Category Archives: Subjectivity

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 118, word count: 1,656

Post-modernist theory rejects the mental autonomy and creative agency of the individual that Enlightenment era philosophy introduced into modernity. It’s also the universality insisted upon by philosophical claims that post-modernists reject and deny. Implicit here is the post-modernist claim that individual identity is inseparable from an ambient cultural hive mind made up of specific ‘discourses’. That individuals can move their personal orientation beyond an ambient hive mind (cultural discourses), beyond an ethnic identity, and reorient into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally, and so engage in thinking with a peculiarly philosophical universality and autonomy, is rejected by post-modernists. The claimed necessity of ethnic identity is the theory behind a postmodernist imperative to refrain from criticizing cultures, to respect the peculiarities of all cultures because criticism is always from some ‘colonizing, imperialist, alien cultural perspective’. The fragmentations of identity politics follow. Without philosophical universality you can’t criticize patriarchy or patriarchal superego. This is our point of dispute.

It is not controversial that individual people universally share both consciousness and embodiment. The question is this: is there enough that is inherent in only consciousness and embodiment for an individual to have a viable identity able to enact an exit from hive minds? Part of the post-modernist claim is that there is no coherent person, subject, or agent without the input of particular cultural norms encountered and learned from ongoing interactions with other people within an ambient community. This claim has essential common ground with the claim of David Hume (1711-76) that there is no continuity of interior subjectivity.

Hume’s Phenomenology

Hume’s phenomenology of subjectivity as a “bundle of impressions and ideas” in which he could identify no enduring self or person, emerges when experience is pre-conceived as passively receptive and determined exclusively by the bombardment at every moment of a manifold of stimuli from surrounding objects and events. Such a pre-conception is typical of empiricists with their idea of consciousness as a “blank slate” that exists only as the sensory stimuli and afterimages that appear there. That model is inaccurate, however, because consciousness doesn’t work passively. A person comes to each moment as an agent, searching, reaching, and delving as an interpretation of a personal past. Such temporal depth and agency is exactly subjective continuity since responses to lessons learned enacted as a personal vectoring into futurity are acts of a subject. Knowing is nothing like a mental photocopy of facts, not the ability to recover an afterimage of words or images from a stack. When something is known it has been made a fixture of a person’s orientation, embedded in a personal sense of context and bearing, an overall sense of where you are, where you are coming from, and where headed: the personal context for making sense of anything sensed or perceived. Knowledge isn’t afterimages but instead a rich directionality of flight, a poise or bearing. Any consciousness is already agency expressing a subjectivity whose particular identity is formed very much by embodiment but also by spiritual individuality, an individual peculiarity of sensitivity, point of view, questioning, impulses to make a personal mark, individuality of voice. Embodiment gives us the personal identity of a particular shape and placement; mobility, experience of moving and shaping other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effort and effect. What persons have in common universally as consciousness and embodiment are dimensions of individual identity.

Discourses Don’t Think (Only Individuals Think)

When “thinking” is mentioned it might still suggest an outward gaze, an opening through sensitivity to objects in the surrounding world, maybe contemplated after the fact with retained impressions or from reading or hearing spoken reports. There is much to think about in the tumultuous, terrible, and wonderful world, from dinner to politics. However, there is also much to think about concerning thinking itself, the action of a personal sensibility that brings to any sensitivity all the context that gives it meaning and sense, a sensibility that delves sensations for confirmations of expectations and opportunities for personal aspirations. The directionality of any human gaze is so guided by what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) to what can only be characterized as a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Spiritual agency isn’t an object or a substance, has no completed outline or appearance, but it still has plenty of identity.

A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity which includes a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring (a marker of spirituality). Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of empathic sociability. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle knowledge and kinaesthetic-metabolic knowledge) in a construction of expectation and directionality.

For such a sensibility, time is something about now, specifically the personal context-in-flight brought to bear upon now as the portal to creating a personal future. The sense of time to come, of passing into time to come, is a glimpse of the freedom of ideality, of the ongoing (never finished) self-construction of sensibility. In a certain sense we exist entirely in our spiritual reach into not-yet in the context of lessons interpreted from no-longer. Only spirituality (intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity. Teleology of creation is another identifier of spirituality, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive gestures or voice. Consciousness, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea-of-a-life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself through the world, is a fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating openness in an otherwise inertial and entropic world. In such a world, consciousness can recognize its temporal bearing as transcendent in its outreaching sensitivity, its caring and curiosity, its ever renewing ideality, its freedom and power of embodied intervention within the shape of brute actuality. In the strictly inertial and entropic world, this very limited freedom is shockingly transcendent.

The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of nature, transcending its own embodied particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion. Instead of having any definitive personal particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality, namely freedom, time to come as freedom into which a possible future extension of self, of life, is projected, a personal metaphysical non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by enacting interconnections with others. The flight of ideality creates a special sensitivity to other fountains of unforeseeable possibilities, other conscious agents. In such sociability we have: empathy, the comfort of companionship and sharing, co-operative bonding, community, ethics, morality, culture, and conversation.

