Category Archives: Uncategorized

Absolute Incompleteness

Featured

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 173, word count: 202.

Tags: spirituality, time, agency, care-drama, existence, eternal recurrence, effort, embodiment, consciousness, freedom.

Spirituality has nothing to do with inherent guilt or fear and love of a higher power or supreme Being which is removed from the desperate care-drama and agency of living an always incomplete existence. Spirituality has everything to do with awareness of the passage of time because the personal drama of caring depends on ephemerality to extend, shape, and renew itself, opening its ongoing by intentionally inventing acts based on expectations and suppositions learned and abstracted from a career of caring and effortful engagement with the world around. Any moment of consciousness is loaded with abstractions that frame and locate an immediate effort. We have to disconnect understanding time from cosmic loops and circles, the apparent paths of stars and planets that have been observed and identified from eras immemorial by people watching the sky. Theirs was a vision of completeness in eternal recurrence. Instead, time is the asymmetrical continuity of context that consciousness supposes in orienting its desperately creative plunge into freedom that is its enduring incompleteness and the incompleteness of the world. The intentional ongoing of individually embodied consciousness constitutes spiritual (subjective) reality, and spiritual reality connects irremovably to absolute reality. The personal exists as absolutely as the cosmic.

Embedded link:

Fragment 169, October 25, 2020, Wildcard Time-World Idealism (word count: 1,230)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Use and Abuse of Spirituality

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Thinking about spirituality is a challenge, and it benefits from going-over-it-again from time to time. Not everyone is interested or willing. Critical thinking about spirituality seems offensive to many people, although that may be unusual now in some places. Spirituality intersects with philosophy with respect to ideas and experiences of intelligence, freedom, creativity, transcendence, and on the issue of what can be known. It isn’t easy to read someone else’s writing about spirituality. However, one way to get on with a personal process of thinking about it would be to read the thoughts presented here (and other places), let them go, then search your orientation and listen for your thoughts.

Spirit

Spirit is the same thing as intelligence or personality. In Plato’s Republic, spirit (as in competitive spirit, ambition, or school spirit) was one of the three variable impulses of subjectivity or personality (along with appetite and rational contemplation). However, “spirit” has come to mean personality (intelligence) detached, like a ghost, from normal animal embodiment; intelligence as a disembodied, immaterial, free floating entity, yet still with power and effect in the objective world; also it can be intelligence ’embodied’ in an extraordinary way such as in the planet Earth as a whole, or in a star (wishing on a star) or in the entirety of existence, in nature as a whole. The category of spirits includes, for very many people, the idea of a supreme-intelligence with ultimate creative power. So spirituality is an individual’s vision of and feelings toward the self as spirit, and the relevance of self-as-spirit to disembodied spirits and especially to a supreme-intelligence at work in the world. A sense of transcendent sacredness, of something profoundly supernatural attaches especially to that super-intelligence.

Mysticism

Mysticism is a vision, normally including practices within a simplified and contemplative way of life, of a way to achieve knowledge (gnosis) of divine things, ultimate mysteries. This knowledge of divine things, say, of flows of supernatural power through nature, is thought to be revealed to people determined and devoted enough to impose long periods of discomfort and sensory deprivation on themselves (de-emphasizing their existence as animal and material body), resulting in trances or experiences of separation of spirit from the body, in which condition the spirit can travel anywhere, meet and communicate with other disembodied spirits, and explore the normally invisible structures, origins, and destiny of the cosmos. Claims of such knowledge of the whole has been passed privately in person from master to disciple, kept arcane and secret, restricted to few initiates, because it is considered safe only in the minds of those proven most worthy. Sometimes supernatural powers are thought to accompany that knowledge. In spite of the secrecy, there have been leaks and deliberate hints and speculations about mystical experiences, to such an extent that the culture of mysticism has had widespread influence on ordinary conceptions of spirituality. Additionally, claims of mystical knowledge often appear to have metaphorical meanings concerning non-mystical but more generally spiritual or philosophical matters.

Primordial Empathy

What we are doing when sensing personality outside ourselves is primordial empathy, recognizing questions, intentions, hopes, fears, and desires that are not our own, and so recognizing other entities acting from intelligence. We are making sense of the movements of (especially) people and animals by recognizing intelligences as elemental forces. Empathy in the ordinary sense is complicated in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be very common. Still, we find that the beings moved by intelligence sometimes shelter each other from the terrifying boundless darkness, uniting by physical closeness as well as by mutual nurturing and imitation-play. The first experience of other intelligence is probably mother or parent, which leads to the imprinting of an orientation toward what passes for an indefinable exterior super-intelligence in the experience of newborns, infants, and toddlers. The universal imprinting of an orientation toward an indefinable super-intelligence gets generalized and idealized, guided by a massive effort at cultural (religious) influence on every individual, with the effect that the ideal super-intelligence is conceived as transcendent and immortal, often immaterial and disembodied, or, in other words, a God or set of gods. Toward the external personalities identified as gods, people feel empathy coloured by profound fear, like fear of an emotionally distant and unreliably engaged parent. That free-floating and supreme super-parent has no other grounding than a culturally conditioned structure of orientation extending childhood dependency, but it provides a common sort of human parasite with a mechanism of profound control. By asserting the claim to be the earthly proclaimer and enforcer of divine will, a powerful faction can gain parasitic control of masses of people.

Two things converge: the universal imprinting of an orientation toward an indefinable super-intelligence, and the history of a parasitic human faction which has been spectacularly successful at sanctifying its top-down human-on-human parasitism by exploiting that universal psychological predisposition of people to orient toward a supreme external intelligence “in the blind”.

There is considerable evidence that we humans have tended to sense personality or intelligence in worldly events far too often. Humans judge intelligence by an entity’s ability to imitate (with variation/ innovation) and so to communicate understanding, act out social roles, and form social attachments. Given the fact that humans have imagined personality in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees and storms, there is no reason why we might not imagine personality in computers and robots. Seeming intelligent is not a matter of being structured and ‘hard wired’ to behave in ‘human’ patterns, because most ‘human’ behaviour is based on intelligent imitation of models in the ambient social system. From time immemorial natural phenomena were seen to be moving under their own inner motive force in coherent patterns and misjudged as being ready or capable of normal intelligent imitations as communication. Storms were seen to act out an angry outburst by a terrifying father. Fathers do not do this because of their ‘hard wiring’, but because they must imitate a certain social role. If engineers want to make machines which seem intelligent, the machines will have to do interesting imitations.

Desire, hope, fear, purpose, curiosity, or intention (teleology) as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been acceptable and often preferred over ‘brute’ natural-law cause-effect explanations. In ordinary discourse, explanation of events based on the motives of personalities as forces in the world has been privileged over brute material cause. “Somebody did it.” “A ghost did it.” “God did it.” These are all still commonly 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 explanations where they are 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 intelligence/ personality and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything that exists, which goes far beyond the experienced models or examples of the powers of intelligences. Since we tend to think of an act of intelligent-will when the question of cosmic creation comes up, it seems that the experience of intelligence necessarily includes creative power and freedom. A sense of the sacred that is connected to ultimate creative power comes with the fact that it is gob-smackingly inexplicable that there is anything rather then simply nothing, but it is neither necessary nor helpful to project a fanciful pretence of explanation onto that. It doesn’t help to say that the world rests on the back of a giant tortoise, and it doesn’t help to say that the world was created by a disembodied super-intelligence. The pre-existence of a divine intelligence isn’t enough since the inevitable, unavoidable question is: how did the divine intelligence (or the tortoise) come to exist?

A Quarrel with Religion: Malign Effects of Imaginary Super-Parents

What can never be passed off as benign about any religion is that religion is the ultimate legitimation of the way things are, of the existing order, the status quo. Religion is always a celebration of submission or subordination to some super-version of the universally imprinted parent, a psychological relic of childhood. Since such a super-parent is assumed to arrange every detail of the cosmos as it wills, the condition of the world is necessarily a direct expression or manifestation of the divine will of the unquestionable super-parent. Even Buddhism legitimizes the inequalities of social hierarchies through the idea of karma, since moving up the moral hierarchy of lives requires the inequalities of a social hierarchy. Such a religious acceptance of, or reconciliation to, the way things are, can produce feelings of calm and a certain sense of transcendence, of rising above all the injustice, misery, and futility, through uniting with the totality of being, the great turbulent river of being. However, feeling good isn’t enough. It’s a withdrawal, a kind of profound personal refusal of the freedom of intelligence.

The Imprinted Parent Lies About Who You Are

A main problem with the universally imprinted parent is that it tells you who you are, and you are inclined to accept what it says because it is the unquestionable internalized parent. What the voice of the imprinted parent always tells you is that you are a belonging, specifically their belonging, that you are their possession and as such you exist for their purposes. Whatever they choose to do with you, such as sending you to war, or confining your work and thinking to what you are told, you obey because it is their asserted right as the owner to use force or kill you if you hesitate or resist. However, that is all a lie because there really is no super-parent, only fraudulent pretenders representing particular social factions and using this age-old psychological back-door to appear to come from inside your head. The pretenders lie about who you are because they benefit from the results of people generally believing the lies. Anything, such as a state, family, religion, or the economic organization of production and distribution, that claims the right and competence to assign your identity is inappropriately playing on the psychological imprint of the parental super-intelligence left over from childhood, which in fact ceases to be legitimate as every person becomes adult. What makes personal self-possession possible even in that extreme (but normal) situation is that elemental or innocent intelligence remains outside any cultural influence, and so can think outside and critique any kind of cultural effect including the imprinted parent.

Not Saying It

An enormous amount of energy has been devoted (academically and politically) to not saying that human societies are structured as forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Historians do not say it even though it is the most obvious thing that jumps off the page from a little reading of history. Social scientists and established political parties don’t say it even when credible studies (Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page) reveal completely dominant influence on (nominally democratic) governments by organizations using massive accumulations of capital. There is no doubt about the reason this cannot be said: the junta of parasitism is still very much in power and feels confronted and threatened when identified as such. The legitimizing ethos of the ruling ownership faction is crime-family culture (fig-leafed by patronage and supportive consumption of art, monumental architecture, and high culture), which licenses any deception or brutality to secure its parasitic advantages. In the ideology of modernity the idea of social progress is headlined in large print, but the system of human parasitism continues getting more strident and overt in many ways, such as in explosive inequality in wealth and income. The whole intellectual culture of human societies has been systematically distorted by not saying the reality of political power.

More than Love

Love is not effective in getting beyond or overcoming the power and grip of entrenched human parasites, but neither is hate or rage. Getting in touch with the supposed cosmic unity of all things or of all sentient beings is also proven to be completely ineffective. It is certainly not helpful to be immersed in an inescapably negative, dark, or stressed emotional state, but, although feeling calmed by a feeling of love for all creation is certainly better, it is not in itself good enough to create a more widespread improvement. Improvement will be a process rather than a single mental accomplishment, of course, but progress on the path must begin with a certain single mental accomplishment, namely elemental self-identification or self-possession. The reason elemental self-identification is crucial is that it is the route via which the transcendent becoming of every other individual intelligence can be recognized. It is the way via which the sense of sacred transcendence is redistributed away from some imaginary super-parent and instead recognized where it truly is, in every separate person.

De-effacing the questioning directionality in any human gaze, as discussed in posting 72, The Question of the Gaze, is a requirement for freedom of thought and agency. Without that interior-oriented grounding of self-identification, a person is, by default, in the grip of super-parent supplied (culturally supplied) criteria of self-identification, (personal identity in terms of family, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, language, socio-economic stratum-of-origin, level of education, personal income, net worth, trophies, titles, occupational skill set, accumulation of possessions, appearance, athletic ability, …) all of which have the effect of making the individual a property of currently reigning avatars of the universally imprinted parent, which in reality is an institutional system of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Full agency requires self-possession of the innocent intelligence which so easily slips into the blind-spot of the outward gaze. A universal imposition of diminished self-recognition is enforced through culturally legitimizing and obscuring the parasitic core of the capitalist economic system. It is not going to be possible to conceive a superior replacement for capitalism without first advancing a reformation in spirituality.

