Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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embodiment, freedom, imperialism, individuality, macro-parasite culture, metaphysics, nature, sociability, spirituality, theology

A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories going around (models for tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as material culture and typical ways of acting, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature and the supernatural, community, and individual subjective interiority. The social construction is the repeated, continually re-imitated activities in which people fit into processes of production and consumption, conversations, and crowds.

All institutional systems of reality have been top-down systems, that is, structured into metaphysical stories in which supernatural beings have decisive involvement. Systems of reality typically include a supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, for example, when language is considered as prior to voices, you have a top-down system. That orientation supports a comprehensive top-down conception of value and power, effectively blocking a true self-recognition of spirituality and stifling the autonomy, creativity, and self-possession of all individuals.

There is nothing inherently parasitic, disempowering, or repressive about human interconnectedness or about cultural forms to formalize that interconnectedness. It is our sociability (as otherwise isolated individual intelligences) which inclines us to welcome culture in as tokens of our connectedness to a collective of spiritual beings. However, culture has been made toxic by a particular historical contingency. Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on “sedentary” grass-eating mammals which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That process launched the cultural efforts to celebrate and glorify top-down human-on-human parasitism. It is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation. The historically special, and historically traceable, cultural and political force of the human-on-human macro-parasite faction has eluded recognition, for example by deconstructionists, who instead blame oppression on a tragic, unalterable, flaw in humanity. ‘We are all complicit and co-conspirators in our own oppression’ is just the default rhetoric of cultures still emerging (slowly but surely) from Christendom, a repetition of its declaration of original sin, an inherent vice which turns every individual against itself. Deconstructionists got “everything is political” right, but they completely missed the criminality (perpetrators and victims) in the operation of power. Culture, something everyone depends on, under these conditions becomes critically disabling for individuals.

The systems of reality elaborated and declared by cultural institutions such as religions, economic production and exchange systems, and the military wings of sovereignty, are crucial for any individual’s orientation, and as such they top the list among bits of heritage which must be questioned in critical thinking. Anyone is able to re-orient, to engage in a process of self-directed re-orientation by which the official conceptualization of community, subjectivity, and nature (including the spiritual forces of non-earthly intelligences) are replaced with de-cultured conceptualizations recognizing that human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between the givens of nature and the myriad non-actualities of creative subjectivity, in the play of interior non-actualities against the brute actuality of nature.

The Ultimate Reality System Hack

For such a reorientation to be possible, there must be a framework of orientation that is independent of culturally supplied conceptions, and philosophical questioning (the spiritual quest, critique of orientation) brings it to light by exposing certain elemental features of experience. The elements of the philosophical frame of reference are personal embodiment, spirituality, and sociability. Sociability, the gratification each intelligence derives from engagement with others, is really part of spirituality. What enables the ultimate hack of false systems of reality is contemplation of personal embodiment because embodiment imposes needs, costs, and vulnerabilities, as well as powers and abilities, at the level of the individual. In doing that, personal embodiment defines spiritual individuality. Embodiment decrees individuality. De-cultured acquaintance with embodiment and spirituality (and with it sociability), and with the powers and vulnerabilities that come with them, situates a person for creative autonomy and a re-conceived interconnection with others.

Life for the individual person is the engagement of metaphysics with physics. There is nothing metaphysical about the natural world at large, the cosmic terrain. It is just plain old physics. Metaphysics is entirely interior to individuals, to us embodied spiritual beings. Metaphysics is our interiority, our spirituality. Conceptions of metaphysics emerge from thinking about time, and time has almost always been misconstrued in philosophy as a dimension of objects independent of intelligences. (What is to be made of temporal discontinuity: the fact that past and future do not actually exist?) Theories of a hidden mysterious substrate of material objects, such as a single infinite substance (Spinoza) which must remain the same even though objects change constantly into different objects, are an attempt to translate time (intelligence) into an occult structure of objects or substances, a way of dealing with time in terms of a ‘metaphysical’ structure within objects, separate from intelligences. However, time is the interiority of teleology, a metaphysical non-actuality. It is the dimension of individual freedom or spirituality, and can only be comprehended in terms of what is interior to intelligences, the bearings of questions, curiosity, projects, and lessons learned in any human gaze.