The agency inherent in consciousness, particularized and empowered by embodiment and yet made transcendently open and creatively indefinite by spirituality, establishes that personhood, viable identity, is not fundamentally a construct of cultural norms. We can judge and criticize patriarchy, patriarchal superego, and any other cultural norms from the perspective of the inherent agency of individual consciousness which is always outside a hive mind orientation. Not only that, but the personal transcendence in spirituality is a guiding beacon in a process of thinking that judges (and discards) culturally assigned labels, categories, and evaluations of personal identity which contradict and deny personal transcendence. We still have an inherent sensitivity to other conscious agents and good reasons to re-invent empathic interconnections.

There certainly is a requirement of sociability, and we construct our sociability initially by learning, conforming to, and using the norms of interaction on display around us. Individuals imitate and twist the norms of interaction we encounter. The imitation of such norms of identity is pragmatic role-playing, constructing a sort of costume or mask which can become habitual and obsessive and yet always removable in principle. The original agency is not replaced or destroyed. The identity markers assigned by culture depend on the inherent agent to make them work, are in fact parasitic on the inherent agent, and agency remains when an individual moves personal orientation beyond a cultural hive mind or ethnic identity and reorients philosophically into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics (3): Crisis of the Left

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 117, word count: 1199

Metaphysics is the ultimate weakness of the political left-wing. Right-wing politics is the promotion of patriarchy, and the main pillar of patriarchy is the widespread personal orientation (superego) formed around bogyman metaphysics, assumptions of cosmic moral ledger-keeping in preparation for a final reckoning, a cosmic plan. Any conception such as karma that includes the idea of a cosmic reckoning, or any other reward and punishment after death, is personification of nature on the grand scale (bogyman metaphysics), entrenching an idealized paradigm of patriarchy as a top-down personal orientation. Platonic Ideal Forms and any other metaphysics ascribing primacy to some conception of eternal Being or a Great Chain of Being are also examples of top-down metaphysics. It is the top-down orientation which confers meaning on imperialistic war. Right-wingers have elaborate social and biological theories (Hobbes, Darwin) cementing conflict, trophies, and centralized monopolies of violence as crucial forces of civilization and society. Such theories are expressions of top-down metaphysical assumptions, and the metaphysics is the ultimate support of right-wing political power. Right-wing thinking operates in an overall conception in which the objective world consists of certain specific, determinate, and eternal structures (great chain of being) and categories (atomic facts) which pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual. In that right-wing world everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. The right-wing orientation is a looking outward for transcendence or for an equivalent for transcendence in material determinism, categorically given and absolute in the Great Chain of Being. Top-down metaphysics is entirely bogus but unfortunately is the universal cultural default, entrenched by history and tradition. Such is the dystopia in which the prospects and strategies for autonomous thinking as an individual must be devised. The good news is that, since the personal superego is the patriarchy, then disrupting the patriarchy is an accomplishment of thinking, an intellectual and cultural enterprise. More good news is that there has been since ancient times a cultural stream of philosophical thinking, a minority report, that resisted and disputed the dominant orientation.

Historical Roots of the Political Left

The main roots of the political left, expressed for example in socialism, are in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically in the radical branch of the Enlightenment which asserted universal human rationality, a transcendent power at the level of the individual, and developed that claim into a profound rejection of social and economic inequality as most evident in such institutions as monarchy, aristocracy, and religious hierarchies. The other looming presence in the ideology of the left, Marxist theory, was merely a footnote to and a distortion of Enlightenment ideas, and Enlightenment ideology itself was a particular formulation of the cultural stream of philosophical thinking that disputed the dominant orientation since antiquity. Marxist theory attempted to change the foundation of egalitarianism from universal human rationality (at the level of the individual) to the predetermined working out of economic laws governing class struggle in history: dialectical materialism. It was a variant of Hegelian (top-down) metaphysics, driven by the cosmic Final Cause, and a tragic dead end innovation. The collapse of communism in The Soviet Union and eastern Europe exposed the absurdity of using materialism as a bottom-up foundation for such Enlightenment ideas as innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy. Although materialism can claim to be an alternative to top-down orientations, and was promoted as such by the radical branch of Enlightenment, it cannot avoid determinism and so becomes a justification for anything that exists. The idea of economic determinism is still an institutionalized assumption in the science of economics. Karl Marx’s ideas of dialectical materialism and laws of history demonstrate how materialism settles into strict fatalism, unfreedom, and the impossibility of transcendence (the creation of unforeseeable alternatives and possibilities). The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just the way it has always been. The collapse of Marxism was not the collapse of the long historical development of egalitarianism as implicit in Enlightenment ideas, because the same egalitarianism was vestigial in ancient humanist philosophy and in Renaissance humanism and in a continuous stream of cultural developments in western cultural history. The pressure of egalitarianism has lasted so long against apparently crushing forces because it expresses the fundamental reality of transcendence at the level of the individual, implicit in the idea of universal human rationality. The collapse of Marxism merely discredits materialist and top-down metaphysics (as in economic theory) as a base for the political left.

Metaphysics for the Political Left

Although in the early twenty-first century the political left is faltering badly for lack of an articulated metaphysics, it already has an informal conceptual framework, a thinking orientation, which implies its metaphysics. Left-wing thinking operates in a conception of the world in which individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures. In that context, individual subjectivities have a mission that goes beyond struggling for survival and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, a mission, instead, to conceive and make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is an essential part of that mission. On the left-wing view, then, individual subjectivity is transcendent in relation to the merely inertial and entropic world. If metaphysics is the identification of transcendence, then the political left is already committed to a metaphysics. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human.