Branding the Construct of Power: imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy

The problem with bell hooks’ concept “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” is that those cultural structures and the personal qualities they are taken to express are (regrettably) widely respected and even considered admirable. Empires and imperialism are spoken of with adulation: Alexander of Macedon is not remembered as Alexander the Diabolical, but as The Great, and his conquest of the known world of his time and place is hailed as a great achievement. The supposed glories of the Roman and British Empires, for example, are staples in the teaching of history. Historians and politicians normally glorify imperialism and war generally, and a strong ideological undercurrent of white supremacist racism is included in that glorification, something like: “European races prove their superiority by exercising dominance and imposing their glorious achievements on all other people.” Masses of regular people just hold such assumptions as unquestionable truths, even people who do not consider themselves racist. On capitalism, in the most economically developed societies of the modern world capitalism is the reigning ideology and it is continuously gushing forth streams of admiration for itself in mass media, including declarations of its unshakable inevitability, so that it is difficult (nearly criminal) to imagine anything different within that matrix. As for patriarchy, it has mainly managed to retain its original branding as meritocracy, and so again as something good for everybody, with maybe a little tweaking needed here and there. Regrettably, the negative-sounding concepts used by hooks for the normal organization of society are (although accurate) full of cultural ambiguity, and consequently sound like name-calling, unfairly harsh characterizations of arrangements at the core of society. They sometimes provide an excuse to dismiss the important message. Parasites, however, are not widely admired, and it is the (false) cultural legitimation of top-down human-on-human parasites that needs to be identified and exposed in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

De-Colonization

Colonization, even in the most literal sense of British capitalists and armed forces assaulting, occupying, and imposing their possession of India, for example, is always some form of asserting ownership by a pretending avatar of the universally imprinted parent. Accepting any form of unthinkable super-parent, even on a persona level, is an invitation to parasitic colonizers to come here and do their thing. Any personal process of de-colonization requires identification of and critical thinking on the issue of the imprinted parent in general, followed by a personal process of getting beyond the internalized parent in all forms. Nobody’s personal identity includes being the possession of some other intelligence, embodied or disembodied. No intelligence-as-such is a belonging. Identify the internalized super-parents in personal orientation, and then move past them, help them fade away. Identify all the culture-imposed criteria of personal identity (self-identification, self-definition, personal evaluation) and then move past them, help them all fade away. Something remains, an elemental questioning or accumulating orientation, innocent or elemental personal intelligence: the authentic grounding of personal identity. As a being in the world you are still not beyond the power of the human parasites, but your personal interiority is ready to open up the creative gusher of curiosity, pleasures, emotional responses, and impulses to craft expressions, and to re-orient more generally through those experiences.

When you begin the process of de-colonization, how far do you go? Can there be an arbitrary stopping place that retains some or most cultural value assignments but discards personally offensive ones such as the pigeon-hole assigned to your race, gender, or sexual orientation? What if you don’t stop? Is there anything at the end of that rainbow? Socrates looks like being another person (roughly two thousand years before Luther and Descartes) who kept going and de-colonized from everything he possibly could, which accounts for his declaration that his only wisdom was knowing that he knew nothing, a state of elemental innocence. Now that’s de-colonization, and it didn’t leave Socrates passive or reconciled to the status quo of his society. It released him as a questioner, as an active intelligence. At the end of this rainbow is innocent intelligence-as-such or personality-as-such. Before anyone has a gender, race, or language, before becoming a child of a certain religion, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, every individual is already a particular intelligence/ personality, and those other features are just cultural variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so to judge the malign effects of otherwise unquestionable super-parents, is personal innocent intelligence, deep underneath the layers of colonization by culture.

Spirituality is Transcendence in Time

The rejection of super-parent religion is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creation of time. Time is freedom into which an intelligence creatively projects itself, a personal hyper-space of 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 intelligences build lives. This is a startlingly unfamiliar idea, but time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. 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, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences.

A New Philosophic Empathy

The sense of the sacred, previously and currently reserved for an awesomely powerful super-parent, a centralized and externalized transcendent supervisor, urgently needs to be redistributed. The reason elemental self-identification is crucial is that it is the route via which the transcendent becoming of every (other) individual intelligence can be recognized. It is the way via which the sense of sacred transcendence is redistributed away from some imaginary super-parent and instead recognized where it truly is, in individual people. All the super-parents must be allowed to fade out and pass away and be replaced by a sense of the sacredness of each individual intelligence.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

bell hooks on Freedom

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

These are reflections inspired by listening to a panel discussion led by bell hooks at the New School in New York City on May 6, 2014. The panel consisted of bell hooks, filmmaker Shola Lynch, and authors Janet Mock and Marci Blackman. The title of the panel discussion is taken from a book title, Are You Still a Slave (1994), by author Shahrazad Ali who was not present. The subject of discussion is freedom, since the alternative to being a slave is being free. The question is direct and very personal: Are you still a slave (or are you free)?

The Question Itself

The question “Are you still a slave?” will be surprising and puzzling to many people, since the United States celebrates itself as The Land of The Free, and slavery was legally abolished there in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 89 years after the United States declared its independence. In that context of American nationalist and legal culture, the question “Are you still a slave?” is absurd, because no educated and middle class contemporary American could be enslaved except by a criminal cult or a rogue criminal perpetrator, and the discussion does not involve overt criminality. In the kind of “being a slave” invoked in this discussion there is no localized slave-master, and enslaved individuals are not controlled and exploited by deviant cults or rogue personalities but instead by ordinary cultural influences, economic processes and widespread ways of behaving, reflected in popular media images and stories, involving legitimations of specific forms of human inequality.

hooks approaches the question of personal freedom from within the history and lingering vestiges and effects of a culture of white supremacist racism originating in Europe that enabled and legitimized black slavery in the United States in its colonial period and for the first 89 years of its constitutional existence. The purpose and intent of slavery, the motives and reasons for slavery, have always been perfectly clear, namely top-down human-on-human parasitism: certain factions of humans become parasites on other humans. Nothing is more blatantly parasitic then slavery. Slavers use the domination and control of other humans as a means of making their own lives easier, more abundant, less involved with sweaty labour, cleaner, more dignified and prestigious, more sexually exciting and entertaining, less confined or restricted, less tedious. Those benefits are achieved by forcing the exactly opposite qualities of life onto specific other people. Those motives for parasitism, the hegemonic domination and control of vulnerable humans by other humans, have not changed in the least throughout history and are still very much in operation in modern institutions. The ancient and enduring success of certain factions of humans in enjoying such parasitism has inspired the development of elaborate and pervasive cultures and ideologies which celebrate and legitimize the achievements of human parasitism, so much so that even when overt slavery came to be seen as illegitimate, cruel, and criminal, more subtle methods of parasitic domination and control, of cultural hegemony, became indispensable to the factions accustomed to the enjoyment of human parasitism. hooks is not talking about anything obscure or conspiratorial but about the normal operating of the overt structures of power and influence within modern societies.

In a society still living with pervasive cultural legacies which celebrated and honoured the achievements of parasitic human institutions, every inequality and every subordination remains an opportunity for advantaged factions to arrange parasitic benefits for themselves. Ideologies of inequality sanctify many forms of human parasitism, so the resulting culture is not merely white supremacist but also misogynist since it manifests in the general oppression of women of all races. It has been the experience of hooks and her fellow panelists that their personal freedom had to be achieved by resistance to the same ideology of oppression that legitimized slavery, and that is what makes the question “Are you still a slave?” relevant in the contemporary context.

Freedom, especially for people in historically host categories, requires a disciplined effort to get beyond the normal state of cultural colonization (what I have often called zombification). To be free, a black woman, for example, must de-colonize herself and eject the influence of cultural depictions in stories and media images which are sexualized, victimized, objectified, and commodified, and which thereby limit and diminish her self-experience and self-identification. Personal freedom requires a deliberate and painstaking process of critical thinking to eliminate the influence of cultural definitions and so become aware of, and act from, personal impulses of authentic self-expression. The members of hooks’ panel are presented as people who are not slaves because they have been able to develop processes of self expression independently and in ways that resist the cultural environment which legitimizes systemic inequality, and the denigration of certain identifiable groups, including ones that these panelists appear to represent.

The possibility of such a process of self-expression requires that there be a difference between cultural assignments of personal identity (relevant images or narrative depictions involving personal worth, potential, dignity, and substance) and something else originating or grounded in every individual independently of culture and in fact normally contradicting cultural assignments. That personal source which is counter-cultural is usefully identified as innocent personal intelligence. The panelists call it their personal voice. Because innocence is what is left when you completely de-colonize and “be yourself”, hooks seems to be pointing toward the notion of a rich personal innocence, innocent self-possession, without identifying that idea specifically. There is an existentialist quality to her view in the sense that she has little development of the idea of personal innocence, subjective interiority, but places strong emphasis on inward freedom and creativity, the need to create a personal voice. hooks says of herself, “I wrote my way to freedom.”

hooks acknowledges both an internal and an external process of resistance to oppressive or cultural hegemonic forces. There is the critical thinking of de-colonization from denigrating images and narratives flowing through popular culture, and also there is publicly expressing a personal voice that contradicts or violates the limits and restrictions in the models and images of mainstream culture which have the force of authoritative predictions, categorizations, and prescriptions, and an implied threat of penalties for transgression. It is those restrictions that are on routine display in normal behaviour and in cultural media which reveal the enduring legacy of top-down human-on-human parasitism, namely an imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. hooks repeatedly refers to the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, which looks like having a lot in common with something often discussed in the postings to this blog, namely the institutionalized system of top-down human-on-human parasitism, based in the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity, and derived historically from nomadic animal herders who essentially live by enslaving herds of animals, eventually expanding to include humans. It is a little surprising that hooks does not develop the concept of top-down human-on-human parasitism specifically, although she does refer to parasitic classes in some writings.

hooks has a very sharp focus on the clear case of ongoing oppression bearing upon women of colour even in the most advanced modern societies. That focus is completely justified, but it is also important that the problem of freedom faced by women of colour is not restricted to them or even to just women or people of colour. The same process of culture-based self-identification which plagues women of colour, and women generally, is universal. Economic criteria, such as the personal possession or control of particular amounts of money, are of overriding importance in any capitalist culture-based self-identification. That serves the ownership capitalist class perfectly by placing everyone with less money in a position of humiliating dependency and insecurity of self-esteem. People in that position are controllable and inclined to remain inconspicuous. That is the internalized hegemony of the parasitic controlling class. Such culture-based criteria of self-identification are tactical weapons in the cultural system of top-down human-on-human parasitism and they apply to everybody and not just to women or visible minorities or people with unusual characteristics. Everybody faces the same problem of freedom, namely the need to de-colonize from the internalized hegemony of culture-based self-identification and instead to find and trust the voice of innocent personal intelligence.