Religions also have a metaphysical misconception of the fabric of the cosmos, from an insistence that ethical or moral standards are inherent in it, laws based on divine decree and divine enforcement, a universal mechanism of justice: commands and judgments, record keeping, and an ultimate moral reckoning removed to some indefinite remoteness (for example, the karmic progression of reincarnation, or the final day of judgment, heaven and hell). Although even the religious conception of personal spirituality has to emphasize freedom so that moral acts and enforcement have some foundation in individual responsibility, that conception is dominated by the individual’s subordination to the universal (divine) system of moral reckoning, making the religious conception of spirituality hopelessly political: top-down, punitive, and repressive. The supposed cosmic source of our ethical sense is proposed as the essence of our spirituality, immediately locking us into unalterable subordination. It is a misconception which expresses the political agenda of the power-hoarding human parasite faction, projecting a mythical personification onto cosmic nature. Only embodied spiritual beings, ordinary persons, (not cosmic nature) make ethical judgments, and ethics is, again, entirely interior to individual intelligences. The real basis of morality in spirituality is not an occult connection to a cosmic order of justice but rather an individual power of empathy. Empathy is the moral compass. The lack of empathy is the lack of a moral compass.

Not recognizing the transcendence in personal subjective interiority (living in time) sets us up to accept all kinds of absurd superstitions about various (romantic) hidden entities, powers, or forces which are used as mechanisms of psychological manipulation to legitimate injustices of the status quo. The philosophical insight is that ordinary subjectivity itself is the miracle, and that it can be recognized as such even though it is misrepresented by official culture.

Effective Liberation

What is called Liberation Theology was inspired by a recognition of the institutionalized exploitation of indigenous people in “Latin” America, (which was a fully intended consequence of modern European imperialism) and it attempts to provide support from New Testament scripture for grass roots activism in aid of social justice. The immediate project was to restructure economic arrangements to accomplish a more equitable distribution of wealth, power, and choice, and with them dignity, and respect. Freedom was conceived as equitable distribution in the nexus of human goods. In that context, the inspiring idea of freedom cannot be realized without large-scale organizational change because it is inseparable from social structures and economic operations.

The point of posting 88, Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality (December 15, 2015) is that doing something consequential and decisive, achieving self-possession, does not depend on the overthrow of the economic order or on any other environmental change. Freedom doesn’t need to wait for historical or evolutionary change in economics, biology, or culture. It can be achieved individually at any time, but even though the philosophical reorientation is first, decisive, and indispensable, perhaps it is not the end of liberation. Since sociability is so crucial in our spirituality, a withering away of the human macro-parasite faction and its culture, and of human parasitism in general, would be the practical hope and the expected effect of a broad distribution of philosophical liberation.

Note: For a closer contemplation of embodiment see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture, embodiment, gender, metaphysics, philosophical liberation, Romanticism, sociability, spirituality, time, transcendence

No one can, by looting property or by any other kind of violence, get beyond the control of the macro-parasitic capitalist faction and its structures of cultural influence, because violence and property are the operating mechanisms of the parasite faction itself. The most important and valuable personal possessions aren’t property anyway but rather the system of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, transcendence (the supernatural), community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the ambient culture into which a person is born, and presented as reality. Getting beyond the control of a dominant faction has to be done by getting beyond the cultural system of reality which legitimates the parasites and their operations. Specifically, it is necessary to get beyond the top-down orientation of popular systems of reality, because that orientation enables the use of those systems as ideological legitimations of macro-parasitism. For example, the fact that cheetahs prey on antelope is cited (since Darwin) as proof that human-on-human macro-parasitism is decreed by the laws of cosmic nature. However, every Great Chain of Being that serves as a food chain is a political construct to legitimate predatory behaviour and institutions. To re-orient freely, you have to disconnect from the message built into culturally assigned personal identity that you are a product, creature, construct, or function of the ambient cultural system, of your ethnic and religious background and your relation to the economic system. That involves going beyond the stories and formulaic word groupings in common currency.

