bearing. The future is only the incompleteness of the instant and the involvement of mental projection, expectation, and self-declaration in that incompleteness. Both are features of an instantaneous mental act. It isn’t that intelligence endures but that it has, in an instant, experiences which are present in different ways. Our experience of time is the intersection of different modes of awareness. We experience time not by being temporally extended but by having binocular consciousness, consciousness of an elemental transcendence, an intersection of intelligence with object-world.

If there is to be time, there must be intelligence and its object. The object alone has no memory and no teleology, no past or future, and without duration there is nothing. The object-world, without a living intelligence intersecting it, is a wafer of duration with a smallness of infinity. Memory and purpose (predicament and orientation) give the object its appearance of duration. Kant agreed that time is a feature of intelligence, but perhaps we can say that the brute actuality of nature is an infinitesimal duration-less momentum. Past and future do not exist in the material universe. The science-fiction fantasy of time travel is absurd because past and future simply do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. Only intelligence brings time to the world, with a structure of tension stretching memory into an act to strike a self-declaring mark on the object-world, present entirely as an instantaneous bearing.

The Hieroglyph

Since the present only makes sense in a sort of triad of past-present-future, maybe a visual aid could be used, a hieroglyph, an enlarged X. That figure is made up of four arrow-heads which point toward something at the centre with no size. The top arrow of the X would represent certain features of the present. Labels for that space might be: “There is nothing but the instant…The present has no duration…”

For the bottom arrow: “… always new and incomplete… Whatever there is must be features of this instant.”

The left arrow of the X would represent all the purpose, direction, knowledge, and force-against-resistance we already bear in arriving at the present. I might put these labels there: “… arriving, by specific efforting, with a purpose … searching for specific valuables … incidents and occasions went streaking by but something accumulated other than fading impressions or images: a bearing in response to them.”

The right arrow is an opening outward, potential, possibility, and probability surrounding the pointing, vectoring, or bearing of effort and orientation. Part of our energy is pushing past the grip of the present “ … leaving specific predicaments behind with an effort toward self-declaration and creation …”.

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

01 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom

Christendom existed as a pan-European theocratic practicality from the time of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 A.D.. The centralized Church hierarchy based in Rome exerted senior supervisory control (more or less) from then until Henry VIII’s separation of the English Church in 1534: 734 years. Medieval Christendom began as a society fallen from the glories of the Roman Empire. The economy was subsistence farming characterized by tenant families bound within feudal contracts to specific pieces of land under the control of a military-estate family or a Church foundation. There was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the ‘second sons’ who could not inherit the family’s noble title and lands would often go to school for a good education and then into the Church hierarchy. The rural-subsistence economy without much money was based on contractual and traditional obligations. Peasant farming families were at the mercy of wild nature, disease, and marauders, and nature was considered to be personified by disembodied spirits who might be anywhere, unseen and yet powerful.

Christian Relics

Ancient investments of effort in monument-creating, such as construction of the Egyptian pyramids, came from ideas about a supernatural stratum of existence. The pyramids were acts to connect with such a stratum, and they illustrate an economy of the supernatural in which earthly wealth is founded upon gods and spirits and the qualities of their world. That conception of wealth was still important in the European middle ages, during the construction of the Gothic cathedrals. Those magnificent fortresses of the faith were built in part to house, in suitable glory, bones of a saint or a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, considered to have supernatural power and influence. Something of the spirit of the dead saint was supposed to reside in the material remnant. Just as a reason for achievements in cathedral architecture was to house relics, the Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth in the form of relics from the holy land. Christianity was, at one level, a cult of relics, thought to be radiant with supernatural energy. Relics were high-status luxury goods and there was a lucrative commerce supported by the demand for them. Such were the treasures of those times.

Christians, like Stoics, believe the world of bodies manifests a providential divine will. Stoics considered the world to be eternal and uncreated, identical with Logos, whereas Christians believe nature to be the creation of a separate deity. For both of them, the common world of natural bodies has much to love, distinctly unlike the visions of Plato and ancient Zoroastrians, for example. Yet there is still a crucial transcendence in the Christian vision, since God’s separateness from His creation is exactly transcendence.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)

Medieval Christianity was by far a darker, harsher, spookier world view than that of the modern Roman Church. Catholic Christendom was characterized by a human-hating obsession with hereditary sin and an imaginary after-death world. The influential writings of Augustine of Hippo asserted that human nature is essentially evil because of Adam’s original sin, and the only way people can be good is by being forced to obey the laws of God and secular authorities. Virtue is obedience and self-denial. There is in Augustine’s view a form of anticipation of Freud’s theory of the superego, that moral behaviour originates outside the individual. In Freud the superego was internalized authority figures. For Augustine, the relevant authority figures were officials of the Church. Officials of religion believed that overpowering impulses to individual self-gratification were continually pulling social attachments apart, and any loss of a popular fear of hell and satan, or supernatural powers generally, would result in uncontrolled female sexuality leading to general social breakdown.

Confirmed in Dependence on the Church

The Church was happy to encourage most people to “be fruitful and multiply”, even though human flesh and its pleasures were considered tainted, because it confirmed the sinfulness of people and their resulting dependence on magical sacrament-performing priests. Strong institutional supervision of adults was required by Augustine’s assertion that people are normally vicious and/ or weak and so can behave virtuously only by means of strong and often harsh control by a powerful hierarchy of the religiously and militarily sophisticated. From roughly 800 A.D. to 1534 the Church’s claim to legitimate authority was persuasive to most people. The influence of Augustinian Christianity went well beyond religious practice as such. It pervaded the culture of western society generally as the common-sense idea of human nature and value. The resulting fear and gloom achieved a firm psychological grip. Soaring cathedrals of stone and glass were fortresses of the doctrine, intimidating symbols of wealth and dominance, presiding over the pessimistic gloom of Christendom. Eventually the Holy Inquisition (1233) was created to exterminate people with unorthodox thoughts.

Transcendence is the link between philosophy and religion. In Christendom the culture of transcendence, which had been a minority report in ancient Greece, was made into a legal obligation by the theocratic Church of Rome. In that sense philosophy as ideology of transcendence had taken control of society, but Christianity removed the decisive power from individual intelligence at the same time as it reversed the philosophical project of understanding nature as an impersonal system. The Church taught the best way to live based on a claim of divine revelation to officials, but the work of rational proof was also considered important to confront heresy and convince the skeptical. The literate class, especially within the universities, were dedicated to recapitulating ancient achievements of rational sophistication. In the panorama of ancient and medieval thinking, a tainted nature was an enemy with humans firmly in its claws. Christianity deified cosmic evil in the demonic figure of Satan, the devil. Whereas the philosophical portal out was transcendence through a non-mystical form of individual mental focus, the Christian transcendence, greatly influenced by Augustine, was collective and corporate, a merging with the body of the Church in return for an eventual transcendent afterlife.

Individualism, Original Sin, and Augustine

The idea of original sin is profoundly anti-individualistic. It means that all human beings share in the same single, sinful, nature. Individual persons are not original on this view but merely new eruptions of one nature. So, in spite of Augustine’s Confessions exploring individual psychology in an original autobiographical way, the effect of Augustine’s teaching was not individualistic, but the opposite. His conclusion was that, although an individual might be able to figure out what is right and even want to do right, rationality is never powerful enough to overcome original sin, appetites, and selfish ambitions of the passionate and lower part of human nature. People will want to do right, but never just yet.