What makes hooks’ work extraordinarily interesting and important from a philosophical point of view is her identifying and documenting a kind and degree of social control of individuals by malleable cultural conditions which remains broadly excluded from academic study and from popular culture beyond feminism.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

The Question of the Gaze

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Golden Age Culture Studies

In pre-modern times, when a cyclical conception of history was normal, people had the idea of a golden age, far in the past, when human society and knowledge were closer to authentic origins, sources, and general truths, and consequently nearly perfect in justice, happiness, and relations to nature and the cosmos. The human story was understood to be a gradual but inexorable corruption and decline from that original high point to the present. People now are generally aware that there is no evidence for, and plenty of evidence against, such a view of history, but there are still living vestiges of golden age mythology. Those vestiges are apparent in attitudes of reverence toward the spiritual attitudes and practices of ancient civilizations and aboriginal cultures. However, no human culture has ever made the essential philosophical breakthrough to get beyond fear of projections of the universally imprinted parent, and so no philosophical or spiritual breakthrough is possible from studying pre-modern cultures, tribal cultures, folk cultures, ancient civilizations, different civilizations, high cultures, nomadic cultures, aboriginal cultures. What is interesting spiritually and philosophically is not some exotic culture or set of beliefs but what there is to any person which was there before she had any culture and always remains unspoiled by culture.

Philosophical Innovation

According to Jonathan I. Israel, in Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, the political revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which effectively put an end to the oppressive Old Regime in Europe, would have been inconceivable without previous innovations in philosophy, in fact a prior revolution of ideas which provided a ground from which the pervasive social dominance of military aristocracy and Christian Churches could be challenged. Specifically, it was seventeenth century rationalism and especially the materialist monism articulated by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) which provided the crucial ideas. This is not to say that Spinoza invented those ideas, because he did not. However, Spinoza presented an important selection of ancient (especially Stoic) ideas in the innovative form of geometric proofs, stunningly persuasive to the rising rationalism of his time.

The change to modernity brought about by the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an entirely novel transformation in the history of adult mentality and the human interconnectedness, but the result remains unsatisfactory and unsustainable. It would be sadly parochial to believe that humanity is finished developing social and institutional improvements. In fact, the Enlightenment accomplished only a half-assed job because it had only single substance monism, materialist monism, the (half-assed) philosophy pitched by Spinoza. All along it was declared that materialist monism required complete determinism. Such a philosophical position was adequate in the ideological quarrel with religiously based authority institutionalized in Christianity and aristocracy, but it provided no grounding for a serious confrontation with the rising wave of purely secular inequality. Although materialist monism, including strict determinism, helped historically with dislodging beliefs in divine control of world affairs, especially through sovereign power and religious authority, it is clear that determinism and monism can’t be a long-term foundation for pluralist individual freedom. Consequently, the Enlightenment failed to have much effect on the systems of subordination that now structure secular inequality. Another set of innovations in philosophy, something far more pluralist than Spinoza, will be required to advance the culture of interconnectedness and adult mentality to the next stage of improvement. It is still possible that the best days of the human interconnectedness are to come, and that they will be more dramatically different from the current status quo than we are from Christendom.

Begin Where You Are

Science is the great intellectual edifice built from materialist monism, so much so that modernity manifests something close to an ideological dictatorship of science. However, under the scientific model of explanation everything is just immutable causal chains. There is never any real novelty or freedom conceivable with science, making it a philosophical dead end. The revolutions of the Enlightenment were attempts to dislodge forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism, but they were only minimally successful. The most fundamental mechanism of human parasitism, of sustaining systems of subordination, is cultural control of the criteria of individual self-identification, self-worth, self-definition. The rewards offered by the capitalist politico-economic system are all external to the individual and as such are controlled externally and work by diverting individuals from authentic self-recognition. Urgings to “dream big” and “live your dreams” look like a celebration of individual freedom, but the kinds of personal orientation which count as “dreams” for this are all constructs of transferable properties such as jets, yachts, corner offices, or vacation properties: controlled, commodified, commercialized, all depending on what money can buy and how money can be procured. Institutions which control the flow of those rewards take advantage of mass dependence on systems of subordination, such as employment hierarchies, to skim off a parasitic revenue stream to preserve structures of inequality in favour of a controlling ownership faction. Scientific ideology provides nothing useful in getting beyond that cultural control, and actually supports it, and so it becomes necessary to reconsider what philosophical thinking might offer.

The Question of the Gaze

The human outward gaze beholds beauties and wonders but often fails to notice itself, the gaze itself, the beholding, as remarkable, as what is most remarkable about the wonders beheld. It doesn’t have an appearance, isn’t part of the scene beheld, and yet there is much to notice about the gaze: it has a direction, and not just a direction but a questioning directed-ness. The questioning in the gaze is fleeting, accumulating, ephemeral, building toward some new questioning, with a sense of coming from a particular prior questioning and going toward a larger, still partly indefinite, subsequent questioning, of being incomplete and renewing. To notice that the gaze has a particularity of direction, of questioning directed-ness, is to notice it editing, contributing context and interpretation to, constructing what is beheld.

The questioning gaze that edits itself into a blind spot is science. Venturing into that blind spot, the contemplation of questioning itself, of being in a life in the world, is philosophical. The philosophical impulse has sometimes taken the form of wondering if the beauties and wonders beheld are somehow deceptive or misleading, hiding something more fundamental or profound ‘behind’ or ‘below’ them, a substrate of eternal reality. Such speculations of a metaphysical substrate mis-express an intuition of the importance of the gaze itself in constructing what is beheld. The intelligence of the gaze is the formative force which is not an item among appearances. The tendency for intelligence to self-efface or self-alienate in this way is the reason for saying that each intelligence exists in its own blind-spot.

As observed many times in postings to this blog, intelligences can’t be part of nature because nature consists of strict actualities, the totality of the categorically actual (being), but we intelligences orient and define ourselves (live our lives) in a structure of time (becoming) which is a fabric of non-actuality, almost entirely beyond what is actual; for example constructing a directionality always exiting a non-actual past and with a heading or bearing structured in terms of increasingly improbable possibilities for a non-actual future. It isn’t that intelligences just make imperfect wild guesses at things that really exist in some actuality, because past and future really have no actual existence. They are creations of intelligences. Nature does not accumulate. It gains nothing and loses nothing: the law of conservation. Each intelligence, however, accumulates experience, invents, and learns. That orientation-complex of non-actuality defines ‘the interiority of an intelligence’ as outside the actuality of nature, and it is a unique creation by every individual intelligence. There is no reason or requirement for, or benefit from, postulating some separate super-intelligence as the source or origin of individual intelligences, initiating their agency, or unifying them. Such a universal in addition to all the individual intelligences would be a gratuitous violation of Ockham’s Razor.

Mindfulness

Ordinary activity is already consciousness of creative agency in the gaze itself, of ‘interior’ construction processes. There is so much subjective involvement in every instance of action and thinking, editing and identification of surroundings via sensations, including an ever-developing emotional condition which contributes much to engagement with the surroundings; so much re-constructing of personal orientation within developing events, that it is impossible not to be somewhat conscious of subjective mental processes the whole time of active engagement with the environment. No special introspective faculty or technique of awareness is necessarily involved in that consciousness. We are aware of it because we are doing it, living a basic characteristic of agency. It is not as if the ‘interiority’ of intelligence is removed or distant, not as if you have to roll your eyes back into your head, locate and direct your gaze into some mysterious obscurity. However, it has been noted that intelligence does show a tendency to edit out its own creative presence from the beauties and wonders it gazes upon. That is, it has a tendency to self-efface or make itself unidentified in that operation of perception.

Philosophical Skepticism

Philosophical skepticism is an example of a technique used as a ‘mirror’ of the extra-natural interiority or semi-blind-spot which intelligences tend to structure into their gazing. The most celebrated and familiar presentation of that process, probably, is in Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes uses age-old philosophical observations on the nearly complete unreliability of sense-perception as a revelation of whatever might be objective and ‘out there’ in the strict actuality of nature. By applying such ways of questioning all systems of belief or knowledge, Descartes clears a way to a direct experience of his intelligence-as-such in its state of innocence, which he reports in something like the following language: “I am thinking (specifically questioning or doubting), therefore I exist!” (That is reminiscent of Aristotle’s “Thought that (in this case suddenly) thinks itself”.) The emphasis tends to go to the fact of finding something that cannot be doubted, but it should go to what it is that cannot be doubted. It is the questioning gaze in action which turns out to be indubitable, in spite of its being so self-effacing. What makes this especially striking is that the questioning intelligence of the gaze is entirely unlike the beauties and wonders beheld by the gaze, unlike and far more wondrous than anything in nature. At the same time, it is noteworthy that the undeniable self-existence discovered by Descartes is just an ordinary operation of active engagement with surroundings, namely questioning, and not a glimpse into any dark mysterious place.

Another crucial moment of skepticism in modernizing philosophy, similarly founded on heroic doubting, (prior to and clearly inspirational for Descartes’ self-discovery) belongs to Martin Luther (1483-1546), who, from an education in Hellenistic philosophy including skepticism, fully confronted doubt in his contemplation of (what he considered to be) the truths of Christianity. In recognizing that the doctrines of Christianity could never be known with certainty, Luther arrived in anguish at unmitigated doubt and uncertainty about the grounding of his personal existence, and in that skeptical extremity he discovered an unexpected grounding for his existence, namely the inward freedom and power to take a creative leap, which in his situation was a leap of faith. Martin Luther was pretty clearly the original (uncredited) existentialist, the breakthrough philosopher of freedom in the modernizing cultural system of Europe. It was Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) contemplating Luther’s discovery, a couple of centuries after Descartes, which occasioned the beginnings of self-identified Existentialism, a contemplation of individual freedom with a Romantic tendency to overstate the futility of that freedom.

Existentialism: The Interior is Empty

Existentialism, in an authentic development of only certain aspects of the Lutheran experience, places complete emphasis on the individual freedom of intelligences, but sometimes goes so far as to claim there is nothing identifiable as a subjective interior, resulting in inescapable anguish at total uncertainty about personal existence and identity, and a sense of the absurdity of all existence. On that view what is exceptional about intelligences is that we exist inside-out in a total blind-spot, aware of only what is not-ourselves, since there is nothing interior except the freedom (and limited power) to create some outward expression, mark, or declaration of personal existence. In that condition, intelligence is entirely and categorically outward-looking, existence without an essence (apologies to Sartre), burdened with inescapable freedom in the form of a need to project markers of an interior character which remains entirely indefinite (and so free in a particular way). This interpretation of Existentialism is certainly individualistic and pluralistic, but it fails to recognize Descartes’ discovery. Such an Existentialism over-states the hidden nature of the interiority of intelligence, completely discounting the unavoidable (and identifiable) interiority of a rich personal orientation in a time-structure of non-actuality. A very elaborated directionality or orientation is certainly “in here”, along with (even in existentialism) the distress around consciousness of uncertainty, and a force of questioning and creativity. That’s quite a bit of existential interiority.

Given the religious culture of the age in which they lived, it is remarkable that neither Luther nor Descartes discerned any channeling of a unifying super-intelligence in their discoveries of their own individual intelligences. Both contributed powerfully to philosophical individualism and so pluralism. Between them the western tradition gained cultural pointers for individual creative freedom and self-recognized interior agency in re-orientation, thinking. In fact Descartes’ questioning agency and Luther’s leap of creativity bring to light that there is lots for intelligence to encounter other than objects or words. Individuals have a rich innocent subjectivity, an effortless gusher of curiosities, questions, and creative impulses to change things in specifically meaningful ways. This is not a matter of interpreting words or the meaning of words. The interior gusher isn’t something that can be known adequately from any kind of description but it can be known by discovering ways to de-efface its activities. There is an innocent, extra-linguistic, experience to be de-effaced and brought into a new relationship with the questioning directed-ness as a whole. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing. Action does result and skepticism does not apply.