The salvation of the left does not lie in abandoning transcendence in a rush to the metaphysical bottom of materialism, nor in a backward-looking reverence for antique conceptions of top-down cosmic providence, but instead in a reconceptualizing of transcendence that builds on the Enlightenment recognition of individual rationality. The great mistake in metaphysics has been to gaze outward, especially toward far horizons, squinting to make out messages in the haze. The focus of metaphysics has to be the looking itself, not what is seen but the seeing. Consciousness, and only consciousness, is transcendent, and consciousness occurs only at the level of the individual, and not as a passive receptivity but instead in the application of personal context in a moment of interpretive sensitivity, a context-projecting moment of interpretation. There is no looking or seeing without an encounter of personally specific context with novel sensitivity, a personally spiritual act.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics (2)

08 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by in Embodiment, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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This posting (number 116) is 955 words.

Bottom-up political arrangements will never be broadly effective in any culture dominated by top-down metaphysics, because bottom-up political arrangements conflict openly with a top-down view of the world. Any system of reality that includes the idea of a cosmic moral reckoning such as karma, or any other reward and punishment after death, is top-down metaphysics, personification of nature on the grand scale. Platonic Ideal Forms or any other metaphysics ascribing primacy to some conception of eternal Being or a Great Chain of Being are also examples of top-down metaphysics. Bottom-up political arrangement will never be appropriately effective in cultures dominated by such ideas because conceptions of metaphysics are taken as templates for the proper assembling of social structures. Such ideas are meant to supply the framework in personal superego constructs, to effect the spiritual subordination of individuals, and as such they have to be dismissed for autonomous thinking to be possible.

“Halt”, you will say. “We can’t change metaphysics. The world is just made the way it is made, and we have to live in it as it is”. Well, metaphysics has been a guess at how the world is made, and the most influential guesses have all been wrong. They went wrong by accepting the form of structure commonly seen in human societies as a straightforward manifestation of the most fundamental structure of the universe. It was a political win for one side of a partisan contest between two gender clustered cultures of human interconnection.

Gender Politics

In the context of political ideology the crucial contest is between two opposing gender-clustered cultures (one of which has been astonishingly invisible to the intellectual community) representing two parallel systems of human interconnection operating simultaneously. One of those systems is roughly described in Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. It formalizes a masculine ethos in which it takes fear of the strongest among aggressive individuals to prevent continuous conflict of all against all for selfish personal gratification. Let’s call this political adulation of a commanding height “the patriarchy”, the core strand of conservatism. Look at Nazis and you will see this ethos of masculinity in a rigorously purified form. Values of conflict, command, rank order, obedience, violence, victories, and trophies are dominant. All concepts of the large scale structure of nature as a Great Chain of Being with perfect Being at the top and flawed or tainted whatever at the bottom are projections of the masculinist idea of the commanding height. This traditional top-down metaphysics was conceived as the legitimizing ideology of longstanding hierarchies of power inequality. However, there is another independent system of interconnection that can be described as first-language-nurture culture and centres on the nurturing and socializing of children, treasuring of every single one. It focuses on development of language competence as well as cultivation of human relationships that are mutually respectful. This indispensable bottom-up construction of social interconnectedness, without which civil society would cease to exist immediately, has been cultivated and practiced by women from time immemorial, almost entirely unacknowledged and unpaid. The effectiveness of the feminine culture of interconnection establishes that love (not fear) is the most important stabilizing force in human societies.

Although the masculine ethos has plenty of metaphysical speculation lined up to support it and formal academic theory romanticizing it, the operation of the feminine culture of first-language-nurture remains largely unidentified, and has no bottom-up metaphysics on offer in support of more effective bottom-up political arrangements. “But wait,” you will say, “isn’t metaphysics top-down by definition? What would a bottom-up metaphysics even look like?” Well, consider final causes.

Ordinary Transcendence: Final Causes

Final causes, an idea introduced by Aristotle, are non-actual but potential conditions or situations that cause the actual state of affairs to change so as to match or actualize the final causes. Aristotle thought that all substances include certain final causes as features of their being without requiring substances to be caring, sensitive, intelligent, or involved in creative planning. Instead they were a kind of in-built individual destiny. However, over the millennia since Aristotle, it has been discovered that the changes of substances as such can be understood without final causes. Final causes are not part of nature. Nature is defined as features of the world that are entirely explainable without final causes, explainable instead as kinds of falling, pre-determined chains of cause and effect within forces and structures such as mass, gravity, electrical charge, atomic structure, momentum, inertia, and entropy. Still, it is obvious that lots of the shapes and conditions in anyone’s experience were brought into existence only because a desire for them was conceived before they existed, because they existed first as non-actualities, pre-conceived by the kind of entity that cares about the future, and conceives a future shaped by enough probabilities and possibilities so that certain situations that do not already exist can be chosen as personal plans or intentional goals and actively brought about by effortful interventions in the pre-existing surroundings. So the existence of final causes as thoughts, ideas, or plans is obvious and undeniable. Since final causes are not part of nature, they are the bits of experience that count as metaphysical, transcendent, or spiritual. The final causes created by particular individuals are the only openings bringing unforeseeable shapes into an otherwise inertial and entropic world. Final causes are brought into nature by embodied spiritual beings, that is, by individual people creating their particular life and work. Transcendence is the intervention of us in nature, exercising agency sourced from our personally inventive spiritual flight. Taking these ordinary final causes as a key to transcendence is bottom-up metaphysics.