In the Christian tradition the individual is a bearer of generic original sin as well as bearer of responsibility for moral choices in day to day life. If there is no person there is no local sin, no specific responsibility, and not much justice in punishment or reward. So, although the Church emphasized generic human nature and the human collective, the individual could not be completely negated because reward and punishment applied at the level of the individual, and reward and punishment were core values and instruments of the Church.

In the Christian world view, the after-death world was more important than the tangible world, and the reflective sense of individuality was not highly developed. Generalized ‘human nature’ was more in focus culturally, and it was considered tainted by the original sin which resulted in human exile from Eden. That is an echo of the pre-Christian sense of taint on the world of nature. The taint applied in Christendom mainly to human nature, from original sin, but the rest of nature did not escape. After all, the world in which humans find themselves is a veil of tears, a long way down from Eden.

Freedom

There was an ancient sense of taint effectively rejecting the world of the senses as pervaded by an evil power. Nature, represented by the human body and the impulses and pains of the body, was still effectively hated and feared in Christianity. In Christendom a conception of spirituality replaced rational thinking as the portal to transcendent freedom beyond demonic nature. Focus on the world to come after the death of the body seemed to offer the only such portal of escape. Official spirituality demanded blind trust in, and obedience to, the Church’s teachings on the rewards of the afterlife. Christianity also promised freedom from nature and the body through exercises which enabled a transcendent other-worldly spirituality. Prayer, penance, and various exercises could be practiced in the effort to invoke divine Grace. Once again, as in ancient thinking, freedom and experience of a higher state of being were a glorious possibility for people, but achieved only through special and arduous efforts and trials, removed from ordinary day to day living. Connecting with eternity was still a crucial achievement.

Among the educated in the Church, knowledge was thought to be mental illumination from God, the revelation of something like a Platonic Ideal Form uncovering the character of something at a particular time and place. There is an echo here of Aristotle’s “active intellect”, a single divine entity which participated in the rational mental process of each individual. The Christian theory of knowledge required such acts of divine illumination, and it was the same with freedom. The Church taught freedom of the will to make moral actions, that is, actions which are ‘self’-denying or contrary to original sin or natural impulse, but it was freedom by divine Grace. Humans were made ‘in God’s image’ by a broad original act of Grace, but some extraordinary intervention was required for a specific act of real ‘self’-denial, real freedom from tainted nature. In general people needed the grim guidance of Church authorities displaying their use of the scourge, rack, and stake. In this context freedom of the will was a weak flame largely overpowered by original sin.

Christian Collectivism

The hard-won classical advances in honouring individual subjectivity, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism, stood as a dangerous threat to the totalitarian ambitions of the Church, and the Church devoted considerable resources to burying them. When rules of living are dictated by an omnipotent god, being ethical depends entirely on compliance with the god’s dictates. Treatment of other beings is unimportant in itself. During the Theocracy of Christendom the Church claimed special possession of God’s truth and exclusive ability to teach and evaluate everybody’s compliance. The Church promoted an “other-world” focus which incorporated misery in “this world” into its myth. The other-world focus and the doctrine that human nature is intrinsically evil, condoned gross social injustice. The Catholic God was seen concretely in the feudal social order just as much as in the images collected in or carved into the structure of churches. The message was that the feudal order had to be accepted and preserved as it was, and hope placed in life-after-death. God supposedly acted through the Church to enforce the social order. The Church thus enforced a collectivism around its sacraments, rituals, art, architecture, and hierarchy. The doctrines of the Church transformed the internal individual-to-god connection characteristic of Stoicism, for example, into an external and objectified individual-to-Church-to-social-order-to-god relationship.

John Wycliffe (1328-84) and Vernacular Literacy

The Universities of Christendom, beginning from Bologna around 1088, did not monopolize literacy in Latin, partly because they did not confine their high-end scribes within their walls as monasteries did. Universities projected Latin literacy outward into their communities in the form of graduates: lawyers, medical doctors, (Latin) grammar teachers, and theologians. It is still remarkable that a European movement for popular vernacular literacy began even prior to the invention of the printing press. The beginning of the movement seems to have been the campaign by John Wycliffe, based at Oxford University, for universal vernacular literacy and translation of vernacular Bibles. That was to be the foundation of a world-changing ideal of equality in the European cultural system.

The modern notion of equality has much to do with the medieval European institution of social class (aristocracy, clergy, and peasantry) which looms as a spectacular paradigm of inequality. It was a set of laws and customs which institutionalized systematic and random insults and injuries to the peasantry, who became increasingly alienated and resentful of them. In medieval society land ownership was the main foundation of inequality, since aristocracy was defined in terms of military culture (Chivalry) and land ownership. As mere labourers in the economy of agriculture, peasants were treated as property also, attached to the land. Another crucial feature of medieval inequality was the special power of priests of the Roman Church. Since the Church owned keys to the divine realm and eternal life, there was a set of critical ‘check-points’ in every person’s life, such as joining the community as an infant, coming of age, marriage, and death, which had to be sanctioned by the presence of a priest performing the appropriate sacrament, specific bits of ritual magic. The ability of aristocracy to acquire religious relics, sometimes to donate to the Church for something like naming rights to a chapel, made them participants to some extent in the exclusionary economy of the supernatural.

The drive to make the Voice of God, as manifested in the Bible, available directly to each individual was based on a notion from humanist philosophy, now translated into a ‘proto-protestant’ attitude, in which every individual on his or her own was considered competent and worthy to understand the Voice of God and be elevated by it. Given the importance of the Bible in that culture, access to it was a profound equality and dignity that would influence every other aspect of culture. Suddenly all people, each individually, could have a really transcendent mental power in literacy. Writing is an engraving of voices, and widespread literacy vastly enlarges the cultural presence and weight of individual voices, and with that the recognition of personal intelligence. The movement was recognized as revolutionary by the Church at the time and was violently resisted. The Church restricted both vernacular literacy and direct popular access to Bibles because of the emphasis on original sin injected into Christian culture by Augustine: that individuals have such evil within them that they cannot be trusted to themselves and can be saved only by institutional supervision and control. However, in spite of official resistance to vernacular literacy, important progress was made and soon aided by the spread of printing technology, and then by protestantism.

Movable Type

Johann Gutenberg ( c. 1398-1468) of Mainz, Germany, introduced the printing press into Western culture in the 1440’s. Gutenberg’s major printing project, a Latin Bible, appeared around 1455. It was printer/ publishers trained by Gutenberg who first published vernacular Bibles, a German translation, in the 1460’s. It was duly banned by officials of the Church in 1485, but it illustrates the spread of the movement for vernacular literacy across the European cultural system. The printing press enabled a culture of written conversation outside churches and universities and independent of them, the ‘Republic of Letters’. Universities are often conservative places, as the term “scholastic” has come to mean, preserving an elite orthodoxy. The influence of church schools and universities was important, but widespread literacy outside institutions was the crucial novelty. The emergence of newspapers and a book press outside church, state, and university expanded the consequences of literacy in all aspects of society. People who read, write, and think about profound questions can do so as independent adventurers, under no authority but their own. The Republic of Letters was and is a voluntary and informal communication arrangement, carried on in writing. It wasn’t middle class literacy which ignited the fires of modernity but proletarian literacy, aided by the printing press.