When intelligences undertake to communicate with one another about their innocent experience of being intelligences, their philosophical experience, the effort necessarily takes a cultural form, and that form is going to be local, provisional, circumstantial, originally used for something else, limited, and ephemeral. Cultural infrastructure such as language has lots of limitations. However, intelligence-as-such is not limited to the circumstances of its cultural setting and, contrary to some claims, culture is not the entirety of any individual’s knowledge, specifically not the entirety of self-knowledge as illustrated by Descartes and Luther. There is the pre-cultural or innocent self-knowledge of any intelligence as an intelligence (unfortunately somewhat alienable by culture in addition to being somewhat self-effacing). Innocent experiences are foundational and entirely without the imitative nature of cultural expressions. I mention innocence and the cultural expression passes quickly but inspires a re-orientation which can be noticed as such.

Skepticism, as a rejection of all knowledge, is a version of the philosophical quest for self-discovery through innocence. The aspiration of all rigorous skepticism must be either the calm passivity of surrender to utter nihilist futility, or the freedom of personal innocence, because those are the only possibilities when you destroy the foundations of all knowledge claims or systems of belief; and, sure enough, as just illustrated by Luther and Descartes, there is something interesting left when such a program of destruction is finished, namely intelligence in action, questioning and projecting creativity. Admiration for personal innocence as a self-deliberative condition of intelligence must be a feature of all authentic skepticism, but skeptics can’t make claims about innocence because such claims look like claims of knowledge about some object-of-knowledge. Luckily, nothing has to be claimed about intelligence-in-innocence because direct self-experience as intelligence-as-such is the point of the exercise and available to anyone at every moment.

Values and Gratifications: Philosophical Innovation

Given that the most fundamental mechanism of human parasitism is control of the criteria of self-identification, self-worth, self-definition, it is important that here in the familiar philosophical archive is the pointer to an alternative ground of self-recognition quite beyond parasitic control. It is an example of how external parasitic control can be resisted and overcome by philosophical thinking and by developing an orientation toward an individual process of creation, curiosity, and expression.

There are many deceptions in the mainstream belief system identifying human fulfillment in terms of levels of dignity/ love/ support/ money/ power/ honour. The pitch from the hierarchical alpha-structure is that you don’t need much in the way of inward self-awareness to enjoy perfect freedom. All you need is an unregulated commercial market which produces some choice of consumer products for self-definition by shopping (including belief and value packages from religions and political brands) and a personal chance to compete for the scarce goods and treasures of life. It is crucial to that alpha-story that the goods and treasures of life are scarce, and progressively scarcer as their value increases, so only the most worthy, divinely endowed celebrities, achieve the holy grails. It is such a beautiful story. The problem is that the greatest treasures of life are subjective intelligence and its expressive voice, powers freely intrinsic to everybody, and so the alpha-pitch is a deception, a control mechanism, even though the managers of the incentive-and-reward systems are themselves completely deceived (zombified) by it.

Language is full of legitimations of top-down parasitism. Sidestepping those prejudices requires thinking elementally, thinking without language. Intelligence has a thinking ‘voice’ prior to language. The primal, elemental, innocent voice is the sustained developing directionality of personal curiosity, pre-linguistic questioning, and the impulses that express it.

Selected Sources

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Kierkegaard: A Biography, written by Alastair Hannay, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521560772, ISBN-13: 978-0521560771.

Martin Luther, written by Martin Marty, A Penguin Life, Published by the Penguin Group (Viking) (2004), ISBN 0-670-03272-7.

Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, written by Kenneth Burke, published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc. (1935, second revised edition 1954, second printing 1965), Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-66067. This is the source of the idea of orientation in my thinking.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  The Argument

We have a system of human interconnectedness that is institutionally parasitic on most people (for the benefit of a small faction) but which has everyone oriented within distortions of reality that obscure and sanctify the parasitism. Specifically, we are oriented within beliefs that our situation is exclusively a personal creation such that as long as we dare to dream big and don’t blame others or rock the boat we can by our own efforts ride the social mobility bus up levels of dignity/ support/ love/ money/ power/ honour/ glory and achieve the best life-of-our-dreams possible given our talents, energies, and personal circumstances; in other words, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, to those who prove they are worthy. The argument presented here against that distorted orientation is that the politico-economic system in fact consists of parasitic systems of subordination which are institutionalized and maintained in place by deliberately manipulating mass reverence for fictitious parent-forms, externalized pseudo-intelligences declared to be sacred, supposed enlargements of ordinary intelligence situated externally as gods, nature, history, sovereign governments, corporations, and the oligarchic celebrity systems often used to represent communities. However, all such parasitic distortions can be overcome non-violently by any individual through recognizing the unique transcendence of all individual intelligences, and there are good consequences, both personal and collective, philosophical and political, in the self-possession that results from doing that.

Exploiting Child-to-Parent Conditioning

The primordial system of subordination is childhood. For every human newborn, infant, or toddler, there is a deep dependence on an inexplicable parental intelligence which is just there in the structure of the world, along with gravity and ground, and whose limits are unrecognizable. That experience of child-orientation is exploited and used as training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, approval, self-definition, and life goals. When an individual matures to adulthood, that psychological pattern of emotional dependence should fade away, but certain cultural mechanisms intentionally keep it active to enable an institutional takeover of the role of supervisory intelligence with indefinite limits. One of those cultural mechanisms is religion and another is institutional sovereignty.

Real Parents are Often Self-Sacrificing

Although there are often parasitic practices in the treatment of older children by their parents, a crucial difference between actual parental intelligence and false parental avatars is that parents are generally devoted, to the point of self-sacrifice, to the fullest development of their children, but the institutional parental avatars work to formalize and preserve systems of life-limiting parasitism on those they supervise.

Just There: The Parental Alpha-Structure of Sovereignty

We all know that there is a sovereign superstructure around here with a whole set of warnings put into effect by watchers and investigators, agents prepared with special equipment for assaults, arrests, and facilities for confinement, and with methods of gathering information and justifying their controlling behaviour. The superstructure makes proclamations of laws and penalties. “Anyone in our territory caught doing X, or not doing Y, will have penalty Z imposed on him or her.” There is a claim to power and a warning about how the power will be used. On the basis of such warnings each person in the territory makes decisions about how to act. That supervising superstructure is just there when we arrive on the scene, as the buildings and streets of a city are just there, and just as to newborns, infants, and toddlers parental intelligences are just there. To carry on a livelihood here you have to get used to dealing with that watchful, interfering, and sometimes brutal supervising organization.

Sovereign superstructures are territorial and display strong drives to preserve and strengthen unlimited control of resources especially people. They organize defined borders and control the passing of properties and persons across borders. They proclaim and enforce exactly who gets to enter or leave their territory. Various branches of the superstructure watch and investigate the world beyond the borders for threats or opportunities for gaining advantages. It has been very common for neighbouring superstructures to do deliberate damage to one another in efforts to gain advantage and dominance. Some proclamations of superstructures require mainly young adult males to serve in lethal-force assault and defence formations to destroy threats and exploit opportunities. The lives of individuals are often destroyed in a superstructure’s promotion of its policies.

Different superstructures have different ways of originating proclamations, edicts, and decrees. Some base themselves on a single person with total authority. Those people often have ongoing conversations with a select group of advisors who assist in forming proclamations and supervising compliance. Other superstructures have collectives of several hundred people to discuss and approve proclamations. Selection to membership in such collectives is done in different ways, sometimes by nomination by political clubs and public election by region, and sometimes by a tradition of primogeniture from the most propertied social categories. Sometimes the superstructure canvasses people in its territory for ideas about how it should conduct business and who should have executive authority. Sometimes it has branch organizations that give certain people the opportunity to vote for candidates for positions of authority or for new policy and project proposals. This is unusual, however. Usually people with authority in a superstructure get to recruit their replacements. For such parental-type authority which is “just there”, mass compliance works exactly the same way in democracies, monarchies, single-party states, or overt dictatorships. People generally accept that the sovereign authority is “just there” and organize their activities accordingly.

The sovereign superstructure is surrounded by supporting branches which gather money and materials for its functions. Some of its proclamations stipulate which categories of people must submit portions of their wealth and income to the superstructure, or must pay the superstructure whenever they buy certain goods or services, cross certain borders, or periodically for items of property in their possession, or for whatever reason the superstructure proclaims. Whatever the superstructure proclaims is backed by its watching, investigating, lethal-force, and penalizing institutions.

The superstructure makes proclamations, takes money, and requires periods of service of some categories of people within its territory. It is not going to stop operating just because there are people who dislike what it does, so the sovereign superstructures do not operate contractually. In fact, the superstructure could not be based on a “social contract” because the concept of a contract requires equality of power among contracting parties (otherwise there is duress of the weaker by the stronger, voiding the concept ‘contract’). The supervising power recruits and acts through a lot of people trained and screened to support and agree with each other. Those people are not encouraged to question the arrangements. They are very strongly encouraged to carry on with established practices and functions of the superstructure, and to enjoy benefits to themselves which it provides. Shared culture and a chain of command unify a large selection of apparent individuals.

For many centuries in the historical past superstructures explained their proclamations (and their existence) as god’s commands and claimed special knowledge of the most powerful god or the only real God. Fear of the God’s retribution in an afterlife has proved a powerful instrument of control and supervision, coupled with promises of sublime and eternal rewards for obedient submission. Typically superstructures which use this technique have meeting facilities in every settlement, where people are expected to come regularly for small-group lessons on afterlife retribution and reward, and to make contributions of money.

Within monotheist religions, the individual’s situation suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among ancient middle-eastern herder-nomads, where the ideas originated, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. The relationship of that God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent declarations of admiration and submission, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. Such an orientation situates every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. However, that peculiar sense of the sacred is not confined to ancient herder-nomads, because the early orientation of every human newborn, infant, and toddler is similarly dominated by the inexplicable external intelligence of parents. On that basis, every human acquires very early in life the psychological disposition to gaze outward for the initiation of agency, direction, purpose, validation, and even self-definition.

Within that cultural background it is well worth observing that the raging power of an angry parent is not sacred. What is sacred within the pre-determined world of nature is the transcendent freedom of every intelligence-as-such. For the majority of citizens the supervising apparatus of nation-state sovereignty is just there, in exactly the same way as the inexplicable parental intelligence is just there for every newborn, infant, and toddler, but as an adult the only influence possible with the sovereign superstructure is to vote every four or five years from very limited choices which are pre-determined by the superstructure itself. That negligible possibility of influence does not apply to all people, however. A gross misrepresentation of sacredness has been exploited to render masses of people compliant to external forces, to render people controllable, because in addition to the cultural mechanisms to perpetuate the child-orientation there are social factions with special advantages in profiting from the mass psychological/ emotional manipulation those mechanisms enable, factions which are fixated on the rewards of maintaining and perfecting that manipulation. There are factions of any politico-economic system which know how to influence and profit from the superstructure, and they use it as a Wizard (of Oz) avatar, working the levers and mechanisms that play out the persona of transcendent Parent, the fictitious higher intelligence.

Any arrangement or mechanism that appeals to and exploits the universal pre-conditioning to orient toward an external parent-type of inexplicable intelligence will take on the character of divinity, will become a god avatar, no matter how ordinary it may be in origin and actuality. Pretty much anything can be deified. Monarchies and dictatorships (as well as nominally democratic political parties) build larger-than-life personality cults around the leader, who is undeniably embodied in the ordinary way. They do it by taking advantage of the universal childhood conditioning. The cultural construction of an inexplicable parental intelligence, like the angry father in the sky, attracts emotional projection of parental qualities onto an external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood.

The reason to go beyond the imprinted parent is not just political, to avoid parasitic exploitation by parental pretenders, but even more fundamentally philosophical, for basic self-discovery and self-possession.