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

Any survey of human behaviour at large finds striking uniformity, and that is often used against the idea of individual autonomy and creativity. However, there is widespread uniformity because culture provides circumstantial compulsions. All of that cultural uniformity is founded on a fascination that individual intelligences have with other intelligences. The most interesting thing to any individual intelligence is other intelligences, and it is undeniable that individuals are almost helpless and completely unviable without the support and nurturing of a surrounding group of people. It could be argued that the mutual attraction of intelligences is the ultimate spiritual vulnerability, because we are very often ready to put up with great discomfort and un-fulfillment to maintain our interconnection with others. One thread of romanticism holds that, due to the dependence of individuals on the support of other humans, the most important thing, the crucial thing, is that individuals be provided culturally with a sense of belonging and social attachment, no matter if that sense is based on outright falsehoods and deceptions. Because we are spiritual beings in the uncertain process of self-creation, and because we are uncertain of our spirituality, we begin by accepting the stories going around ambient culture, including the assignment of personal identity in terms of ethnicity, family, religion, nationality, gender-role, sexual orientation, job aptitudes, or trophies won, until we recognize that, along with belonging, they impose a sense of personal diminishment and a disabling false finality. That leads to a philosophical questioning of the ambient cultural system of reality, and of personal orientation within that reality, especially upon recognizing that top-down concepts of subjectivity, spirituality, and identity which produce personal diminishment and false finality also maintain control by the macro-parasite faction.

Embodiment and Spirituality

The incongruence between personal embodiment and spirituality has always been an important inspiration for philosophical questioning (in addition to the two vulnerabilities described in the previous posting). The challenging nature of the embodiment – spirituality duality is already expressed in ancient Orphic philosophy: a story about spirituality exiled and cast down from divinity, and imprisoned in matter by embodiment. That ancient story illustrates a longstanding approach to spirituality as the reach for “something higher”, as an inherent sense of relation between personal spirituality and a universal divinity. In fact, the inspiration to search for “something higher” is nothing other than the sense of unknowing or uncertainty about personal spirituality (what is personally “higher” in relation to dead matter), for example, the search for how personal aspirations and accumulated lessons learned are present invisibly (which is the immediate presence of “something higher”). The same impulse that goads the quest for the “higher” (non-apparent) presence of personal bearings or directionality is full enough of hopes and fears to fixate on the most grandiose possibility of the “something higher” in the form of deity, a non-apparent cosmic master intelligence or spirituality.

The rejection of such upward-orientation is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creating of time as accomplished by every individual intelligence. Time is freedom into which an intelligence projects itself creatively, a personal hyper-space of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. This is an unfamiliar idea, but time is the conception (opening) of freedom-from-nature and as such the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze (always into futurity) 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. **

There are several ways in which it is correct (but also misleading) to say that there is no spiritual self. The basic nature of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself, to project its self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a spirituality or intelligence: a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and freedom. What time as a personal mirror shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of spirit is precisely the same thing as the immateriality of time. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

The only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of embodiment. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom, the non-particularity of intelligence is the non-particularity of freedom, and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body. We have a tendency to overemphasize our particularity based on the finality of bodies, since bodies are measurable in great detail, mappable, chartable, locatable, and so we are very clear about our presence as a body-particular, up to a point (another vulnerability). We are much less clear about spirituality since it is a no-thing-ness, only a directionality pointing out away from itself. So, under the influence of cultural teachings, we underrepresent the never-yet-particularity of personal spirituality (intelligence) in our self-identification. That is why the emphasis here is on identity as spirituality with its creative freedom. The realms of experience most expressive of embodiment are, first, placement (being here), then, effortful mobility within, and effortful mobilization of, brute actuality, grounded in a person’s accumulated sense of the metabolic cost-shape of the world, and third, communication and interconnection with other people which, surprisingly enough, cannot be done strictly spiritually, but instead require gestures of the body. Embodiment defines a strict spiritual individuality.