Martin Luther (1483-1546): Doubt and A Personal Leap of Intelligence

Until his break with the Roman Church, Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order, and that grounding persuaded him that humans have no power at all since the exile from Eden, and are absolute slaves to the devil except by God’s whimsical Grace through which some are predestined to have faith and virtue. Both Calvin and Luther show strong Augustinian influence. Calvinism emphasized the intrinsic evil of people, as Augustine’s Catholicism did. However, Luther’s Protestants combined humanist beliefs with the acceptance of original sin and distrust of the body. Luther’s published statements about the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524-25) make it clear he was no crusader for full social equality, and it was not his intention to interfere with the other-world focus of theocratic society. Like most philosophers, Luther’s messages were inconsistent and many of their consequences were more or less unintended.

Luther had the ancient teachings of Hellenistic philosophical sects to draw upon, the Stoics and Epicureans already mentioned, and was proud of that humanist education. He applied the basic humanist insight of self-possession to the credibility of religious claims. The humanist competence of self-development revealed a special importance in the context of those most profound questions of knowledge. Luther discovered that the competence of self-development included the power to make creative leaps, which did not turn speculation into knowledge, but rather revealed God’s image in the leaper.

Christianity as a Mental Process: Luther and Doubt

On October 31, 1517 Luther posted a list of 95 theses on his church door in Wittenberg, Germany, including a defense of “justification by faith alone.” Luther’s emphasis on faith is often put in the context of a removal of emphasis from good works, but a better way to understand it is to put faith in the context of doubt. Luther’s doubt was based on courageous honesty about the impossibility of being certain of the teachings of Christianity, among other knowledge claims. Christian certainty was breaking down, and in the process preparing the way for the breakdown of Christian gloom.

Luther became a new model of the mental process of being Christian. In public debate with Church authorities Luther was continually confronted with the question of how his individual wisdom could match the accumulated store from the whole history of the Church. Luther could well have quoted Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing.” For Luther the mental process of being Christian was an intensely personal struggle against anguished uncertainty, against doubt and the dread that comes from it. For Luther the internal focus and struggle was an obsession. He confronted the impossibility of knowing human and individual destiny, even in the light of the divine revelation of Christianity, and his response pioneered an alternative to skepticism, namely a personal leap of faith. If I take the leap of faith in full rational awareness that it is absurd, it is a declaration of my freedom from ‘laws of thought’. Manifesting that freedom is actualizing human life in the image of God since God’s image is precisely freedom.

Luther’s inner struggles with doubt in the face of desperate need for certainty introduced a thread of ‘existential’ subjectivity into the culture of intellectual debates. Personal doubt and anguish are markers of a thinking and emotional entity, a subjective intelligence with powers of acting from judgments of probabilities, extending into the increasingly remote future. Luther had faith in Truth, but was convinced that Truth could not be known with certainty, so individuals must get along with what innocent subjectivity makes available to them. Basing a sense of identity on knowing, on certainty, makes individuals passive and it loses something crucial in Luther’s inward faith, which is not a knowing and must be active to be authentic. Exactly because it is not knowing, faith is distinctly a person’s act, a personal self-declaration and self-creation, something like “I choose faith, so I exist in the freedom which is the image of God.”

Luther’s relationship with the university at Wittenberg was an important part of the framework of his work. His writing expressed the role of a university scholar at an advancing edge. In that context it is remarkable that Luther’s thinking was personal in contrast to Medieval scholastic logic. Luther’s mental condition as a Christian defined a profoundly individual subjective (existential) state. At the same time, Lutheran inwardness was not mystical, not an abandonment to cosmic wholeness or to the love of a God who is a person. Mysticism is never individual, but instead all encompassing. Faith for Luther was a personal and reasoned decision which removed magical, cultish, and mystical features of religion.

Protestant Christianity offered a model of inward subjective value by emphasizing individual piety, ultimate justification by faith. Faith, and so virtue, is a personal, inward accomplishment, available equally to all and not just the gifted, privileged, or heroic. The thrust of Protestantism is strong and equal individualism, justification by an internal accomplishment which is socially invisible. You cannot tell who is ‘in Grace’ by social position, property, family, cash flow, physical beauty, or overt giftedness of any kind. That was the Lutheran revolution, an overthrow of “establishment” control and supervision by discovery of elemental value in individual subjectivity. Freedom of conscience placed emphasis on a personal inward process of decision. Subjectivity is the ultimate revolutionary force because it bypasses all incentives and rewards under the control of a supervising elite or an ideology. The Church became irrelevant when each individual found direct personal communication with God through his or her own competence.

With Protestantism there was a radical change of what counted as moral action, away from “good works”, which normally involved a transfer of wealth to the Church, to private grace in exercising freedom. Faith for Luther was in contrast to payment of money to the Church for certificates of forgiveness (indulgences) with specific expiry dates. So the nub of Protestantism was a rejection of overt, outwardly observable accomplishments and a concentration on individual inwardness: faith. Luther’s essay The Freedom of a Christian emphasizes a distinction between individual mental “inwardness” and “outward” appearances. That was an essentially Stoic distinction. Morality and sin no longer had to do with observing the sabbath, priestly sacraments, dietary laws, formal sacrifices and prayers, or performing correct rites of purification or charity, but with realizing God’s image in freedom of the individual will. Since God’s relation to his creation is exactly transcendence, that mental process, which recapitulates the image of God in a creative act of freedom, is an experience of transcendence.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes was an amateur genius in mathematics who had been spotted as gifted as a child and educated to be a lawyer. Next after theology, law was the most esteemed of the university faculties. Descartes never worked professionally as a lawyer nor as a university professor, but sometimes as a military aide. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) started the year Descartes turned 22 and continued until he was 52, merely two years before his death. The war raged along during all but a tiny portion of his adult life, and so military work was widely available. When Descartes was a child of 4 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed in Rome. Bruno’s execution by burning alive, by order of the Roman Inquisition, had a profound effect on subsequent generations of philosophers, Descartes among them. Bruno was savagely executed for nothing other than his philosophical thoughts and writings, and far more brutally than Socrates had been. Bruno’s killing clarified the Roman Church as the mortal enemy of philosophy and inspired a fierce determination in an underground movement for “freedom to philosophize”.

Descartes liked to get lost, and found, in thought, and became active in the republic of letters, writing in academic Latin. Descartes’ thinking was moved by doubt, as Luther’s was, and doubt was a crucial act of intelligence for Descartes. For Descartes, doubt was the matrix of personal freedom in thinking. Descartes’ “thinking substance” and “extended substance” follow fairly closely the inward-outward dualism presented in Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian. Luther had no influence on Descartes’ mathematics or science, but the philosophical side of Descartes’ work fits perfectly into the cultural context created roughly a century earlier by the existential doubt explored and made famous internationally by Luther. The demystifying force of Descartes’ science was also in the tradition of reducing magic advanced by protestantism.