Legitimacy of Sovereign Superstructures

The way in which superstructures of power formed, now encountered by succeeding generations as “just there”, has been described below in posting 68, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/lines-of-human-parasitism-through-western-civilizations/), in addition to postings 55, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-1of-2/) and 56, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-2-of-2/). The origin of sovereign superstructures in human-on-human parasitism has determined the behaviour and character of institutional power ever since, and it serves parasitic power well to be accepted as “just there”. Power is never an end in itself, but instead is always a means of reaping the benefits of parasitism on those over whom the power is exercised. (Michel Foucault (1926-84) politely refrained from recognizing parasitism as the purpose and product of power.) The sovereign superstructure protects top-down human-on-human parasitism partly by devoting itself to resisting and controlling bottom-up or petty human parasitism (fighting crime, maintaining “law and order”) which is laudable as far as it supports a degree of public safety and stability. However, in spite of the fact that institutions of mass subordination do their best to insinuate themselves into the semi-blind spot of ordinary habituation to parental influence, a question of ultimate legitimacy must be faced.

Myth of a Social Contract

In spite of the fact that sovereign institutions are just there for most citizens, there are theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who claim that citizens agreed to this, that there is (or was at some point) a contract or agreement among citizens to create sovereign power, and by that agreement citizens gave up some liberty and autonomy for the stability and security which a sovereign power imposes on everybody. (On Hobbes’ view the sovereign is not a party to the contract, which would disqualify the social contract as instituting the rule of law. While claiming to champion the rule of law, sovereign governments routinely evade and violate their own laws, interpreting the social contract as Hobbes did.) Hobbes was specifically trying to remove the obscurity of supernatural foundations from sovereign power.

The basic mistake made by Hobbes was thinking entirely within the culture of reverence for the imprinted parent, and specifically within the version of that culture based on alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, which originated with ancient nomadic herding groups and became the universal ideal of masculinity. That is the cultural source and origin of the whole edifice of sovereignty. Political power structures and theories have always been cooked up among male-only clubs of the most privileged, and those structures and theories always project the ethos of alpha-trophy-looting herder masculinity by celebrating some (supposedly obvious) inherent alpha-male right to rule, in other words, superiority to (and fear of) women and other unprivileged groups. Hobbes believed that creating a super-father is the only way to avoid a war of all against all, which he imagined as the pre-contract course of nature. In that faith there is a sort of Confucian myth of the divinely ordained transcendence of father-power. That is how Hobbes smuggled false transcendence into his justification (sanctification) of sovereign power. There is a set of assumptions about how the new father-sovereign would behave: something like a good aristocratic father, imposing order through rational fear of the father’s violence. However, the proposal to designate a great parent wouldn’t even make sense without the childhood habituation to the external “sovereign” intelligence of parents, the primordial model of external transcendence. In addition, for Hobbes, the social contract institutes Leviathan, the superhuman collective, the super-family, that also has the presence of transcendent necessity since is supposedly expresses the same nature as the common family. According to Hobbes, just as nature and human (male) nature decree an original war of all against all, so also the seam of rationality in human nature decrees agreement to the social contract and so the cultural construction of Leviathan as the only relief from eternal war (a clearly failed promise). Hobbes’ theory claims to identify sovereignty as the product of a co-ordinated act of multiple rational intelligences. However, Hobbes shared the restricted concept of rationality that was becoming current in his time, in which rationality was just an alignment of a basic animal drive for self-preservation or self-interest with the necessities of nature, in this case the supposedly natural consequences of father-power.

What Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine is the fact that there is another generally known approach to human interconnectedness, namely from within the feminine culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally; in other words, the first-language-nurture worldview generally cultivated by women. From that alternative state of nature the interconnectedness develops without the social contract or a super-father. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. Sovereignty is not the source of that stability. Language and mutual support create for intelligences the opportunity to experience more of the best of values, namely intelligence itself.

The Norms Fallacy

When philosophers (pragmatists and utilitarians, for example) talk about an indispensable framework of community norms, it is difficult for them to be quite specific and historically accurate about the meaning or referent of “community” or “civil society”. There is no recognition in their claims that the actions of states in conducting wars (often clandestine), for example, and actions of corporations in looting the earth’s natural resources, express a crime-family ethos that extends back historically to nomadic animal herders and from there forward into universally celebrated ideals of masculinity, modelled most conspicuous in parasitic aristocracies of medieval societies (armed men on horses) which invented and imposed the forms of organization now called “sovereign government” and “corporations”, as ways of institutionalizing subordination through the universally imprinted parent. That crime family ethos is intrinsically and irredeemably parasitic on subordinated humans and, since it expresses the cultural norms of the social faction which directly influences the actions of national governments and their covert agencies, armed forces, and police, it stands as a clear revelation that there is no coherent system of community norms. The routine use of deception and violence by national governments and corporations is completely contrary to norms and values respected and considered definitive of decency by the mass of wage-dependant families, but is entirely representative of the crime family ethos which animates ownership/ governing classes. In clear contradiction of ideas about a social contract, there is actually a semi-stable system of human-on-human parasitism, kept operating by strenuous and increasingly scientific and technological efforts at behaviour and thought control by the beneficiary factions, which is obviously not a decent or dependable foundation for anyone’s values or standards of truth. In that situation of effective manipulation and pacification of host classes by parasitic classes anything like a social contract would be strictly tactical (deceptive) in an adversarial sense.

In pre-modern cultures, after the general diffusion of the culture of herder masculinity, everything was ascribed ultimately to the will of patriarchal gods, to divine involvement; whereas in modern cultures everything is ascribed to nature as an unalterable nexus of causal chains, but the old assumptions of divine involvement are so ingrained in the culture that they are still called on for the sanctification of power, and even lurk within the scientific conception of nature. In the modern world of nearly-nihilism, strictly utilitarian economic incentives and rewards are the everyday “front window” justifications for superstructures of sovereign power and authority (“peace, order, and good government”). Appeals to transcendent justifications are not normally made up-front, but they are always held in reserve for times when emotions run high in the collective. Nature is now just as much an externalized projection of parental super-intelligence as gods have always been.

Nature Takes its Inevitable Course

One of the justifications of capitalism as well as of sovereign superstructures is the claim that this is just the normal course of nature with a minimum of rational tweaking to reduce nature’s more abhorrent forms of brutality. However, that claim expresses the view of a particular cultural faction, specifically the faction of herder masculinity. The alpha-trophy-looting culture of that cowboy masculinity claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from capitalism. The claim, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, depends on a claim that the superstructure of sovereign government, as well as corporate operations, are just (immutable, unalterable) nature taking its course. There is a claim of scientific necessity for their just being there, too immutable and gigantic to be resisted or re-conceived. “Just there” is a version of “it’s just nature running its course”.

There is always an unspecified suggestion of Intelligent Design in such appeals to nature and history, and behind every Intelligent Design there is an implied super-intelligent Designer, if not overtly a separate disembodied divinity then a spirit manifested through inspired geniuses, so inexplicable as to be incomprehensible by ordinary people, and so adding up to divinity. The apparatus of state sovereignty claims to represent design in history: the great unthinkable Parent was erected by forces including inspired statesmen and brave military heroes, sanctified by the blood of sacrificed soldiers, and rationalized by rigorous science, scholarly research, and tried-and-true business know-how.

Nature and Intelligences: Beyond Nature’s Parental Embrace

Arguments of the form, “this social arrangement is just part of nature running its inevitable course” all crash against the recognition that social arrangements are creations of intelligences, and intelligences in every case operate outside the course of nature. That is to say, intelligences transcend nature. Intelligences can’t be part of nature because nature consists of strict actualities, the totality of the categorically actual (being), but we intelligences orient and define ourselves (live our lives) in a structure of time (becoming) which is a fabric of non-actuality, almost entirely beyond what is actual; for example, constructing a directionality always exiting a non-actual past and with a heading or bearing structured in terms of increasingly improbable possibilities for a non-actual future. It isn’t that intelligences just make imperfect wild guesses at things that really exist in some actuality, because past and future really have no actual existence. They are creations of intelligences. That orientation-complex of non-actuality defines “the interiority of an intelligence” outside the actuality of nature, and it is a unique creation by every individual intelligence. There is no requirement for, or benefit from, postulating some separate initiating or originating super-intelligence behind or beyond individuals.

Before anyone has a gender or becomes a child of a certain religion, language, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, he or she is already a particular intelligence, and those other features are just variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so masculinity, is the innocence of intelligence-as-such, deep underneath gender culture.

Because of the dominance of outward-gazing science in modern culture, contemporary people have difficulty with the idea that intelligences are outside nature, each an individual interiority which transcends nature. Apparently it is comforting for contemporary people, in the current culture of nearly-nihilism, to imagine belonging within the embrace of cosmic nature. However, recognition of the remarkable freedom of intelligences requires recognition that intelligences are separate from nature. Nature has become the great unthinkable parent and it is urgent to recognize that intelligences operate beyond its deterministic embrace. Only when we stop looking outward for validation, even from nature, can we recognize our innocent inward identity as transcendent freedom in self-created time, and begin re-creating our precious interconnectedness beyond the imprinted parent-forms that are being abused by factions expressing a culture of human parasitism.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Correcting East-West Philosophical Traditions on Freedom

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Part I: Where Zombies Come From

There is an important thread of support for individual freedom in modern western culture, derived from the same historical roots as the thread of equality, namely, ancient Athenian democracy (plausibly derived from the military importance of the Athenian proletariat); a philosophical individualism from Hellenistic humanism which was partly incorporated into Christian doctrine and eventually blossomed into Luther’s idea of inward faith; and finally, the success of a fourteenth century European movement for universal access to Bible reading through vernacular literacy, eventually developing into the social norm of universal literacy. That crucial cultural legacy should not be minimized, but recognition of individual freedom has never gone uncontested, and the unique transcendence of individual freedom has never been broadly recognized.

Longstanding culture, both popular and intellectual culture, has prevented appropriate recognition of the transcendent freedom of ordinary intelligences. Ideas about gods and spirits have imposed limits on such recognition, since gods (sometimes in the form of stars and planets) were believed to impose specific fates on humans. Ancient philosophical efforts to remove gods and demons from the process of making sense of events, and to recognize ordinary intelligences as transcendent (philosophical humanism again), were isolated islands in a vast cultural stream. When, leading up to and immediately after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Europe, monotheistic religions from middle-eastern deserts flooded the cultured territories around the Mediterranean, the Christian-Augustinian idea of original sin certainly diminished the possibilities of individual freedom. A bit of Christian theology typical of monotheism insists that creativity is a special and definitive attribute of divinity alone, so only God is capable of creativity, which rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In Christendom, though, everyone’s life was supposed to be given grand purpose by the divine plan for creation as a whole. Christian and even post-Christian freedom is freedom granted on the whim of the omnipotent sovereign authority, a tentative loan from God via His earthly vicars, and its main function has been to sanctify punishment. A person cannot reasonably be condemned without the freedom to have acted differently. There is still loose talk about freedom left over from that blame-sin-punishment culture of Christianity, but individual freedom doesn’t have strong roots in our culture and didn’t in Christendom either. When, in seventeenth century Europe, the intellectual revolution of science spread through educated classes, the transcendence which was challenged by science was the transcendence of the Christian God because that was the only conceivable transcendence in the cultural universe of Christendom. In a western cultural system still quietly dominated by religious metaphysics from middle-eastern deserts there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. God’s transcendence contradicted and categorically repudiated all other transcendence, and ended by tainting the very idea of transcendence as some kind of superstition. So, even though God’s grand purpose was gone, which used to give meaning to ordinary life, the power of individual freedom to fill that vacuum was never recognized, and could not be recognized because of a culturally induced blindness.