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

The no-thing-ness of spirituality is not a void to be filled from outside itself, but instead is a gusher of curiosity, questions, projections of marks and patterns, and expeditions of discovery and creation. That is why the proponents of macro-parasitic patriarchy would like to appropriate spirituality as a masculine quality. There is an historical attempt to connect mentality, specifically rational thinking, with masculinity, coupled with an attempt to associate femininity with embodiment. However, there are possibly more metaphorical congruences of spirituality with aspects of female sexual biology, based on spirituality as no-thing-ness, an absence, labyrinthine, creative, undefined and as such free. The positivism of embodiment surely is more congenial as representing a certain dominant style of masculinity. Not much should be made of any such metaphors, no metaphysical conclusions please, especially since far too much has been made of them historically. Spirituality is gender neutral, and metaphysics is not gendered.

It is obvious that no individual’s re-orientation beyond the dominant culture is going to cause the institutions of macro-parasitism to vanish, so that pay-off is strictly off the table. Getting past the typical top-down orientation does not objectively negate the power of the entrenched macro-parasitic faction and their decisive influence on culture-at-large. So, it is fair to ask what is achieved by getting past looking up to sovereignty, divinity, tradition, institutions, ethnicity, the language community, or anything like that. The process of philosophical liberation, the re-orientation accomplished by a critique of common reality, leads back to a new recognition of personal spirituality, to embracing spiritual individuality as defined by embodiment, and nullifying the typical alienation of autonomous creativity. The only pay-off is life as a spiritual being than which there is none greater or higher, embodied among others, conscious of the transcendent freedom of individual intelligences as distinct from the unfreedom of inertial nature, without guilt from any mythical inherent flaw, original sin, or from interpreting the will to live itself as a fatal weakness. The immediate result of going beyond culturally assigned definitions of personal identity is taking on the burden of spiritual no-thing-ness, which is the project of self-creation at every moment, engagement in a personal creative process. That has to be the new way to enjoy engaging with the surrounding cluster of other spiritual beings, all relating to one another using our precious embodiment.

** An earlier iteration of this paragraph can be found in posting 74, June 7, 2014, The Use and Abuse of Spirituality.

Embodiment and Two Spiritual Vulnerabilities

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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critical thinking, critique of modernity, culture, embodiment, freedom, intelligence, nature, philosophy, science, spirituality, time, transcendence

Taken together, the two previous postings present a couple of observations worth highlighting. The postings are: Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality (July 15, 2015, posting # 85), and Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (November 4, 2015, posting # 86). The first observation, pointed to by the titles, is that (Blind-Spot) philosophy is both a spiritual quest and a critique of orientation. A quest begins in questions, and is a re-orientation process with questions as guides. As a spiritual quest, it is an intelligence’s search for what is most personal and most human, a self-consideration, and as a critique of orientation it is an intelligence’s questioning its situation within what is beyond itself. A spiritual quest is a gaze into a mirror and the critique of orientation is a gaze into surroundings (being in a life in the world). There is already a horizontal duality in this binocularity to the philosophical gaze: inward and outward, although there is no inward-seeing eye. The directionality of the gaze (outward) is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, that it points (in addition to some region of surroundings) back in a direction that can only be characterized as inward. The duality is all the more insistent because we are irritated or nagged by the sense of that inward direction as partial blindness, as obscurity and vulnerability, the sense that there should be an inward sensitivity to match the richness of our outward sensitivities. Since there is no simple gaze inward we are forced to devise or discover a spiritual mirror and we find it in the experience of time. Inwardly, instead of a particularity of instantaneous outline or substance, we have a directionality within time.

Critique of Modernity

Critique of culture is a crucial part of any spiritual quest just as it is of critique of orientation because the engagement of spirit or intelligence with nature (via embodiment) is heavily mediated by ambient culture which is historically rooted and largely arbitrary for the individual. An individual’s surroundings include a multitude of other embodied intelligences expressing a collectively shared orientation (a system of reality) acquired in childhood from the local culture. “System of reality” specifically denotes a culturally stipulated set of ideas and orientations. It is the set of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, the supernatural, community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the culture into which a person is born. Ideas about the supernatural often have a revered status in systems of reality, stipulated as the top-down power over the other elements. Recognizing culture as an accumulation of human creations distinct from nature and from fundamental humanity provides the basis for recognizing in history a variety of systems of reality, which often contradict one another and all of which must include important distortions and falsehoods. Critique of modernity, for example, is culture criticism, since modernity is not a manifestation of nature (such as winter) nor, as a late and special development, can it be a structure of enduring human nature.