Doubt is distinctly individual, in fact definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Descartes’ presentation of his method of thinking was a demonstration of the freedom of thinking. Descartes conceived ‘thinking substance’ as individual thinking persons: “I doubt, therefore I exist.” That discovery was fundamental for Descartes, so he intended no scientific dismissal of thinking. The thinking illustrated by Descartes was propositional reasoning, the action of an enduring self with a continuity of language competence, mathematical competence, logical competence, and of voice. In Descartes the “I” or subjective entity of intelligence encounters extended substance, nature, and exerts power in discovering the laws and shapes of nature. So Descartes extended Luther’s vision of subjectivity in a secular direction, but Luther merits considerable credit for beginning the progress of modern philosophy. There is much of Luther’s specific influence in Descartes’ work, as well as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Luther had a strong focus on individual mentality, of which faith was one feature and doubt a closely related feature. According to Luther, people had the mental power to make a creative leap in the absence of sufficient reason or evidence. Western people had gained intelligence in a new cultural way on the basis of Wycliffe’s campaign for popular literacy focused on reading the Bible. The value so placed on mental processes was a foundation on which Luther built. Following Luther, reading the Bible was a requirement for normal protestant piety, and so literacy spread with protestantism. Literacy brings the power to write, to invent original communications and self-expressions, as well as the power to gain awareness of the voices of others. Vernacular literacy, the printing press, and the protestant reformation raised the profile of personal intelligence in the private lives of an uncontrolled portion of the community. Broadening the base of literacy enabled cultures of written conversation, the republics of letters, to develop outside institutions, and subsequently enabled the ‘Enlightenment’ in eighteenth century Europe, when the literate portion of the population became the majority. That rationalist enlightenment was directly inspirational for the American and French revolutions, the most effective events of a spiral of revolt that extended back 400 years to Wycliffe’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Great Plague. When literacy is a minority skill it can be an effective technique of domination by a ruling elite. Universal literacy has been a profound inspiration for equality.

Elemental Orientation

23 Thursday Feb 2012

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

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Personal Agency: Good Work

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

Strategic Elemental Orientation

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

Pulling out of Corporate and Official Propaganda

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

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

An Elemental Grid

Some reference points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Stinking Badges

20 Friday Jan 2012

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

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Proposition One: Philosophy of a Voice

An intelligence is more like a voice than like a face, shaped through time rather then in space. Objects which are shaped and extended in space, and as such have an appearance, can display their image, a distinct force of presence, in a flash. Without an appearance, intelligence has to intentionally construct itself by exercising agency through a lifetime. The shape that a voice inscribes through time has to be assembled from memory by other intelligences. It exists nowhere in nature since nature is limited to the timeless actuality of the instant. Since intelligence has no flash-image as a bounded, continuous, and exclusive entity, it is vulnerable to acute self-uncertainty within a world of things which have appearances. Ever since the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is famously quoted as saying of his thinking “I have searched myself”, a recurring intent in the personal use of thinking has been discovery of, or encounter with, the self-who-has-no-appearance, subjective questioning and intent in-the-blind-spot of day to day activity. When Heraclitus went searching within himself he found a river which was always different from one moment to the next. A river is a force and a voice.

Proposition Two: Politics and the status quo ante bellum

The private international banking system failed in 2007-08, and in failure was revealed as viciously addicted to ‘investment’ gambling, deeply fraudulent, and alarmingly immune from accountability of any kind. (The Occupy Wall Street Movement of 2011 marked widespread outrage at these revelations.)

In the wake of that failure (the metaphorical bellum of the title), current political agendas divide into two categories: 1) business as usual, with a little tinkering and tweaking to restore the 2007 status quo ante bellum, and 2) radical change offers the only hope of controlling the value-sucking gambling addiction, fraud, and criminal immunity which have created extreme social inequality. The media divide along similar lines, with the large-scale advertising and entertainment media covering events from the point of view of investors and financial markets who dream of having the pre-2007 world returned to them; but with internet media frequently interpreting events from the point of view of the victims of investors, banks, and financial markets. This division illuminates something else.

A vast class war was exposed by the failure of the banking system. Study after study has detailed the disproportionate and illegitimate political and media control practiced by organized wealth, of which the banking system is an important part. The radical enrichment of a tiny minority achieved by the policy reforms of Ronald Reagan (US President 1980-88), Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom Prime Minister 1979-90), and their followers, enabled organized wealth to fund political parties, ideological lobbyists, and mass communications enough to gain effective control of taxes, laws, administration of justice, environmental exploitation, and wars, the faculties of sovereignty. Organized wealth has repeatedly used war both to drive pervasive social control and as a private money spinner in support of its own power. War is the ultimate destroyer of broadly distributed agency, self-possession, and personal freedom.

Can The Personal Use of Thinking Make Any Difference?

The self-uncertainty that is perfectly normal for an entity that has no appearance can be exploited by bullies, the greedy, political adventurers, as well as by enthusiastic people absorbed within supra-individual collectives, to sell their version of false self-certainty. They will give out money, things to do, special clothes, hats, badges, names, marks of rank and position, to convince you that you are something definite: tinker, taylor, soldier, beggar man, on a hierarchy of inequality. Distracted from personal agency, people can be quite willing to accept those role-play characters assigned from a script made by outside interests, instead of self-inventing avatars in their personal creative process. That is how we are persuaded to submit to wars and to be silent about collective crimes.

An attachment to practicing freedom through a personal creative process does reduce vulnerability to that kind of psychological manipulation. The subjective river of intelligence is a power for self-agency in uttering a voice through day to day life.

The Two Traditions

12 Thursday Jan 2012

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

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There are crucial differences between each individual’s situation as understood in transcendental dualism (the posting of December 15, 2011, “Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy”) and the individual’s situation as understood within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. To clarify the differences, it is helpful to refer to a summary of the religion of the God of Abraham provided by Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) (1138-1204), generally recognized as authoritative on this issue. Based on Maimonides’ summary, all the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely meriting and commanding worship and obedience from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and will reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. Instead of direct general Revelation, God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth.

That set of beliefs situates every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, authority, an axis of deserving reward or punishment, grace or disgrace, in a way that is alien to transcendental dualism. It suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among the herder-nomads represented by Abraham was childhood fear and awe of the typical father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is a father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, but unreliable, quick to anger, and inclined to terrifying violence. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a profound sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

500 B.C.

If we imagine the cultural geography around the eastern Mediterranean in 500 B.C., we encounter a rich variety of ethnic communities. In Egypt, we see a culture focused on the gods of ancient Egypt. In Palestine we see the religion of the Old Testament, the emergence of the God of Abraham, with influence in the surrounding region, perhaps especially in Arabia. Further east in the highlands of Persia, we see the emerging dualism of a religious innovator, Zoroaster, self-proclaimed prophet of the ancient Aryan god Ahura Mazda. Looking west, we encounter ancient Greece with the Olympian gods and Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. Farther west again, the city of Rome had its own pantheon of gods. These communities were known to one another to various degrees, but beginning with the Persian assaults on Greece from 490 B.C. until around 449 B.C., there was increasing contact, especially at first between Greece and Persia.

The religion of ancient Greece was focused on a set of gods with close similarities to humans, including bodies like humans, although with powers to transfigure into whatever they wanted, and who were in close, easy, and frequent contact with humans. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi was a popular institution and the initiative lay with ordinary individuals to present specific questions to Apollo’s Pythia. There was no place for divine prophets. Orphic mystery cults were also active and had common assumptions from transcendental dualism, perhaps accounted for the exile of human spirits within physical bodies as punishment for transgressions in a previous existence, but they did also include promises of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. In a contrasting cultural development, it was characteristic of Greek philosophical thinking to remove disembodied spirits and divinities from an account of the world, to value scientific instead of narrative explanations. For example, Plato’s philosophical work completely abandoned the Olympian gods. In the work of Socrates (possibly) and of Plato there is a development of a non-mystical, non-religious ethics inspired in part by the widespread myths of transcendental dualism. It seems to have been the encounter with Persian dualism which jolted Greek thinking to a new profundity, which we see in the philosophy of Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.). However, the version of dualism that penetrated Greek culture as transcendental philosophy retained not a trace of the prophet Zoroaster, or any personified divinities such as Ahura Mazda. The resulting philosophical form of dualism spread widely in the classical Mediterranean world and then later endured a long competition with Abrahamic religion.