Modernity is Zombie-like Nearly-Nihilism

With that cultural background, it is not too surprising that the idea of profound individual freedom does not fit easily into modern ideologies. Although contemporary right-wing corporate and political groups put spectacular emphasis on every individual’s freedom to compete for the scarce goods of life, the intent of the idea is mainly to justify the privileges of a small entrenched faction and to blame the mass of the excluded for their exclusion. (That ideological/ rhetorical use of freedom is remarkably similar to the punishment-justifying rhetoric of Christendom.) Science is unable to say anything in support of freedom, and science is broadly accepted as the standard for final explanations of anything and everything. Social science and economics accordingly present things in terms of causes and effects, and free individual creativity does not count as a cause in that lexicon. In the cultural universe of science, the old gods and their plans and purposes for humanity have been discredited, great Pan is dead, but with the same principles science has convinced everybody that individuals are just pre-programmed (slightly re-programmable) machines, just like the cosmos as a whole. For science, since everything is part of eternal causal chains (with allowances for a degree of random chaos), all things are as they have to be, and there is no freedom in that system.

However, the cultural thread of personal freedom noted at the beginning is still active, partly because it makes us feel better, partly because it is indispensable rhetorically to justify institutionalized systems of economic parasitism, and because something about it rings true for most people. It is that meagre culture of personal freedom which qualifies modernity as only a nearly-nihilism instead of a flagrant all-in nihilism, an abyss of personal and collective pointlessness. The problem is that the cultural legacy of personal freedom contradicts the overall tendency of modernity, which, to be brief, is scientific reduction to cosmic unfreedom. In a collective orientation dominated by science, repudiating all transcendence, nothing can be perceived or identified other than measurable externals. So it is that this modern Nearly-Nihilism leads directly to the reduction of modern ways-of-life to corporate-sourced incentives and rewards, imposed self-definition by measured economic externals. However, that immersion in a hedonistic/ narcissistic culture of self-definition through accomplishments, competitions, and acquisitions feels disconnected from anything like profound personal freedom, ungrounded in individual creativity. There is an uneasy sense that the modern rhetoric of freedom has been detached from freedom’s authenticity, and, so detached, trivialized into a means of manipulation. The massive cultural phenomenon of the zombie apocalypse expresses the generally felt inauthenticity of contemporary ideas of freedom.

Part II: Blind-Spot Philosophy

Modernity is Nearly-Nihilism because its historical cultural matrix invested (almost) everything in the false transcendence of an externalized projection of intelligence, a disembodied father-in-the-sky God in which all creativity and freedom must reside. However, it can still be recognized that ordinary intelligences create their own transcendent freedom innocently, simply in virtue of being intelligences. There is that authentic grounding of individual freedom, and it is still possible to find it in both culture and in personal experience. In spite of the vast cultural conditioning against it, the freedom of intelligences should be recognized in any serious contemplation of contemplation, any self-consideration of intelligence-as-such, an effort that traditionally fell within the scope of philosophy.

The cultural grounding for a recognition of freedom does exists in the history of philosophy, and specifically in the category of what could be called inward-turning philosophy. Contemporary philosophy, as professionalized in western universities, has completely repudiated that philosophy. The English language tradition from British Empiricism confines itself to the logic of natural and artificial languages, possibly on an unuttered assumption that intelligence will recognize its full nature in language alienated from its grounding in particular voices, leaving an externalized edifice of rules (a scientific kind of false God). Confinement to a gaze upon language-without-voices also characterizes continental European philosophy, to which there is nothing but text. Neither has anything to offer against Nearly-Nihilism, and they combine to form part of its fabric. The old philosophy which declared that ultimate wisdom comes from looking inward rather than outward is more associated with “eastern philosophy” or “eastern mysticism” rather than with traditions developed from Ancient Greece. However, Thomas C. McEvilley, in his The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, is entirely convincing in his demonstration that the inward orientation of thought was a dominant stream in the Greek tradition as well, from Orphic roots (plausibly originating in Egypt and Mesopotamia) that were developed overtly in Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle; Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics; and Neoplatonists starting with Plotinus.

It was a basic understanding of the nature of philosophy from the Early Iron Age on, (The Shape, p. 560) that it concerned intelligence contemplating its own interiority. The philosophical consensus (it exists!) then was that ordinary knowledge, such as science, comes from an outward gaze onto objective, measurable phenomena, but ultimate knowledge is the same as profound self-knowledge and comes from (in Aristotle’s terms) “thought that thinks itself” (p. 560, see also p. 558). In spite of the inward-turning philosophy in the western tradition, it is only the eastern tradition which is now widely recognized. Various meditation philosophies, inward-turning philosophies, have been popular in western mass media culture since the aftermath of the World War of 1939-45. Sacred books of the east, especially Indian but also Taoist and Zen texts, were important in the worldview of the American Beat Generation of the 1950’s. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, serves as an example, as do the popular writings of J.D. Salinger. (Salinger certainly moved the culture, and me personally, in that direction.) In the 1960’s The Beatles famously moved to India to study Transcendental Meditation, and their example inspired large numbers of others. Ever increasing masses of people study and practice Yoga. In the face of this mass culture of inward-turning philosophy, the question confronts us: If inward-turning philosophy is the source of authentic recognition of transcendent freedom, why hasn’t the popularity of those inward philosophies worked to re-orient people generally to authentic individual transcendence? The answer is that a certain correction is required in those inward-turning philosophies.

Mass acquaintance with inward-turning philosophy has not worked mainly because such philosophies are always presented in the context of some theory of Monism in which the individuality of intelligence is interpreted as illusion, hiding the reality of a great cosmic intelligence or spirit you should sense in the process of inward meditation. No sort of monism could form the basis of individual freedom which is inevitably pluralistic. In the minds of monists, the inward-searching philosophy (blind spot philosophy) is not a route to encountering individual freedom even though it is a route to the transcendence of intelligence (not so much the transcendence of freedom as of over-arching singularity, of unity transcending plurality), because in monism the individual merges with the All-One, and everything is as it must inevitably be. In The Shape of Ancient Thought, McEvilley identifies the Neoplatonism developed by Plotinus, along with the Vedantic texts of Hinduism, as “the world’s two great corpora of intense systematic thought about monism.” (page 552) Those two corpora are remarkably similar to one another, and Plotinus fits within a western tradition that began much earlier. McEvilley lists the tradition of western monism as extending “from Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Plato, to Spinoza, Hegel, and Heidegger.” (page 505) (Fichte and even Schopenhauer should be inserted between Spinoza and Hegel.) It has been impossible to separate the philosophy of inwardness from the philosophy of Monism, and yet that separation is the portal to an encounter with profound individual freedom.

Philosophical monism always fails to overcome a basic dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, and always includes that dualism in some form. The main effort in theories of monism is to find some way of describing the All-One which can embrace the fundamental existence of both intelligence (which is active, creative, and effective in making change, that is, the manifestation of freedom) and cosmic Unity or Being (which must be indivisible in any way, eternally uniform and unmoving, the manifestation of unfreedom). Both Vedanta and Neoplatonism require their ultimate foundation to be an all-embracing intelligence, because both assert that ultimately it is such a cosmic consciousness that creates the world of objective phenomena (of change or becoming), by thinking it. (Mere passive consciousness is impossible except as an aspect of a richer and active intelligence.) That cosmic intelligence, the creative principle, freely creates the thought (world) of non-intelligence or unfreedom, and encloses itself within a prison (body) of that unfreedom, and so diminishes to a form which experiences itself ordinarily as limited individual intelligence. So when, in meditation, intelligence encounters its own immediate activity, it supposedly intuits beyond the dream-like enclosure of unfreedom out to the original activity of the cosmic All-One.

It is a story with real charm, but with an entirely unnecessary construct of mythology. That All-One intelligence of the cosmos is no longer interior to the embodied intelligence doing the meditation. The cosmic intelligence sensed inwardly is yet another externalized projection of imaginary super-intelligence, the Great Parent imprinted on childhood experience and always difficult to abandon. Based on that imprinting, there is always a culturally engendered higher sovereign power looming close that everyone is trained to keep in mind, and the monist All-One is another of its avatars. The encounter of thinking with itself does not need to be interpreted as anything but the most straightforward possibility, which is the self-experience of an individual embodied intelligence. The inward-turning tradition of philosophy needs to be corrected precisely by recognizing personal interiority as an independently transcendent individual intelligence instead of equating it with the Monist Cosmic Interiority. The resulting pluralism is repugnant aesthetically to some people, which is not a convincing reason against it.

The Fate of Nearly-Nihilist Zombification

The question returns: Could the wide recognition of this correction in the tradition of inward-turning philosophy, widespread recognition of personal transcendent freedom, result in a cultural transformation away from the zombified Nearly-Nihilism of modernity? Could philosophy be the guide that gives zombies back their individual voices? Blind-Spot philosophy does not restore anything like the comfort of a super-parental type of external intelligence. In time, we must lose our parents in all their forms and avatars. We have to become the parent at the same time as retaining a grounding in innocence where we find individual freedom. There is a kind of personal interiority which is outside nature (Being), peculiar to intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy constructs a mirror of that non-spacial interiority of intelligence. Being is not intelligence and never could be. Being is eternal and has no time, as declared by the iconic Greek monist Parmenides. Being is timeless unchanging eternity, but intelligences creates time for themselves, and actively expresses creative freedom in time. Intelligences are creative and so free, but Being just is. There is no route of transformation between Being-unfreedom and the freedom of intelligence. Neither can be reduced to the other, and so the eternal and unavoidable relation that intelligences have to Being is transcendence. So it must be recognized that the freedom of individual intelligences is transcendent with respect to pre-determined nature which is equivalent to never-changing Being.

If all the avid students of yoga encountered their individual transcendent freedom to create instead of learning a passive resignation that everything is as it must be; and if in doing so they also identified the cultural repression of that freedom, a difference would certainly be made.

Reference cited:

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, Published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

A Syllogism in Homage to Martin Heidegger

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Being and Freedom

If Heidegger was correct that the meaning of Being is time, then,

since time is the self-created freedom of every individual intelligence, 

the meaning of Being is the freedom of every individual intelligence.

Concerning the Second Premise: Creativity and Time

In the brute actuality of nature, the past does not exist and neither does futurity. However, the only way that an intelligence can engage with nature is by acts of primal creativity, namely by constructing internally-to-itself some orientation including bearings to an accumulating non-actual past and a rich mutable future full of possibilities and with some continuity with its constructed past and with nature. Every individual does that individually. Please see below, posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, especially paragraph three.

Concerning the First Premise

Although I am very far from being an authority on Heidegger, or even a disciple, reading Being and Time left permanent course alterations in my thinking about philosophy and about being an embodied intelligence in a life in the world.

Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), written by Martin Heidegger, Translated from German by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Published by Harper & Row (1962), Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-7289.

My specific source for “the meaning of being is time” as an interpretation of Being and Time is the great Rudiger Safranski:

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Ewald Osers, published by Harvard University Press (1999), ISBN 0-674-38710-4. See page 148 for “the meaning of Being is time”.

Taking this opportunity for a more general homage to Safranski: Reading these books, especially the translations by Ewald Osers, has been a high philosophical adventure. As Safranski documents, there have been wild years of philosophy, and there could be more.

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, Published by Harvard University Press (1991), ISBN-10: 0674792769, ISBN-13: 978-0674792760. This is history of philosophy at its most engaging and enlightening.

Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Shelley Frisch, published by W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (2002), ISBN 0-393-05008-4.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Lines of Human Parasitism Through Western Civilizations

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

A crucial thread in tracing the progress of top-down human-on-human parasitism is the history of disembodied spirits in human culture, and especially the fear of an angry father in the sky, a projection of the culture of human alpha-power onto the cosmos at large. The humanistic progress made by ancient Greek Stoics and Epicureans was eventually forced underground (in a cultural sense) by violent empire-building that swept over the Mediterranean regions, swamping philosophical movements under a resurgence of God-cultures associated with conquerors who subordinated the known world from around 300 B.C.: Alexander of Macedon and later the Roman imperium. Although conquering looters are often materialist in their evaluation of assets, they normally place great importance on their connection with a special personal god or gods, and assert such a connection to their troops and victims. Because of that, generals do not support secular or humanist world-views. That wave of imperialist activity in ancient Mediterranean societies created a cultural atmosphere that was unfriendly toward secular humanism, and rewarded belief in a spooky spirit world.

The example of Alexander the Great illustrates that the history of religion is intimately intertwined with the history of looting-family dominance. Alexander of Macedon was the great event that separated the stories of embodied gods in ancient Greece (and the Greek philosophical humanism that branched off from them) from the cultural diffusion westward of the One incorporeal God from the Arabian deserts. The ancient importance of the individual Greek polis and its gods was shockingly diminished by military defeat at the hands of Alexander, followed by supervision and exploitation by a distant imperial city representing a more powerful God. Alexander, like the One angry father in the sky, attracted emotional projection of parental qualities onto a single external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood. Alexander was the prototype and paradigm of the One God of monotheism, even though personally Alexander seems to have favoured the dualistic worldview of ancient Persia, and even expressed admiration for Diogenes the Cynic philosopher.

The Christian religion originated in the area of the Arabian peninsula where the God of Abraham emerged, an area of deserts dominated by nomadic tribes of animal herders. An overview of the individual’s situation within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among those ancient herder-nomads, as represented by Abraham, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. Such beliefs situate every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. All the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely commanding and meriting obedience and worship from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and then reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. The relationship of the Abrahamic God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent expressions of admiration, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. However, instead of direct Revelation of Himself to the flocks, Abraham’s God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a totalitarian sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

The ancient (Epicurean) consciousness of the general hegemonic effect of culture was completely transfigured in the floods of religion that swept out from the Arabian deserts into the whole Mediterranean world, from the missionary expeditions of St. Paul around 50 A.D. to the Islamic conquest (via Northern Africa) of distant Spain in 711 A.D. and for centuries after. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire after 313 A.D., and after 600 Islam was launched into the world. In that tide, religious culture was understood as not natural but supernatural, a force, knowledge, and technology from outside the world of individual persons, a divine gift. Proponents of that religious culture believed people benefited from having that grace imposed on them, which encouraged and justified great concentrations of power in a few central patriarchs. Divine religious culture went well beyond the words in the holy books, especially in creation of religious law and supervisory organizations. It included the hierarchies and entire myth systems of entangled organizations of religion and worldly power.

Citing the world-views of a couple of Roman emperors illustrates the shift from humanist philosophy to father-in-the sky religion. Marcus Aurelius, emperor 161-180 A.D., was a Stoic philosopher. Emperor Constantine, in power 306-337, converted to Christianity late in life. Constantine moved the Empire’s head office east of Greece to Byzantium/ Constantinople, closer to the heartland of ancient civilization, and his imperial Edict of Milan, 313, legalized Christianity within the Roman Empire. Then, with the influx of waves of Germanic tribes, the Empire withdrew completely from western Europe and carried on for centuries in the east as the Byzantine Empire, incorporating organized Christianity, the Greek Orthodox Church, as the imperial religion. When a Rome-based Christian Church branched off independently, spreading west again around and after the sixth century A.D., that Church adopted a policy of placing Church officials who were literate, educated, and well connected socially and professionally, into the executive councils and households (often as tutors of youths) of the most powerful (looting) families among the new Germanic conquerors, providing those families with much needed advisors and executives. That technique put the Church into a position to act as the power behind the thrones. Such officials were in a position to influence everything about the operations of those families, but especially to insist that all persons under their control become active Catholics under the direction of the Church. The faith was to be spread by decree from the militarily powerful. So, from very early in the medieval rebuilding of Europe after the Roman imperial organization abandoned it to move east, the organization of Christianity deliberately rode the coattails of those military-estate families, essentially crime families, to establish itself in power. There was also an ongoing “revolving door” between the Church and those families. Many of the ‘second sons’, who could not inherit a family’s aristocratic title and lands, would go to school (Church operated) for a good education and then into positions of power in the Church hierarchy.

From these considerations it is clear that the partnership of the Medieval Church and the violence-based military-estate oligarchy was deep and profound. The military class of medieval Europe was united with the ethos of Christianity and its hierarchy by the patriarchal and parasitic culture of nomadic animal herders. Since the Germanic tribes who occupied the western Roman Empire originated in the east, in close proximity to, if not within, the great Eurasian Steppe where nomadic herders and their culture of parasitism dominated, their original culture of masculine parasitism came from involvement with that established ethos of the Steppe. Reinforcing that cultural background were very specific engagements with the nomadic herder culture of the Middle East.

Legacies of The Crusades

The Crusades of the period 1096-1291 were wars of aggression incited by popes promising crusaders forgiveness of sins and all the loot they could take. The Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth, especially in the form of ancient Christian relics, old bones and artifact fragments considered sacred and magical, from what Europeans call the holy lands. (A main reason for the achievements of Gothic cathedral architecture was to house the looted relics in suitably intimidating splendour.) The European knight practiced a style of battle centred on formations of armoured combatants mounted on heavy horses. The social class which could afford such military equipment and the training it required was made up of families exploiting vast land holdings secured by their private armies, crime-families. Combatants from those families became invaders of the communities of the Middle East, with full support from the Christian hierarchy and its considerable myth generating capacity. The aristocratic culture of Chivalry took on its enduring character in that context, in an effort to refine and glorify the most brutal parasitic looting by dressing it in Christian myths and symbols.

The enemy that confronted the looting class of Western Europe when it reached the Middle East was the military class of the Arabs, just a few generations removed from their own nomadic herding way of life, now preserving the values of that culture while combining it with the sophistication of societies they had conquered in Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran. The knights of the west came to admire the manly values of their Arab adversaries, and flattered them by imitation. If the parasitic animal herding values of the western military class had been softening, they were refreshed and energized by the Crusades. The arrogant cruelty practiced in assaults on foreign non-Christians was brought back with the crusading knights to their domestic life, to relations with each other, to relations with other orders of society, and especially with ‘heretics’ and social dissenters of all kinds. That legacy is still very obvious.

Defending Parasitism with an Ideology of Nihilism

When the Christian father-God-in-the-sky lost credibility, starting after the Great Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, there remained a cultural legacy, a culturally conditioned disability to accept the equal dignity and transcendence of every individual person as an intelligence. Even in the shadow of Christendom, Christianity was still an important cultural presence, and individuals were generally thought to be intrinsically sinful, tainted (the Gnostic taint) with an impulse toward disobedient pride and autonomy. That very identification of the human taint reveals that the idea of individual freedom was present, ambiguously, but very weak in Christianity and its aftermath. To fill voids left by the declining credibility of the Christian vision, other forms of externalized transcendence were given increased emphasis. As examples from the Renaissance era (roughly), the political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) were indifferent to the Church and Christianity as such, but supported the sovereignty of princes (still claiming divine right), convinced that the mass of individuals required strict and awe-full guidance (herding) from a source accepted as higher in some profound way. As a widespread proletarian spiral of revolt gained credibility, advancing the wave of cultural disillusionment recognizing the illegitimacy of (violence based) monarchy and aristocracy, then the privileged classes started to create an ideology of nihilism, declaring that any general denial of external transcendence opens an abyss of chaos, hopelessness, absurdity, and meaninglessness, the contemplation of which is ultimately fatal (first to sanity), and which must anyway be false because of its intuitive repugnance. In spite of the fact that the ideology of nihilism was formulated specifically to be rejected and discredited, there was also some real fear and even covert acceptance that nihilism is the truth, because the external transcendences really are shams.

That crisis of nihilism was especially, maybe exclusively, an experience of powerful privileged factions of European society, the factions with a literary voice: The propertied faction, families who had their livelihood from ownership and investing, and their scribes, the specialists of advanced literacy, professionals, knowledge and book specialists, who for centuries had been coddled and controlled by the Church and indeed to a great extent were the Church. The meaning of the parasitic lives of those privileged factions had been sanctified by the old mythology of Christendom, and without it they found themselves in an abyss of naked parasitism, which they preferred to interpret as cosmic nothingness. Of course the great mass of the population had been engaged in the miseries and delights of surviving all along and were actually liberated by the death of Christendom.

The basic enabling error for nihilism is a prior identification of transcendence as external to ordinary individual intelligences, as in, for example, a disembodied father-figure in the sky. Since that external identification of transcendence is always a distortion of reality it will never be completely convincing. Inevitably there will be intuitions inspiring doubts and questions leading some people and groups to recognize the falseness of the external identifications. The overwhelming cultural training in outward orientations will make it nearly impossible to trace or accept the true transcendence of the interior freedom of ordinary intelligences. With all hopes pinned on the false transcendence, the immediate response to its loss will be a vision of an abyss of hopelessness: nihilism. In spite of the fact that individual freedom was recognized to some extent, that freedom could not be recognized as uniquely transcendent, as it truly is. The whole nihilist turn of mind was possible because of a culturally conditioned, post-monotheist disability to accept the transcendence of every individual person, in spite of the egalitarian effects of spreading proletarian literacy, Renaissance humanism, and the Republic of Letters of the rationalist Enlightenment era. In the trembling world-view of the privileged factions of society, only a supernatural source, external to nature and individual persons, could be convincing as the bestower of a kind of meaning which would legitimize their top-down human-on-human parasitism.

The Roman Christian tradition always sees an abyss of meaninglessness as the only alternative to the Christian story (to itself), and, since it held the position of hegemonic worldview in European civilization for centuries, it goes on engendering irrationalist reactions to an ideology of nihilism it both loves and fears. However, there is also the humanist tradition of individual freedom philosophy carried through a Protestant and post-Protestant line of influence that includes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as well as the interpretation of Martin Luther (1483-1546) by Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) (the individual’s inward and creative leap), which convincingly pointed toward the answer to nihilism. It is an answer which Church loyalists, Romantics, and even Deconstructionists (there is nothing but text) are unwilling to accept. They can’t accept the answer of individual transcendent freedom because they remain under the influence of cultures constructing a blind spot over the experience of that transcendence, partly with a romantic love of the drama in their vision of darkness and the cultural conservatism it speciously seems to legitimize.

Sources for the origins of human-on-human parasitism:

A Study of History, written by Arnold J. Toynbee, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1947, and Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1957 (Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 47-2302). In the 1947 volume (Volume 1 of the Somervell abridgements) see pages 152, 172-4, 181-2 for indexed discussions of “nomads as shepherds of men”. In the 1957 volume (Volume 2 of the Somervell abridgements) see page 230. Toynbee was the first to explore the parasitism of nomadic animal herders in my personal reading experience, and is certainly the source of the idea in my thinking.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor Books (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. See page 6 for the description of human-on-human macroparasitism, pages19-20 for humankind as a disease, page 48 for agriculture-based humans as attractive hosts for macroparasitic groups (among whom the most importantly are nomadic herders), page 75 for the example of China.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

The Cultural Construction of Blind Spots

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Stories

It is difficult to find anything more fun than a good story. Everyone’s intelligence is gratified and stretched by the emotional roller coaster ride of struggles and triumphs with characters navigating through situations that are emotionally charged with risks, conflicts, and splendid opportunities, finally resolved in some vision of beauty or high truth. The emotional mechanism of stories works on the fact that to have a relationship with someone is to take on personally the emotional life of that person, to re-orient empathically inside that person’s experience of the world and their particular situation. To connect and share awareness with other people is to share something of their emotional particularity, some awareness of, and immersion in, their inner life, along with features of their outward orientation. This applies even (maybe especially) to fictional characters. Connecting with others is a way for individuals to enlarge the experience of being human, of being an intelligence.