This also relates to posting 111, July 26, 2017, Politics is Metaphysics.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Postscript to Superego

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

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

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Superego

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The idea “superego”, from the Freudian model of subjectivity, identifies a learned force of personal orientation. In that Freudian model the vectors of force are the inherent id, bestial lusts for ecstatic pleasure, sparkly things, power, and esteem (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions), and the acquired superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Many other social influences must also be included: representations by teachers or in media stories, for example, of certain people iconically enjoying pleasure, power, and status, intended to motivate imitation and so to influence career aspirations and style of life. There are also role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people with various ways of making a living. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and of person. So the superego includes far more than personified authority symbols, because it encompasses the whole structure over which those figures exert authority, the whole surrounding social landscape in which any individual must make his or her way.

This superego is a learned (as such internalized) model of reality which on one layer is a strictly pragmatic set of local markers that enable an individual to navigate social structures and economic arrangements in order to survive and achieve some personal goals. However, the presence of the active social system and its material infrastructure as a whole is impressive enough to be taken as a manifestation of transcendence, of some unquestionable force of God or nature beyond the grasp of human understanding, and it is especially the most low-definition and abstract symbols of sovereign authority which claim and invoke an origin in, and proximity to, transcendence. The most local markers of collective orientation, typical ways of acting and material culture, lend a readiness for easy acceptance, inspired by the immediacy of their functional utility and their apparent clarity of foundations, to the rest of the superego construct, all the way up to those most abstract symbols of authority which claim that a grounding in transcendence sanctifies their right of primary agency overriding and negating the agency of any individual.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Spirituality, Time, and Ideas

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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Spirituality is ideality, but contrary to the classical Platonic conception of ideality as the perspective of eternity, radically removed from time, in fact ideality is inseparable from the personal sense of the passage of time. Ideality is the spiritual creation of transcendent freedom in teleological time. A spiritual person as an idea carries lessons (ideas) interpreted from no-longer and with them creates a personal reach into not-yet.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Found Buried in the History of Philosophy

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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tags: transcendence, spirituality, dualism, hive mind, philosophy, history, religion, thinking, freedom, Immanuel Kant

A thing to be found in the history of philosophy, a thing which has been carefully avoided, is the fact that the thinking of a series of people who did philosophical work progressed through a slow development from ancient times and finally became confident in a fundamental breakthrough, the essentials of which are present in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) along with plenty of contradictory and distracting material. The breakthrough is substantially this: the message of personal spirituality is not subordination to an eternal and infinite disembodied spirituality (caring), but instead is individual creative autonomy, an active transcendence at the level of the embodied individual: transcendent individualism.

The Transcendence of Local Spirituality

Philosophical spirituality is not obscure. It is your personal experience, intelligence, or consciousness, but the word “consciousness” implies something impossibly passive, and impossibly “here and now”. Without there, there is no here. Without then, there is no now. The there and the then are always brought to the here and now spiritually by a person’s intelligence intervening in the here and now. Ordinary mental intervention that includes perception of here and now must also include ideation, abstraction, memory, caring, lessons learned, expectations, and aspirations in effortful progress within the sense of the passage of time. It is creative activity, a thought or idea of temporal opening that is thinking itself into the world. Philosophy is (often) a descriptive exploration of that local and temporal spirituality, a recognition of its transcendence in spite of its everyday familiarity. This transcendence is orientation (existence as intelligence) within a continuous newness, with invention, creation, and the openness of alternative and devised possibilities, which is more or less the ordinary sense of being alive, of consciousness. By contrast, in the world of materialism, without transcendence, there may be cycles and variations on similar kinds of events but all within a world that is fundamentally formed and bounded, completed, closed, in something like an unalterable Great Chain of Being. The difference is between a closed world of determinism or an open world of ongoing creation. Normal experience always includes openness, but an openness that must assert itself against the world’s tendency to go closed. The transcendence of the opening is always part of a dualism with closed determinism as its surroundings. That transcendence is the only way in which everything does not have to be as it is. The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just what it is. So, philosophical spirituality is a recognition of transcendence at the level of individual embodied intelligence.

What is Religious Spirituality?

This highlights the fact that there are two main contesting concepts of spirituality: the religious and the philosophical. Among religions, there is a widespread assumption that spirituality is inseparably connected to a guilty conscience supposedly inherent in every human, and, from that guilt, a reaching out in surrender to a higher being for forgiveness, healing, and release from the taint and disgrace of being-part-of this world of trouble and strife. The guilty conscience and certain events are considered to be deliberate messages to humans from a supernatural parallel universe containing personified entities of caring with effective power over our world. Those entities and their world cannot be known otherwise, so the behaviour of humans toward them demands belief without evidence, faith in the legends of their mysterious power, and demonstrations of fear decreed by those legends. (faith, fear, guilt, surrender, transcendence of disembodied intelligence) The mystical version is an overwhelming sense of release from guilty individuality through spiritual uptake into the absolute, primordial, and eternal unity of everything. Almost everybody is brought up under the influence of some religion or other, emphasizing obedience to divinely proclaimed rules, with guilt and punishment for disobedience; but hardly anybody learns anything about philosophy as a different (breakthrough) encounter with spirituality.