Not only the Euro-American imperialist culture of modernity, but every culture, is tainted with superstitious legitimations of the injustices of human macro-parasitism, because there are spiritual vulnerabilities which universally give macro-parasitic cultures access to human hosts. There is no index culture to use as a standard of empathy in human interconnectedness or of the human grasp on reality. Tribal or aboriginal cultures are no better. Philosophy is nothing less than developing re-acquaintance with personal pre-cultural innocence, disconnecting from all the cultural biases, especially constructs of personal identity, self-definition (including gender), and stories of cosmic origins, purpose, and destiny. What you get down to, moving outside cultural influences, is a horizontal dualism: limited personal freedom within the non-actuality of time (which is to say, individual intelligence) confronting brute actuality, a relationship obviously vulnerable to the very active interference of tainted collective culture.

Spiritual Vulnerabilities

The second observation is that there are two spiritual vulnerabilities inherent in intelligences and our situation, both of which vulnerabilities are exploited culturally by macro-parasitic factions to establish and stabilize their regime of top-down human-on-human parasitism. (Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on a “sedentary” grass-eating mammal which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation.) It is incorrect to say that critical thinking would have no function without the distortions of reality (such as gods, demons, inherent human vice, the great food chain of being, fine art, monumental architecture, and good breeding) spun culturally by macro-parasitic factions to legitimate themselves. Even without that distorting cultural force, the inherent vulnerabilities (self-uncertainty and orientation to top-down subordination) would remain. Although both spiritual vulnerabilities are culturally re-enforced and exploited, they are not created out of nothing by cultural forces. They are inherent in the encounter between the non-actualities of subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature, and so pre-exist cultural influences. However, it would be wrong to characterize the inherent vulnerabilities in the situation of intelligences as any kind of inherent vice or fault, there is no trace of original sin there. Vulnerabilities are not vices. Vulnerabilities require a strengthening of individual autonomy, encouragement and support of individual expression and critical thinking, and not repression or punishment.

Spirituality

The spiritual vulnerability studied in Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest is existential self-uncertainty. The spiritual vulnerability studied in Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality is a tendency to accept without question the imprint of a whole complex of normal human circumstances as a top-down or child-to-parent orientation on a cosmic scale. There is a direct correspondence between the two spiritual vulnerabilities and the two directions of the philosophical gaze, with a spiritual vulnerability as both an inspiration and a challenge to overcome in each direction. For the spiritual quest itself there is the vulnerability of self-uncertainty, spiritual no-thing-ness, the necessity to self-create at every moment. The spiritual quest never arrives at the discovery of a definitive self. Instead of having any definitive self-particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality: time and the freedom that comes with time and the teleology of creativity, constructed of interior non-actuality, accumulating orientation. The past never accomplishes a definitive self, which is, of course, inseparable from freedom. However, the inherent self-uncertainty is exploited as a vulnerability to having a culturally assigned identity imposed. Consequently, the spiritual quest has to include a critique of the culture of personal identity. Personal identity definitions assigned by culture have to be put aside so that innocent self-experience is encountered and liberated.

Horizontal Dualism

Outwardly, the vulnerability is the readiness or early conditioning to project a top-down parental-type orientation (personal subordination) onto the self-to-environment relation at large. In fact that readiness to project a top-down structure onto the self-to-environment relation spills over and invades self-uncertainty as well, so that it becomes a vulnerability to crediting personal intelligence (non-actuality, time, freedom) to some cosmic source intelligence or master intelligence. The posting Horizontal Dualism … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of spirit, based on its transcendent freedom and creative power, to superiority and mastery over nature. As just noted, spiritual mastery has usually been alienated from individuals and made more plausible as a mastery by being centralized and assigned to a cosmic master intelligence, leaving the individual as some sort of subordinate derivation or product of the vastness of the master intelligence, but, even as such, still claiming a share of mastery over local nature. Rejecting that (culturally re-enforced) alienation brings intelligence back to the scale of the individual which already makes it more horizontal with respect to nature.