Plato’s Cave Parable

Plato’s parable of the cave, from Republic, Book VII, shows that he drew much from transcendental dualism, but removed the battling gods of good and evil in such a way that completely eliminated subordination of individuals to divine command and with it the importance of prophets, the psychological control of divine reward or punishment, and of divinely sanctioned sovereignty in general. It highlights the difference between acting from an imperative for obedience, for example in matters such as diet and genital mutilation, and acting from the personal impulse to find your way home. That reveals an historically important liberating force from the philosophical tradition. Plato’s hierarchical conception of thinking ability, noted in a previous posting, was a weakness that fortunately does not undermine that liberating force.

In primal dualism the world of ordinary objects is the creation of an inferior and jealous rival of the authentically creative god, and so is tainted by a mocking intent as well as by shoddy design and craftsmanship. In Plato’s vision there is a parallel to the idea that the world of bodies is flawed and deceptive. In the cave of the parable, perceived appearances of things are shadows of passing images of eternal Ideal Forms, and so they are a false appearance of reality, a mirage. As in transcendental dualism, Plato’s emphasis was on the assets and liabilities of subjective intelligence in finding a way to go from appearances to reality. His particular description of metaphysical Reality is less important then situating the individual on a personal arc of transcendence. Plato’s Ideal Forms were a specific interpretation and elaboration of a previously broadly familiar idea of “logos” which was thought to underlay the mysterious unity of words, thoughts, and things. Plato’s approach wasn’t religion, and it wasn’t science either. Although his theory of Ideal Forms is a kind of metaphysical speculation he was not basing his claims about personal transcendence on speculations about a supernatural world or stories about what might have happened at the origins of the world. Instead, he was describing the immediate situation of subjectivity in general, immediately available to anyone. He was in the tradition of the earlier Greek sage Heraclitus (“I sought myself.”) which marked out a distinctly philosophical questioning. Plato was writing about thinking in its overall relationship to nature and to culture. In that specific way he was different from both scientists, spiritualists, and religious reformers.

The Third Way

In Plato’s vision, accepting ordinary appearances as reality is encouraged and sanctioned by belonging within a collective. The hero of the parable is among a crowd in the cave, encouraging and cooperating with one another in the pretense that shadows are substantial properties, but when the hero goes out and experiences reality he goes as an individual. Perceived appearances are permeated by cultural influences, and objects of ordinary perception are inseparable from culture. Channelling culture, imitating social and cultural models, being immersed in the language-games of a community, these conditions solidify a cave of certainties which imprisons the mind. The parable of the cave, in combination with the beginning of Book X of Republic, indicates that culture itself, myths that poets and storytellers, or priests, kings, politicians, or advertisers make popular, is a cave of delusion. That is highlighted by Socrates’ declaration in the Apology: “I know only that I know nothing.” To escape from the cave you have to abandon the knowledge that culture has provided, that is, to think independently of the language-games of any society. You become a philosopher when you think without language and exercise innocent subjectivity. Socrates did not claim revealed visions of gods and their purposes. He was no shaman, mystic, or prophet. Socratic inwardness was not mysticism. One of the crucial points about the originality of Socrates and his legacy in Plato and others is that he is exactly not mystical. Socratic innocence was a contribution to the civilization of the west which provided a genuine alternative to mystical religion as ultimate value.

Transcendental practices which originate outside religious organizations divide into two main streams: a mystical anti-individual stream, and a non-mystical individualistic stream with a lineage through ancient Greek philosophy. The purpose of intellectual or mental activity was very different in the two streams. In the mystical stream the purpose was loss of individuality through union with the largest and most all-embracing force of divine nature: the great power “behind” the world of appearances. For the non-mystical stream the purpose of mental activity was often individual happiness through self-knowledge and self-realization, virtue, authenticity, self-possession. For example Stoics considered rationality, reasoning, as the most worthy feature of a person, the feature by which individuals realize freedom, and as such the only portal to virtue. They reached for truth as individuals, and thought that rational processes could find it.

Plato’s parable of the cave is a narrative of climbing out of darkness into light and grace, a narrative of transcendence. Transcendence has 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. The profound promise of that philosophy was freedom from slavery to nature and culture through the practice of rational thinking. That was the craft of living the life of gods. Plato’s parable of the cave is the exact reverse of the biblical myth of Adam’s and Eve’s exile from Eden, humanity’s fall from grace.

The Two Traditions

The two traditions have had an uneasy co-existence ever since an historical tsunami of Abrahamic theism from Palestine and Arabia washed over the classical Mediterranean world system. That is, since the Jewish diaspora, the spread of Christianity, and the conquests of Islam. The philosophical legacy of transcendental dualism had, for a long time prior to that tsunami, held the high cultural ground of the Hellenistic system and then the Roman Empire. It illustrates the changes to recall that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161-180 A.D.) was a Stoic philosopher. Stoicism represents the legacy of transcendental dualism in spite of the fact that it claimed officially to embrace materialism, a monism. There was an essential spark of freedom to subjective intelligence in Stoicism. However, by the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (306-337 A.D.), Christianity was being recognized as the favoured religion of the Empire. The old spooks were back in power.

Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy

15 Thursday Dec 2011

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

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There were two main bearings or vectors to ancient philosophy. The first was an aspiration toward transcendent experience through thinking. There was a sense that the life of the mind is the life of gods. The world-view in which transcendence was an urgent desire was nested in metaphysical or spiritual ideas elaborated in ancient Persia, concerning an ongoing war between the god of good and the god of evil. In that duality, the everyday world of tangible and visible events was seen as the creation and realm of the god of evil, the lesser god, the deceiver, the dark principle. Events in this world were completely determined by the dark god in league with some lesser demons. Stellar constellations and planets were among those demons and they controlled and toyed with the lives and fates of people on the earth below them. The very material from which bodies are composed was thought to be corrupt as the creation of a flawed and imperfect creator, and evidence of that corruption was change in the material world, things transforming into other things, becoming and passing away. Time itself was taken as a flaw in the created world. The natural appetites, sensitivities, impulses, and emotions of human bodies led to ever more flawed, fragile, and perishable bodies, often ill and suffering, and always in an arc of decay, putrefaction, and mortality.

Each human body was thought to be animated by a spark or fragment of the high god of good, recognized as each person’s soul or spirit. The relationship which the god of light and good had to the world of bodies was transcendence. Feelings and impulses closely associated with functions of the body were identified as the lower aspects of humanity, and experiences of deliberative intelligence and rationality were identified as the higher and transcendent aspects. The fate of the spirits within human bodies was often suffering and despair. However, the spirits themselves were parts of the high god, and so were ultimately immortal and joyful, as glimpsed sometimes in the innocence of childhood. In that way each person was understood as a local version of the duality of the universe at large, a microcosm of the war between good and evil. Human spirits, as sparks or fragments from the high god, suffered more than their eternal source. Imprisoned within bodies, human spirits were soon imprinted and poisoned by body, eclipsed, isolated, and alienated from their higher truth. However, their truth was still their truth and a person could, with an effort to disregard impulses and sensations from the body, regain some degree of higher spirit. Rational thinking, or some other mental exercise, was a way a person could move along an arc upward toward the perfect god and true self-possession. Concentration on pure mentality (Aristotle’s “thinking, thinking about thinking.”) would ultimately achieve transcendent freedom from the misery of the mortal life of the body and from the astrological demons in the sky.