Emotional Structuring: Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama, Farce

Every novel, every joke, every song, is an emotional pretending-journey with the characters or voices carrying or appearing to utter the story. For example, you start with happiness about a surprisingly pleasing situation, such as living at leisure at Bag End in Middle Earth, but soon at an initial turning point happiness becomes fear and worry as the situation comes under threat and there is some damage and injury, but there is rising hope and determination because decent and charming characters resolve to test themselves and do something to preserve a good that was previously taken for granted. Various complications and vicissitudes develop with emotional impacts, loss and grief and the taste of small victories, and finally there is a decisive turning point leading to an emotional resolution: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce.

Everyone is familiar with the pleasures of a good story, and quite deliberately we seek out the kinds of stories that gratify us personally. However, there are stories that are insinuated into everyone’s experience at a semi-conscious level, and which are deeply absorbing at the same time as being mainly unidentified as stories. For example, every sporting event is also a simulated and structured emotional path: tragedy, comedy, farce, or operatic melodrama. Even more surprising is that every newspaper, magazine, and broadcast news show, every school history lesson, is emotional programming in exactly the same way. Particular publications not only search for emotionally provoking stories, but for stories that provoke a particular emotional arc, an arc which serves their editorial policy.

The thing to notice in cultural presentations of any kind is the emotional changes you experience going through it. That is crucial as the primal content and is often the stealth-message of the presentation, just as much in presentations that are framed as information, education, or news. Whatever information there is in newspapers (of whatever form) is submerged in stories, and it is the stories which determine the sense made of the information.

Suspension of Critical Disbelief

It is generally accepted that the ordinary appreciation of fiction and theatre involves and requires a willing suspension of critical disbelief by the reader or audience. We enter the emotional current of a narrative by turning off our rational moorings to strict realities, to the connection between conclusions and relevant evidence. Just as there are unidentified stories pervading cultural experiences, there is also an unconscious or unwilling suspension of disbelief, of critical rationality, when the emotional current of a story is strong enough, even in situations in which fiction is not supposed to be involved and in which critical thinking powers should be dominant and active, as, for example, in politics, economics, religion, or ideology in general. The drama and pathos of a good story are easily appealing enough to displace curiosity about reality. For example, there are people who love re-reading The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins, (Published by Scholastic Press (2008), ISBN-10: 0439023483, ISBN-13: 978-0439023481). They want to immerse themselves in the story and live through Katniss’s emotional situations, without distractions or interruptions, approaching an experience of total immersion. That’s exactly what religious or patriotic devotion is, no more or less, emotional immersion and absorption in the stories a religion repeats and repeats. In an indifferent and often hostile world, people have been desperate for a mental shelter, even one made only of the clarity of an absorbing pretence.

Gangs are Stories

By the way, there is no way to prevent the formation of neighbourhood gangs expressing competitive team spirit when competitions between team-spirit-bonded collectives are universally glorified and modelled at all levels of social organization, all building stories expressing the mainstream cowboy-masculine culture and value system, from school sports teams, religious sects, business and corporate operations, to nations in conflict. Every gang is an exciting tragedy, and in exactly the same way every club, school, profession, corporation, and nation is an emotional thrill machine, an emotional current to plug in and ride.

That Big Thing

This issue goes back to Socrates and his observation, depicted in Plato’s Republic, about the old quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates was aware that poetry often works by emotional enrolment and programming which is crucially different from philosophical questioning. Socrates saw the alternative to stories as a persistent questioning of ideas, a method elaborated later in Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Identifying and withdrawing from cultural story-content is essentially the philosophical method described by Descartes, systematically removing his assent and belonging from every belief he held, stripping away everything cultural until a bedrock was found: Intelligence-as-such as an elemental grounding. Descartes called it thinking. Any critical thinking strategy requires objectifying all the stories carried by culture, being especially sensitive to stealth stories, and then withdrawing from their emotional program.

Many different sorts of claims and arguments have been called philosophical. Notwithstanding the merits of any of those, philosophy can be thinking on the insight that the externalizing gaze of science is incapable of grasping some important features of experienced reality. This casts philosophy as a kind of discovery thinking which goes to the blind spot of science, the blind spot of intelligence itself: the questioning subjectivity that is intelligence itself. On that basis philosophy claims the seriousness and general relevance of science without being in competition with it.

Nature is just physics, completely pre-determined stuff, in eternal instantaneous freefall structured by invariable regularities, but intelligences don’t exist as physics. We exist as metaphysics, separate specks (universes), each living an embodied life in time rather than simply in instantaneous nature. Intelligences do something metaphysically remarkable, stretching nature’s instantaneous freefall and in doing so creating time, not by slowing nature’s fall or by speeding it, but instead by constructing a universe of non-actuality through remembering, simultaneously with perceiving, anticipating, pretending, aspiring, building and pushing open a non-actual future. That thing you sense that is bigger than yourself is the universe of your own intelligence. The primordial experience of transcendence is the experience an intelligence has of itself. The original and authentic experience of transcendence is always an intelligence’s awareness of itself as a power of freedom in the creation of time, taking a feature of nature and spinning freedom from it in the form of time.

The historical influence of nomadic herding conquerors stunted the development of human cultures and stranded those cultures at the primitive condition of fixating on false external projections of transcendence. Everyone is bound and controlled by culture, even within controlling factions, everyone except individuals who have kept a sense of their innocent elemental orientation, or who re-discover and work to restore it. We are still stuck culturally because the myth of external transcendence has been used effectively to sanctify a system of top-down human-on-human parasitism which defends and perpetuates itself tenaciously through culture. The promise of progress through science and technology is yet another avatar of externalized transcendence.

Thinking

The alternative to psychological immersion in a cultural story-sphere is re-orienting to an actual human situation that is stunningly different from ordinary assumptions and perceptions. It is possible to objectify the stories and disengage from their emotional currents, their pre-determined emotional arc which carries with it a sense of inevitability which overrides any individual’s creative freedom. All those stories are an emotional diversion away from (making a blind spot of) the emotion that is appropriate to the human reality, serving to divert everyone away from noticing the top-down human-on human parasitism in the ordinary arrangements of social organization, and from noticing the primordiality of transcendence in every individual intelligence. It is not easy to specify the emotional state that is appropriate to a clear encounter with that situation, the situation of living as a zombie in Zombie-land, but it surely involves excited curiosity, amazement, determined re-orientation, intelligence sensing itself as emotion in actively expressing freedom and power. Ancient Epicureans and Stoics identified the emotion of active intelligence as happiness.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

A Quarrel with Buddhism

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

The Buddhist tradition seems to share the conclusion presented as Proposition Seven in Seven Propositions On Transcendence, (posting 65, September 10, 2013) that the strategic response to political injustice is for each individual to search inward and thereby to overcome the primordial philosophical problem. Political consequences would inevitably follow from widespread discovery of the original transcendence of individual intelligences. Such an interpretation could account for the lack of overt political commentary in traditional Buddhism, which otherwise seems close to teaching resignation to political injustices of the status quo. Resignation to political injustice is definitely supported by the idea of karma, which serves to support and align with the politics of parasitic power. The myth of the karmic hierarchy of lives, social mobility upward or downward from one incarnation to the next in a long course of reincarnation, legitimizes the structure of parasitism institutionalized in hierarchical class structured societies. Although Buddhism is sometimes presented as a religion without a deity, the intelligent design of a cosmic moral hierarchy of lives points to the agency of a discretionary “great spirit” behind the structuring of society and politics, as behind everything, and such an agency is another instance of the political appropriation of false projections of intelligence as a means of sanctifying human-on-human parasitism. The actual source of the intelligent design in this sort of case is the person who projects the idea of a moral hierarchy onto the social hierarchy. These political considerations indicate that Buddhist explorations of the foundations of experience missed the reality of primordial transcendence in individual intelligence as such. The explorers did not comment on the political problem because they accepted it as the design of the great spirit, just as most advocates of the Abrahamic religions did and do.

Since there is an implication of “the Great Spirit” in the Buddhist myth of a moral hierarchy of lives over the long process of karmic re-incarnation, there is also the implication that, when an individual turns inward to sense transcendent intelligence, it is really the cosmic intelligence of “the Great Spirit” which is sensed as the source and giver of transcendence and of the world in which all experience occurs. That, again, is the great error of misidentifying transcendence.

Any assertion of cosmic spiritual unity implies a conservative admiration of hierarchy. It brings to mind the romantic adulation of the hero, the prince, the champion, the celebrity genius, the saint, the prodigy, and is a complete denial of the fact of universal individual transcendence, and an aggressive denigration of ordinary lives and ordinary people. Contrary to that view, any intelligence, engaged as we all are in building a sustainable and gratifying life in particular personal circumstances, is as transcendent as anything ever gets. Every time someone receives the revelation of a higher good, a higher beauty, a higher truth, some version of an übermensch, then lots of ordinary (transcendent) intelligences are in mortal danger of being brutalized, enslaved, tortured, and murdered in the name of the false transcendence. Hero (celebrity) fixation is another manifestation of the culture of cowboy masculinity, which identifies the majority of humans as livestock as a fundamental worldview.

Intelligence, Nature, Time, and Illusion

It was quite common among ancient philosophers to claim that the realm of time, the world of change and becoming, is an illusion (the Buddhist maya). There was also an old idea that the human essence was exiled into the world of time, is temporarily confined here, but belongs at home in eternity. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to improve social justice within a fleeting illusion, so that kind of view is politically conservative. What was right about those old ideas is that intelligences are not part of nature, even though profoundly embedded in nature, certainly arising within nature in some crucial sense. In every instance, intelligence transcends nature and escapes partly from the determinism of nature by inventing and constructing time, and time is not part of nature. Time is an intelligence’s construct from encountering a feature of nature, specifically an instantaneous dislocation in nature, but that feature of nature in itself is not time as intelligences have time. Nature is no more than the entirety of what is actual in the strictest sense, brute actuality, and that actuality has no mutually negating possibilities. There are no possibilities in nature (only actualities), but possibilities are inseparable from the time of intelligences.

The observation that time is not part of nature (because it is full of the freedom of possibilities) is pretty close to the ancient claim that the world of time is an illusion. However, time is only an illusion if intelligence is an illusion, but the claim that intelligence is an illusion goes nowhere. Only an intelligence could have such a thought. Cogito ergo sum. Time is intelligence overcoming the instantaneous (timeless) actuality of nature. Time is the freedom of intelligence, overcoming the vanishing imposed by the determinism of nature without vanishing by merging with a universal, category, form, ideal, or type. When an individual’s time comes to an end there is a return to the instantaneous eternity of nature. As intelligences, time is our transcendence and freedom from nature.

The illusion or appearance of banality or mediocrity in ordinary life (so despised by a romantic such as Nietzsche, for example) results from a general acceptance of the culture of the externality of transcendence, which fixes the orientation of everybody outward in search of (parental-type) command, guidance, and reward, and so it grounds the legitimacy and sanctity of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Overcome that cultural malaise and all the old gods and demons are gone, nobody is coming, great Pan is dead, original sin is gone, the fictitious collective personality-entities are gone (except as functioning clusters of interconnected intelligences), there is no social mobility between lives from moral action, and the social hierarchy is not a moral hierarchy in any way. All the old celebrity systems disappear, since no one needs vicarious transcendence when there is an interior supply.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.