The problem now is that, culturally, we lost a sense of transcendence during the nineteenth century in an onslaught of scientific materialism, which also had a decisive, and in some ways helpful, role in Enlightenment politics, having gone a long way to undermine the political power of institutions deriving their credibility from the religious story of transcendence. However, we are still wallowing in the metaphysical slough of pre-Kantian materialist determinism. The credibility of the old religious transcendence has been in steady and terminal decline, but is still clung to desperately by many people who remain unaware of any alternative, and who recoil from nihilist materialism. In its combination of scientific denial of transcendence and a clinging to discredited religious conceptions of transcendence, the cultural hive mind that is made available to us in the Euro-American cultural system of the early twenty-first century is debilitating and toxic. What is required now from philosophy is a metaphysics of transcendence in personal spirituality, but that metaphysics has existed for a long time already as the spirituality and transcendence of ordinary consciousness.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (1)

10 Wednesday May 2017

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

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tags: hive mind, social contract, mass media, individual identity, collective identity

The idea of hive mind is a certain interpretation of the collectively goal-directed activity of bees in and around a bee hive, imagining that physically individual bees lack mental individuality and instead all share a single consciousness with a single collective set of perceptions, urges and motives, knowledge, expectations, aspirations, gratifications, and intentions. Since the idea of hive mind in bees is pure speculation, it is possible to imagine it as a perfectly single collective mind. For example, it is possible to imagine that the hive mind of bees is so completely and equally shared that every single bee is constantly enduring the full drudgery of being-the-queen at the same time as always enjoying the full pleasure of being-the-worker-bees gathering pollen from flowers in the sunshine. The meaning of hive mind is that the collective is the primary unit of agency, the source of value definition, creative initiative, and identity definition. With hive mind, a collective is more important than the individuals who make up the collective, the collective owns the individuals, and the individuals belong to the collective. In the case of bees, the single intelligence shared by numerous bee bodies involves, presumably but implausible, a form of telepathy that is inherent in each bee, rather than being constructed of complex cultural teachings, but for human beings an outwardly fair imitation of hive mind is artificially constructed with culturally supplied symbols and pageantry, but not a hive mind that is completely and equally shared in every individual person. With humans, everybody is restricted to living in his or her personal body, with its sensations, pains, and pleasures, but there is a culturally constructed orientation to certain crucial pillars of reality, including messages about threats and opportunities defining a collective situation. It is widely recognized that the shared stories and emotional triggers distributed by pervasive mass media, for example, concentrated under the control of a few corporate owners responsible to the same advertisers and funders, and under irresistible pressure to be patriotic and responsible in maintaining investor confidence in stable and predictable growth, contribute mightily to that shared sense of reality. Unlike our speculation on the shared consciousness of bees, however, in which there is a perfect transparency of experience, and a perfect empathy, among all bees, the shared pillars of reality in human culture support and legitimize a hierarchical inequality of experience and dignity among human individuals by effecting widespread personal identification with the collective in an imagined social contract. There is a conspicuous lack of transparency and empathy across the hierarchical class divisions in the human hive. There is a de-location of personal identity from the high definition of what is strictly personal, to the low-definition of a personified abstraction, a culturally constructed collective. There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

In Plato’s Cave

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: spirituality, transcendence, thinking, Plato, dualism, the cave allegory, autonomy

Thinking, in addition to including the many reorientations involved in someone’s responding and navigating through an ordinary day, can also be a non-pragmatic delving or soaring into previously unidentified regions of experience, into the looming unidentified now. It can be an opening of new directions and new pathways of curiosity. This often involves writing, uses writing as a tool, and the crucial role of language in writing does not mean that the thinking process begins or ends with language. With thinking-as-delving you search around in the concrete dust and muck of the objective world to uncover in this moment the precise beauty and detail of structure there. With thinking-as-soaring you notice and question the occurrence of abstraction, ideas and ideality, the presence of memory and expectation in all acts of perception, even in the most concrete experiences. You notice the recognition of types, categories, universals, patterns, relationships, and structures which have no perceivable existence as particulars, and which consequently point to a mental, ideal activity often conceived as subjective inwardness or spirituality. The directionality of any human gaze is so equipped with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as questioning, curiosity, expectations of futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to some region of surroundings) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. To say that spirituality is personally interior is to say nothing more than that it is not an actuality among things, but is still the marker of what is most local for any particular person.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, from Republic, Book VII, a crowd of people is watching shapes move about in front of them. They do not know that they are in a dark sloping cave, and they are looking at a wall at the bottom of the cave. There are people outside the cave, near the entrance, carrying cut-out images, models of objects, back and forth in the direct light of a fire beaming down into the cave, so that the cut-out images cast shadows all the way down onto the wall at the bottom. The people in the cave believe they are perceiving real objects, when in fact they are seeing shadows of cut-out images of objects. One person in the crowd at the bottom of the cave, presumably thinking philosophically, separates himself and turns away from the wall of shadow images, and sees that he is in a cave with light streaming down from above. He makes his way up the slope and reaches the top where he sees the cut-out images being moved about, casting shadows down into the cave, which the crowd at the bottom mistakes for reality.