In that primal dualism the inner vs. outer separation came before the distinction between higher and lower, since you can take the lower aspects of subjectivity, arising from the body, as the world of outwardness penetrating or invading the world of subjective inwardness. That world-view presented human life as exile, as not belonging in nature, as being alien in the world of time. This is a life of catastrophically injured dignity and energy, an inappropriate life, fallen, disgraced, and deceived. There are echoes of that in the Old Testament story of humanity’s exile from Eden. That world-view was broadly influential around the eastern Mediterranean in ancient times and still has some congruence with popular religious and metaphysical assumptions.

Early philosophers rejected much of the world-view of good and evil spirits, but intellect vs. body experiences could not be dismissed so easily. The pessimistic assessment of the body, and of the dangerous environment in which the body carries on its mortal life, was based on ordinary experience, always vulnerable to misery. Within that mortal misery of the body there was the life of subjective intelligence which seemed to have a degree of independence from the body and to represent different principles. Intelligence seemed already transcendent to some extent and so it inspired efforts to understand transcendence more fully and to practice transcendence in the delight of intelligence as such. The abstract projects of mathematics and metaphysics, for example, were connected to the practical project of living transcendence, experiencing mental release from the vile prison of the body.

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The Value of Stardom

There are important organizations promoting the concentration and centralization of property, power, and esteem, in a structure that makes up the social star system. Those organizations operate to express the beliefs, values, and tactics which achieve those concentrations and so create stardom. Stardom itself is the dominant value, and the organizations promote themselves as opportunities to achieve stardom. Stardom doesn’t have to be fame as played out in popular culture, but sometimes it is. The exercise of power and influence is not always ‘in the limelight’. The security of that system requires a nervous vigilance for threats and alternative visions which might divert energy away. There is an effort to spread the beliefs and values of stardom, and to promote their dominance in the community at large. A tsunami of star-system glamour-imagery is washed over public spaces and communications media. The message put about is that the world simply works this way, that the stars with remarkable accumulations must be permitted special liberties and immunities, must be admired and followed because they are the leaders who create and develop the community culture. In that way the star system functions as a social control mechanism.

Right-Wing Oversights and Misrepresentations

The star system as just described is the core element of right-wing political thinking. Devotion to stardom is devotion to inequality. So it is that the basic idea of the political right-wing is inequality itself. In addition, the claim is made that inequality is simply natural, and uniquely represents the spirit of nature.

There are fatal problems with these right-wing claims. Perhaps most important is the evidence that people do not need leaders or contracts to create cohesive social systems, language, or meaning in their lives. The creation of those fundamentals is broadly decentralized and nonhierarchical. Leadership is generally parasitic on innocently created social groups. Individuals do not need to be provided with identity by a collective or culture since we already have it with our subjectivity as described in previous blog posts. Additionally, that subjectivity is not savage instincts, lusts, aggression, delusional imaginings, or a blank hole to be filled with outside influences. It is a specific intelligent questioning which accumulates. It does not require close supervision or hierarchical placement to prevent it from harming itself or others.

Right-wing political rhetoric claims to champion simple justice. The appeal is to individuals who have accumulated property through work, diligent application of their abilities and energy, and perhaps personal risk. Such people seem justified in not wanting the rewards of work and talent to be sucked away to support people who might seem lazy and stupid to them. Fair enough, but neither does accomplishment entitle anyone to control, exploit, or torment the less accomplished, and that is an assumption that typically accompanies such an appeal to ‘justice’. The star system as a social control mechanism lurks behind the rhetoric of rugged individualism, and meritocracy is a typical star-system. It is also important to acknowledge that nobody accomplishes anything without a lot of externalities provided by the contributions of many people, externalities such as the stability of law, health care, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, a fruitful and healthy environment, maybe summed up as a healthy human interconnectedness.

Rugged individualism as manifested in star systems takes just as much centralized administration and control as equality. That is why right-wing political forces always balloon the size, powers, and immunities of military forces, police, prisons, and secret intelligence operations and simultaneously reduce civil rights and the transparency of authority. Private property accumulators are terrified that their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. The more property a person has the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases.

Psychological War

The personal use of thinking is to exercise and experience some agency, initiative, and control in a world where so much is beyond control. That was the point of Stoicism and Hellenistic humanism generally. Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism all developed ancient Greek heroism turned inward, the personal use of thinking to act as an individual force in the face of nature and the gods. Their teaching was not competitive, hierarchical, or star-system enabling. The message was a profoundly egalitarian call to exercise creative subjectivity no matter how small it may seem in relation to world-historical events. Feel the transcendence of your subjective intelligence. Find happiness in the freedom, creativity, and transcendence of it. Nurture yourself in happy creativity and Epicurean delight, even when the whole force of nature, gods, and culture works to drown you out and leave you silent. Cultural star-systems are important in those silencing spectacles. The personal use of thinking is still egalitarian. Philosophy has always been a presentation of the thinking of an individual person, not divine revelation or decree from occult inspiration or authority of any kind. It is thinking that can be considered and evaluated, and so thinking that is an invitation and portal to thinking for every individual. The gift of philosophy is validation of the power of individual thinking, and so the self-subsistence of individual identity, freedom, and self-possession.

Given the dominance and force of star-system culture and organization it is not too wild to characterize politics as psychological war raging around us and through us. The stream of messages from standard news and information organizations is a reality distorting campaign in support of systems of stardom. Star-system culture is an enemy trying to disable your agency and creative initiative. Inequality as a political value is an enemy to most people because it specifically discounts and writes off most people. That is the foundation of class war. In that psychological warfare the distribution of property, power, and esteem is far less important than the distribution of self-possession. That is the psychological battlefield on which the war rages between attempts to disempower and efforts to self-empower people at large. Stardom is the opposite of self-possession. The personal use of thinking is to wake up to self-possession.

Ground and Sky

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

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

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We are Grounded

Ground is important to us because we are pressed against it. Ground is what dwellings and furnishings are supported on, so we can say that when we stand on a floor or rest in a chair we are still pressed against the ground. We have merely provided ourselves with a convenient shoe. Ground is what we plant gardens in, and sometimes bury treasure and our dead in.

Being pressed against ground involves first that ground draws us toward its own centre with a force we have come to call gravity. The ground also prevents us from approaching its centre. That exclusion is a general characteristic of ‘material’ objects, manifested in 1) resistance to change in their shape and integrity (resistance to penetration is a form of this) and, 2) resistance to change of place or movement (momentum or inertia). These resistances can be overcome if enough pressure is brought to bear. The effect is our being held at our point of contact on a surface, fetched up against an impenetrable, pressing, presence.

Jelly

Our own presence on the ground is a body whose material is mostly a translucent jelly, in surroundings that are often hostile or indifferent. Simple survival requires us to defend ourselves against the surroundings, to devise shelter from weather and predators and we have to eat our surroundings to stay alive. That work produces a sense of personal force against the environment, a kinesthetic force of personality, even in the face of weakness from hunger, fatigue, illness, and injury. Some parts of the environment are very good to eat and contribute to that force of personality in being eaten.

Our body of translucent jelly has cores of rigid bone, and sensitive vulnerability. Hold your hand to a strong light, and red and blue blood vessels are visible inside. It is living jelly that springs and vibrates. It is sometimes tough and stringy, sometimes soft and floppy but always changing shape, giving way under gravity, voluntary movements, or touches from outside. In the belly and in large muscle bundles in thighs and shoulders it has liquid qualities. Skin communicates its own surface luster and the shape and structure beneath: muscle bulges around the wands, balls, and sockets of bone, red-blue blood in its pattern of tubes and capillaries, subcutaneous fat. Sometimes the muscle, bone, and skin structure feels like a container for liquid guts and belly organs, deep waters of the body. Thin, tremulous bands of muscle cover those deep waters, holding them in a tough but elastic and sloshing cellular column.

Muscle-Frame Opening

From birth, except for rare occasions when we are falling in open space, we feel the ground pressing on that body. Our skin is sensitive to the pressure and vibration of touch, to textures and temperatures. It might seem that much of our attention throughout life would be directed at warding off such a continuous assault. Yet, it is not so, because we manage to overcome the holding pressure and move. Since we cannot overcome it all at once, like space rockets do, in a great push into orbit, we overcome it in quantities sufficient for a little movement, again and again and again. We adapt the muscle structure of our body to hold ourselves poised on ground against gravity, and as part of that alignment, we adapt part of our body structure, a pair of movable limbs, as a flexible contact capable of pushing against ground with enough force to move away from the point of contact. We make our contacts with ground into a routine, a simple repeatable stepping, that we perform without much attention.

Even more important are sensations of strain that muscles make across joints in the bone frame of the body. A very rich and extensive array of distinctions is available in these sensations. Moving a particular finger is clearly distinguishable from moving a different one, and both are distinguishable from moving a leg or changing the posture of the back. A small movement is precisely distinguishable from a larger one, a slow one from a fast one, a slightly resisted one from a strongly resisted one.

Sensations of muscle-frame tension are sensations of directed pushing against a resistance or holding off a pressure. We sense the solidity of the object upon which we are bearing and the pressure of our body against the object. In ordinary standing we sense in our muscle tension the firmness of the footing and the force with which our body is pressing against that footing, normally the standard force of gravity on the particular mass of our body.

We are moving creatures in our very structure, and, except when we are falling, our movements are resisted by gravity at least, and quite often also by various obstacles. The space outside the surface of ground is largely not occupied by impenetrable presences, so if we propel ourselves in an unoccupied direction we move.

We use ground itself to propel ourselves. By its qualities of (relative) rigidity and immovability, ground provides us with something to push away from in directions we pick. We use it to push against when we want to travel in an open direction, and when we want to stop. This constitutes the region along ground’s surface as space in which we carry on controlled movements and play out our force of personality.

That we have enough leg power to overcome the holding pressure of ground does not negate the continuous presence of that holding pressure. Our overcoming it is not an annihilation of it, nor even a suspension of it. Our overcoming it is always a cost to us. It is an effort in which our vitality is reduced, and it always requires us to make up the reduction with food and rest.

When the only means you have of moving is the power of your own muscles the flat ground virtually rises up around you and closes you off from other places. Ground’s holding pressure constitutes a virtual upward slope, a gradual but important barrier to movement. Because of the costs of moving and barriers in specific directions we are easily marooned, stranded, at a particular place and with the material values of that place. The limits of kinesthetic force, costs of moving, and the resistance of barriers maroon each person at some particular place or locality most of the time. The material particulars of the place determine what becomes of the needs we suffer, what pleasures we have, what shelter we have, and what we are nourished or hurt by.

Down, Up, and Sideways

Ground itself is opaque, so our orientation is mainly lateral to the pressure of ground. Our lines of movement go along the surface rather than into it. Not only do we have to give a lot of attention in the direction of our movement to avoid mishaps, but also the very possibility of moving through a region invites attention there for opportunities, resources, and dangers. We put the continuously pressing presence away from the centre of our attention, but not too far away. In doing so we constitute the direction to the ground as a fixture of our orientation, as “down” and “under”.

Places very near to one another are yet very different in their relative accessibility. Most of us most of the time find ourselves between two great inaccessible regions. Ground itself is one of these and it has in most places a very abrupt beginning, a surface.

The other great region of inaccessibility stands roughly parallel to the surface of the earth and extends in the opposite direction from “down”. It is not marked by a surface but rather a gradual increase in inaccessibility. It is the sky above the surface of the earth. About half the time it is full of light, sometimes glaring, sometimes hazy. When the sky is not full of light it offers a very different spectacle. Given these conditions the portion of the world accessible to us is rather ‘tablet’ shaped on the medium scale, a narrow space between an interesting sort of ceiling and a floor.

Although an individual’s sensitivities and perception are local and anchored at a locality, we are aware of the vastness of the world in which we are placed. We are aware that the vastness we do not see or know may contain and deliver threats and hazards. The moment is always unfinished, never possessed of a fixed essence. There is more to come, which we have a thought (a hand) in creating. We live in that ‘not yet’ as if it were an opening in which we might create a larger, unfolded, form of ourselves. Our questions point us into it. The light of our questions beams into the ‘not yet’ opening, the future.

When momentum does not account for what happens, a person tries to fit events into patterns from subjectivity, assigning subjectivity to otherwise separate and different presences. To recognize intelligence, other than personal subjectivity, is to recognize an entity moved by intuitions of predicament, value, and opportunity, a memory-based sense of the relevance of things, a sense of the future, and problems of achieving presence in the world. It is to distinguish a voice, actions which express desires, judgments, and sensitivities instead of movements due to mechanical momentum. You cannot see or touch another intelligence. You have to sense it in action. For example imitative action, especially mimicry with an original addition, is a declaration and communication of intelligence. Rocks and bushes do not imitate.

We recognize intelligence too much, sensing human-like personalities in the form of gods, ghosts, or spirits ‘behind’ all kinds of natural events and irregular occurrences. The assignment of intelligence to separate beings changes a person’s presence in the world into a being-with these others. Being-with is a sense of having an existence larger than personal privacy, of self-experience as something others might be aware of, share, and possibly meddle in.

When sensing personality outside ourselves we are recognizing questions and intentions that are not our own, and so recognizing other entities acting from intelligence. We are making sense of movements of people and animals by recognizing intelligence as a force. Empathy is difficult in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be common. Toward the external personalities identified as gods, people do not feel empathy but fear. Still, beings moved by intelligence sometimes shelter each other from the boundless darkness, uniting by imitation as well as by physical closeness. The first experience of other intelligence is probably mother.

Humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees, storms, and the universe as a whole, and we might next imagine personality in computers and robots. Desire, purpose, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations. “Somebody did it.” “A spirit did it.” “God did it.” These are 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 subjectivity and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything that exists.

Living has to be maintained continually by effort. We need to be taking in food, water, and breathable air which are unevenly and thinly scattered. The survival of a body requires coverings and shelter. Embodiment brings the necessity to work. Work is required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities of life. That is especially problematic because everybody wants to escape from work to enjoy and wonder at the mysteries of nature and intelligence. It has been customary, culturally structured, for people to unload tedium, fatigue, discomfort, and filth onto others when they can. Based on that, tedium, fatigue, and filth, ordered onto you by someone in a more powerful position, are defining qualities of the experience of work. Humans have always had disease, injury, fatigue, hunger, weakness, and old age. Anchored to the ground, the human body is at the mercy of wild nature, disease, parasites, predators, and hostile marauders, in a situation that is often out of control.

Considering all this, humans worry about survival and well-being, and not just because of uncertainty about invisible spirits. Such worries support formation of collectives. There is a longing for grandeur, the supra-individual nation, social-class, race, Church, or even civilization.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

There is lots of evidence that, for most of human presence, the landscape of the night sky looked far better than the clutching ground. In a world without urban crowding and smog, and without artificial lights, the awesome beauty and fascination of the universe as revealed in the night sky likely had an importance quite lost to modern minds, in fact seeming more real than the world on the ground. Life on the ground has been nasty, brutish, and short. People struggle, fight and run, get sick, hurt, tired, weak, and enslaved. People looked up at night and saw a landscape of soft light. It was huge, bigger by far then the turf below, and movements were few and slow. The daily drift from east to west is unvarying, recurring in a continuous pattern. The movement made it seem alive, yet without vulnerability.