Plato had an elaborate theory of supernatural Ideas as the ultimate reality, but it is not necessary to accept Plato’s metaphysical theory to find meaning in the allegory of the cave. It is a story about discovering transcendence. In that context, Plato’s cave makes sense as the simple unconsciousness of the transcendent spirituality of ideality itself, of the idea that is thinking itself in thinking your life. It’s right here. Plato’s cave is simply ignoring spirituality as we gaze from it or through it at the shapes of objects in our surroundings, leaving ideality itself as a blind spot, so that materialist monism seems sufficient. We get caught in the symbolism and pageantry of property rights, competitive materialism, the valley of concrete things, behavioural science and economics as destiny. We lose the transcendence of spirituality, the magnificent absurdity of outreaching curiosity and sensitivity, caring (often desperate), newness, incompleteness, projecting an intervening voice, abstraction, ideation, temporal projection, futurity, creative freedom. Plato’s cave is the loss of the awareness of transcendent spirituality. Philosophy is most interesting as a descriptive exploration of spirituality, and there is a perennial dualism in such philosophy because it is the dualism of spirituality meeting actuality that brings the transcendence of spirituality into focus. Truly creative freedom is transcendent no matter how conceived, so if we are to recognize freedom, we are stuck with dualism.

Having a working recognition of spirituality makes a profound difference. It means that transcendence exists at the level of individuals and that every individual has direct personal access to transcendent spirituality. Transcendence is not remote or occult, not the preserve of devotees of altered states, not from supernatural revelations or custodians of ancient knowledge. It means that transcendence is in experience that is immediately available to everyone. It is local and personal for everyone, with no need for speculations about supernatural entities. Even more important, since freedom is at the core of transcendent spirituality, it means that creative freedom is an inherent power of each individual. The simple fact of autonomous individual consciousness, based on the unique placement of individual bodies, brings with it the whole package of autonomous spirituality. The possibility and historical fact of philosophical thinking demonstrates that autonomy.

People in positions of institutional authority are dismissive of generalized individual autonomy as a centrifugal force, can’t allow themselves to see it or admit its importance, and prefer to accept psychology, social science, and economics as revelations of unalterable destiny. The philosophical agenda is to have everybody recognize their personal and autonomous power of thinking-as-soaring, to recognize an inherent ability to question and recognize relevant experiences, to discover and live the truth of spirituality meeting actuality. The message of spirituality is not surrender but instead is individual autonomy.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

The Social Contract as Superego

06 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: social contract, superego, id, Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Hobbes, social pragmatism, romanticism, primary process, sociability, linguistic competence, spirituality, The Matrix, dystopian capitalism, thinking, self-thinking idea

Everybody is well aware of dystopian features of investor supremacist capitalism: corporate profiteering from environmental destruction, war, addictions, and rigged markets; broad injustices of stark inequality and brutal imperialism. However, to eliminate such problems through reform of institutions has proven to be vexedly complicated, to say the least, partly because there is nothing near a consensus on what effective reforms might look like.

Romanticism to the Rescue

An overriding cultural romanticism comes to the aid of this situation like a shining knight. Romanticism is the attitude that it is better to get lost in an artistically appealing story or image than to face the ugly political reality. “I can’t do anything about it, so thinking about it is a waste of time.” Romanticism includes a strong stream of nostalgia for an appealing image of the past, galant knights (heroic warriors, cowboys …) and damsels in distress, an image made appealing and profoundly deceptive by being decontextualized, oversimplified, and glamorized. Such romanticism motivates a lot of tourism to European castles, gardens, and museums. Romanticism includes the tragic view of the human situation: ugly political reality is inescapable so, since nothing can be done, enjoy the stories and images. Fixation on the past makes romanticism politically conservative, and conservatism is a kind of romanticism that appeals especially to the comfortably well-to-do, but remarkably, the dominant romanticism helps keep just about everyone from being too upset about the problems of capitalism. “At least this horrible arrangement produces opportunities for entertaining and monumental beauty”, and with romanticism beauty is truth, the essential value of anything is revealed in its beauty. Art is worth more than truth.

One side of the coin of romanticism is accepting that an ugly political reality is unalterable and so pointless to think about, and this is how everybody is brought up and educated to be socially pragmatic, to accomplish the best we can personally within social and economic arrangements as they exist, and the central message of that education is that the only alternative to conformity is self-destruction; that nobody could ever devise anything better than investor supremacist capitalism. The message is that arrangements are far from perfect or even fair, but the imperfection results from a flaw in human nature, competitive self-interest, and you can’t change nature. Nor can you change the organization of nature in a food chain, a hierarchical chain of command, the Great Chain of Being. The best you can do with the better impulses of human nature (ephemeral but recurring) is to soften some of nature’s worst brutality, which is what political and legal institutions are set up to do, especially in nominally democratic states. In effect, this seems to have made the utilitarian utopia a reality: the greatest happiness actually possible for the greatest number.

But I’m OK

So you might say, it doesn’t matter to me if investor-supremacist corporate culture controls my lifestyle and thinks of me as something like livestock, because I’m not living like livestock. I have a decent job and leisure to enjoy reading widely along with encountering a variety of cultural works. I enjoy life with my friends and family with whom I talk freely about anything. We talk about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, politics, religion, war, peace, morality, and human rights and fulfillment. I never miss an opportunity to vote. The retrograde cultural attitudes of some collective of the wealthiest does not hinder me in any decisive way. Without the current economic system and arrangements of civil law and administrative institutions I would be hunting and gathering in the woods, fighting off bandits, subsisting on a dirt farm, or herding goats, reindeer, or bison. I’m happy to support the way things are right now.

Social Contract and Competitive Materialism

This socially pragmatic outlook is as minimally metaphysical as possible, brandishing an ideology evolved for an era of science. Religiously dictated metaphysics-of-far-horizons is still strong as a romantic undercurrent, of course, but, if pressed, a pragmatic person will not insist on any particular religious transcendence as the justification for a sovereign society (authoritarian and starkly unequal), but instead will invoke something like an implicit social contract, a rationalist idea introduced into modernity by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) with the intention of avoiding religious metaphysics. The social contract idea works with the more scientistic kind of metaphysical assumptions that Hobbes held about human nature, what could be called the competitive materialist view: that human nature benefits dramatically from being repressed and controlled because, as naturally atomized personal lust for possessions, power, and adulation (praise, prestige, pageantry of status) it is innately too competitive to form the stable relationships involved in complex collective organization. In social contract ideology, there is an assumption that sovereign authority and force is an expression of the benign intent to impose humane rules on competitions for worldly goods, rules instituted so that nature (primordially brutal) can remain ecstatic and so motivating, but moderately restrained within a cultural framework of peace, complex co-operative stability and security, minimizing harm and maximizing the benefits of collaborative effort. On this view, restraining the primordial ecstatic brutality requires maintenance of authoritarian social structure, supervisory control of the majority of people by a sovereign institution with overwhelming power.

So, as an adolescent, it seems that you are offered the contract: accept the grim reality that decrees the necessity of sovereign authority, submit to supervision within the chain of official power, do your best within the incentives and rewards of the status quo, keeping your egoistic assertion and thinking within practicality as dictated by social norms and nature (as conclusively disclosed by science), and, in return, the institutional system will shield you from the worst ecstatic brutality of nature. It will help beautify the human condition for you. The social system accomplishes its promise with bread, circuses, and a sense of participation and belonging, a personal identity from having a defined place within the Great cosmic Chain of Being as it extends, as it must, into social structure. What the socially pragmatic person accepts in return for embracing the sovereign hierarchy worldview is the promise of employment to be rewarded through some degree of access to the consumer marketplace: tv, cars, homes, fun fads and fashions, drugs and alcohol, social media technology, tourism, dramatic stories and images, movies, music and dancing (all unevenly delivered), but even more important, a personal narrative of place and identity within an impressively idealized institutional and human structure.

Although there is no literal social contract (and never was one to launch civil society) the idea provides an easy and intuitive way for individuals to conceptualize their relationship to the broader structure of a complex society. There is a widely shared and rather wishful assumption by individuals that something binds the broader society to us just as our personal vulnerabilities and needs bind us to the society. So, in that sense, there is a virtual social contract, but it is a projection from individuals onto our surroundings rather than an offering to us from the civil society.* That act of projection is inseparable from accepting, internalizing, the society’s hierarchy of esteem and sovereign supervision as a personal guide or roadmap of thinking.

Thus Spoke Foucault … and Nietzsche

The socially pragmatic espousal of social contract ideology was recognized by Foucault, for example. Foucault’s post-modernist analysis of power combines Hobbes’ idea of the social contract with something like the idea of “the matrix” as depicted in the movie The Matrix (1999), if we take the situation in that movie to be a metaphor for the emotional control of masses of generally co-operative people by means of strategically crafted messages originating from an institutional entity which is minimally disclosed and yet which, by its messages, decisively influences certain crucial perceptions and opinions on a mass scale. (For example, in Medieval Europe that institution was the universal Church of Rome, and today it involves the high priests of investor-supremacist capitalism, something like the international collective of corporate and financial executives who protect capital wealth. In both cases nominally sovereign national governments are subordinate.) In Foucault’s view, everybody chooses voluntarily to participate in constructing the social grid of unequal power and wealth under supervisory direction from the minimally disclosed sovereign entity, and so to conduct personal thinking within the hierarchical conceptual patterns intrinsic to the social contract idea, and to accept the personal identity cashed out (literally) from competitions within the economic system.

Foucault’s thinking was much influenced by Nietzsche’s. However, Nietzsche launched a critique of the citizens of modernity (the last man) as abandoning the primordial ecstasy of life for the safety of herd-like forms of behaviour, internalizing the norms of bourgeois society (the social contract) to such an extent that it is nothing short of a prison, self-supervised internally by each individual. This personally internalized regime of supervision became known as the “superego” and was an important idea in the work of Sigmund Freud**. Nietzsche claimed that the degree of shelter taken within the safety of the superego was separating individuals from the ultimate source of vital ecstasy which is the primary process of personal subjectivity, something he called “id”. Nietzsche thought that primary subjective process is ecstatic will to power, and that the most urgent need of modern people was to revitalize ourselves by unleashing that primary process, our individually autonomous will to power. Interpreted as a response to Hobbes, Nietzsche’s message was that the social contract is killing us by blocking the sources of vitality within our personal subjectivity and replacing them with the specious safety of cookie cutter ambitions, expectations, and satisfactions, and in the process drifting us toward the nihilism of utter predictability. Nietzsche’s concept of primary process is pretty much identical to that of Hobbes, and of course immediately suggests the dystopia imagined by Hobbes: the war of all against all, the dominance of the strongest and a fascist adulation of masculine strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action: the blond beast. Fortunately, Nietzsche was just as wrong as Hobbes was about the specifics of primary process, even though he was right about the spiritual lethality of the superego. So, a re-thinking of primary process is crucial, and that means doing exactly what romanticism rejects, thinking philosophically.