Because the rotating pattern of stars does not change, in contrast to things close to the Earth, including the moon and planets, the starry sky was taken as a model of eternal being. It occurred to some that the realm of stars did not change because it was a vision of perfection. The fact that stars are immeasurably high and distant, pure light, and incomprehensible did not stand in the way of interpreting them as sacred and peculiarly real.

The night sky was an early inspiration for the idea of a transcendent world, everlasting, completely primal, and sacred. That world was imagined to have a different kind of Being, subtle, ethereal, pure luminosity, and immune from organic growth and aging processes, wear, tear, random change, or decay, the Being of Eternity. It was separated and different from the ordinary surroundings of human lives, but there is a historical pattern of people believing that the sky above creates and moves the earth below, the idea of the sky as a top-down causal and creative force. It seemed to be the foundation and source of ordinary surroundings, apparently creating them as a sort of imperfect echo or model of itself. The sky is the primordial clock, apparent driver of time. The night sky is always drifting or coasting (and falling) around a set of complicated cycles. Intelligence brings time to the brute actuality of nature. The great firmament of the night sky had a message for intelligence: together we hold time.

Intelligence has an analogous relation to the brute actuality of unintelligent nature. Both stars and subjective intelligence separately were sources of an impression of a kind of Being more subtle and sublime than the material world-of-work, but the star-world is easier to point toward. People of ancient times used qualities from the star-world to express intuitions of their self-experience, of intelligence and thought. The star-world gave them an image of an ethereal, subtle, and present-but-separate kind of existence suggesting thought itself. In the delicate beauty of the clear night sky they thought they saw a reflection of their own invisible Being.

Interpretation of the star world has been complicated. An element of gnosticism asserted that events in the world experienced by people are controlled and determined by the great stellar patterns of the zodiac. These celestial powers were sometimes conceived as demons, fallen angels, or lesser gods called archons. Those powers author the fate of individuals and humanity as a whole, but they are not ultimate powers. There is a higher and greater power which can be touched by individual persons. Inward awareness and contemplation of the highest deity can achieve release from the zodiac powers, and profound self-determination. The gnostic claim is that authentic self-determination is the best life, and it can be achieved only by that very special inward mental accomplishment.

The Transcendence of Intelligence

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Intelligence is common to conceptions of transcendence, both ancient and modern. Even if God is the particular form a sense of transcendence takes it is still a matter of intelligence transcending inertial non-intelligent nature. The power of God is always a deliberate teleological power, the power of intelligence. The sense of the absurdity that there is beautiful nature, intelligences, and culture instead of nothing shares a kind of transcendence with the sense of God, because that mystery temps us to interpreted it as a deliberate act of creation. Intelligence itself is the only evidence for a higher plane of existence, and subjectivity is our primary acquaintance with intelligence. The encounter between individual intelligence and merely inertial nature begins to make transcendence thinkable.

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the choice of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. For choices of action, intelligence has more than sensory perception and immediate responses stimulated by perception. It has memory and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote future, rational thinking has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions through conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern imposition, analysis, and extrapolation. It has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows rational mentality with a unique public voice. The rational will or intellect is an individuating personal genius with the dignity of deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

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 are emotionally expressive qualities from an intelligence in a life-situation. The voice carries or expresses a character, persona, or avatar in addition to any meaning that might be denoted or connoted by linguistic utterance. The voice expresses a continuity of deliberate acts of self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments.

There are grounds for transcendence in these observations. For one thing there are no negations, possibilities, or probabilities in the brute actuality of nature. Neither are there temporally remote features. These are brought to the situation by a personal mentality and clearly transcend the actuality of nature. The rational will is free, beyond the compulsion of natural impulses and merely ephemeral appearances, because it draws upon powers which transcend nature.

Existential Non-Appearance

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Subjectivity

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The actor’s questions are: Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? * This is the fabric of self knowledge. For the question ‘Who am I?’, there is a social definition and there is a purely subjective definition: the gusher of subjective playfulness, curiosities, questions, orientations, synthetic productions of the dream-engine, gratifications, appetites, frustrations and impulses to mark the environment. Subjectivity is a strictly personal answer to the question “Who am I?”. For all the other questions there are also two answers, one focused on the subjective buzzing and bubbling and another focused on a socially assigned “I”.

As the philosopher David Hume declared in 1739, innocent subjectivity has a problem specifying its own existence due to the absence of a subjective appearance that can be measured and pointed out. It has existence before identity, or maybe existence without identity. It is pointless to undertake a study of something like “soul,” “mind,” “self”, “beliefs”, or “ideas” for example, because that discussion is about imaginary objects. Subjectively is not an object of any kind.

Subjective intelligence has a problem in its own non-appearance. It is a gusher of creativity, building a life and a way of being in a life with questions, curiosity, immediate gratification and suffering, ambitions, appetites, desire for self-preservation, and impulses to mark the objective world in ways which involve self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Yet, it feels the lack of a stable image or essence as a fragility and questionability about its existence. Its existence is verified by that very agonizing, the “existential” dread or doubt of insubstantiality. Intelligence feels that its intellectual and emotional powers transcend voiceless but measurable nature, and yet cannot escape the ephemerality of its emotional, libidinous, actualizing, or intellectual presence. Everything that can be said of it is momentary, and soon something else will mark its presence. Subjectivity, that is, existence as a particular person, is exposed, unstable, and fleeting, especially in our volitional nature and our mortality. Personal acts of volition change and change and emphasize differences between one person and another. As individuals what we have is always sliding away and the unknown is bearing toward us. In youth and in life’s prime that is normally balanced by graces and opportunities raining continually and by the strength, skill, and endurance we can devote to getting along. Mortality means the rain of graces itself is slipping away. However, there is also a subjective accumulation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness”. Roughly, the experience of many teachers is that each student learns best what he or she is really wondering about simply from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Each person’s wondering process could be seen as a peculiar force of nature that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia.

When subjective questioning evaluates and measures nature, the questioning is changed. A question is not a picture of the world, but its bearings and directedness change with satisfactions, disappointments, and discoveries. Its discoveries are part of its moment of directionality, evaluation, and measurement. Every discovery, satisfaction, disappointment, or surprise adds itself to the bearings of a question. Training and education work to the extent that they contribute to a person’s questioning. At a personal level within subjectivity, knowledge is a modification of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, the personal orientation or bearing which confers meaning on an environment. Every change is present in the instantaneous bearing or directionality of a person’s questioning. Everything that is part of the meaning of experience must be present instantaneously, as the question with which a person confronts, reads, and makes sense of sense-impressions. The instantaneous stimuli which fit into the bearings of questioning are those which make sense. Ultimately, a question is a person at some instant. Perception is a reading process, an interpretive activity by a person in a life.

* My Dinner with Andre, A Screenplay for the Film by Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-394-17948-X. (p. 26. Attributed to Stanislavski.)

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Subjectivity

The Brute Actuality of Nature

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

Elemental Orientation

No Stinking Badges

The Two Traditions

Transcendence in Ancient Philosophy

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

Ground and Sky

The Transcendence of Intelligence

Existential Non-Appearance