Sociability and Primary Process

The most obvious thing wrong with social contract theory, which purports to explain the necessity of, and the marvellous benefits of, social hierarchy, sovereignty, and authority as the crucial enablers of organized society, is the hidden-in-plain-sight reality that civil and stable social relationships are mainly founded on the nurture and linguistic/ sociability culture practiced and taught by women in their caring for infants and children***. The building of sociability accomplished in that effort does far more to establish civil society than any overpowering hierarchy, and the basic human sociability that it expresses and builds from establishes that Hobbes and Nietzsche were profoundly mistaken about primary process, the basic subjective mechanism of human nature. Personal linguistic competence from long nurture and interconnectedness within small collectives, normally curated by mothers, is a sufficient foundation for the broader sociability and interconnectedness of complex society, unless the society is distorted by arrangements that violate the fundamental spirit of sociability. History reveals, partly in the intractable problems of capitalism, that the intent and culture of sovereignty is very far from benign, but instead is an institutional expression of top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, to protect the special advantages of human macro-parasites, inseparable from the sovereign claim of ownership of individuals (the herder’s herds). That culture of sovereign macro-parasitism is the source of, rather than the remedy for, the persistent dystopian features of the most advanced societies. Sovereign force (or an agreement to accept it) certainly did not create civil society nor is it required for the ongoing stability of civil society. In the actual absence of a demonstrable divine right, no claim to sovereign supremacy has any legitimacy.

It is quite possible to separate participation in the productive processes of civil society (as a necessity for survival) from thinking within the social contract conceptual system, from limiting personal thinking to institutional norms as a road map of reality. You don’t have to think anything in particular about the fundamental human condition to participate rationally in co-operative systems of production, distribution, and consumption. Since the social contract is posited by the individual, it can be voluntarily un-posited. Any framework that individuals project onto our social surroundings can be questioned and dissolved to think differently about personal identity, sociability, and human relationships. It is quite possible to thrive economically at the same time as evading and even subverting the prevailing romanticism (both sides of its coin) which swaddles the pragmatism of living by the social contract. To move past romanticism means to question the premise that there is an unalterable political reality embedded in nature and especially in the primary process of human nature.

Philosophical Thinking

Romanticism is a rejection of philosophical questioning/ reconceptualization in favour of an emotional immersion in drama and beauty. Philosophical thinking is a personally creative reconceptualization of the human condition, but rethinking human nature and personal identity does not depend on the eventual result of reconceptualization. The essential autonomy of the act of thinking is already accomplished and experienced in any turning to personal subjectivity in a questioning search, in an openness to more than previously thought or suspected, a letting it be what it is, no matter what previous expectations and assumptions might have been, searching experience without preconception. Doing that is what is blocked by the romanticism of the social contract and by social pragmatism.

Spirituality: An Idea Thinking Itself

What is essential to the primary process of individual subjectivity is the ideality or spirituality necessary for the projection of creative interventions from personal interiority into the brute actuality of nature through acts of the body. Spirituality is not about moral ledger keeping nor about personal individuality being an illusion which masks an eternal and universal essence, origin, and destiny. Rather, it is about autonomous creative freedom at the level of the embodied individual, within a surrounding actuality which otherwise stands as the antithesis of freedom. The world of brute actuality is very different from our common sense impressions of it because as individuals we project past and future, which are spiritual non-actualities, onto an actuality that exists without past or future. Freedom is made possible by that creation of temporality, the idea of a mutable future partly pre-figured by an increasingly remote past, created subjectively in the service of constructing a sustainable embodied life-flight into a receptive future. As spirituality, your identity is an idea thinking itself, which is to say a directional bearing and force of creativity largely defined by a particular embodied past and a projected personal future of interventions into local actuality, both past and future being strict non-actualities and so your ideas. It is about constructing a sense of expectation in flight, including expectations about the range of free discretionary intervention. That is your own idea of yourself because ideality, thinking or spirituality, can exist only at the level of the embodied individual. This is not a Platonic idea, eternally unchanging, inactive, and as such remote from mundane events and appearances. There is no creativity or freedom in that conception. The primary process is maintaining spirituality, which is to say unceasing newness and incompleteness, transcendent temporality. This reality of human nature puts creative thinking at the core, exactly what is ruled out by the social contract.

Autonomy

To think is to assert an autonomous spirituality as a self-creating idea. In primary process you recognize your primordial autonomy of curiosity, questioning, of encountering, opening,  and intervening in actuality, of creative re-conceptualization. Actuality is still actuality, but there is more than actuality. You are autonomous spiritually, even though not metabolically. Individual autonomy was at the core of what Enlightenment rationalists meant by “rationality” as primary process. However, this thinking is not a rule-governed procedure and is not restricted to language, numbers, or mathematical figures. You don’t need supervision or doctrine about this. To think is to embrace spiritual autonomy. It certainly does not negate sociability, because it must recognize equal autonomy in everybody.

Notes

* This brings to mind Kant’s categorical imperative, but the categorical imperative does not remove creative judgement from the individual and is not a blanket submission to existing norms.

** Please see posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality.

*** Please see posting 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy?

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.