Enlightenment rationalists moved western culture along the right path by pioneering scientific secularism to replace the imagined agency of disembodied spirits in religion and magic. They made the people of their future (made us of modernity) philosophical in an important sense by helping us be secular. People have largely become scientific instead of superstitious and that was once thought to be the crucial aspect of being philosophical: accepting strict causation, interpreting and perceiving strict causation in the events and structures of the surroundings. However, conceiving science as “universal laws” still retains the old top-down orientation. With science, we are still overawed by the splendours of nature as a self-subsisting matrix or grounding to which the individual intelligence is subordinate. (That gets interpreted politically so that the fact that cheetah prey on antelope is offered as a legitimation of capitalism.) Comparing the radically located individual intelligence to the scale of cosmic nature, which is by definition omnipresent, seems to show the individual as insignificant and again some sort of derivation or product, this time of the vastness of nature. Critique of Orientation … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of nature at large of all-embracing superiority and mastery. Something crucial is missing from that system of reality, and what is missing is the experience of subjective interiority and the fact that human life is played out by individuals in the (horizontal) encounter between non-actualities of personal subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature (conceptually mediated by culture via the human surroundings). The awesome creative freedom of individual intelligences is still edited out, censored, from the scientific system of reality. Innocent self-discovery (self-possession) as an autonomous intelligence with the creative power of time/ non-actuality/ freedom is the release from that cultural distortion and from the spiritual vulnerability exploited by that system of reality.

The forces at the core of human life at the individual level are spiritual freedom and embodiment, constituting a strict individuality to spirituality in its embodiment. The encounter between the free non-actualities of the interior of intelligences and the brute, pre-determined, actuality of nature is an inseparable and shockingly fruitful dualism, essentially horizontal. To deny the dualism is either to deny spirituality or to deny embodiment, either of which is perverse and self-defeating. Effective freedom and the fulfillment of transcendence requires both.

Contrary to the prevailing Euro-American culture, which still includes important remnants of Christianity, there is no innate flaw or taint in human nature which reduces the individual to a destructive force in need of external control. Additionally, there is a global misidentification of transcendence as belonging to some other-world, an afterlife world, a future world of science and technology, or a supernatural ideal dimension, knowledge of which is reserved to a few selected gatekeepers. However, again contrary to prevailing culture, there is no such world to wait for, to escape to, or to expect rescue by. With no transcendent other-world there are no gatekeepers able to offer access to such a thing. This moment of being in a life in the world is it. There is transcendence here and now in personal creative freedom.

The inherent spiritual vulnerabilities would still challenge philosophical thinking even if there weren’t social inequalities which parasitic beneficiaries legitimize by means of culturally instituted (false) identifications of external transcendence, such as monumental high culture (instead of the transcendence of individual intelligence). It is still true that tainted culture exacerbates and institutionalizes the individuals’s spiritual confusion originating from the inherent vulnerabilities. Philosophical thinking is uniquely suited to overcome the influence of poisoned culture, and the existence of philosophy is evidence of a pre-cultural innocence. Something innocent in intelligence is drawn to the spiritual vulnerabilities as questionable, and strikes back against the confusion and diminishment around the vulnerabilities, and against the distortions and violations of reality that are institutionalized in culture. We are intelligent and embodied before we are cultured.

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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alchemy, culture, dualism, freedom, inherent vice, intelligence, macro-parasitism, metaphysics, nature, philosophers' stone, philosophy, Philosophy of Time, spiritual quest

Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? These questions are personal, and at the same time reach beyond the personal, in a spiritual quest. A spiritual quest begins from a questioner’s recognizing the imperfection of self-awareness or self-possession, recognizing itself as its own blind-spot, recognizing the blind-spotness of itself to itself. It is a questioner’s sense of unknowing and curiosity about its own impulse (or imperative) to question and discover, about its own curiosity and its resulting construction of ever accumulating orientation, so, about its intelligence. Out of that sense of unknowing, a spiritual quest is a search for a fuller acquaintance with, or understanding of, this personal situation of intelligence in its aspect as the human situation.

Intelligence or spirit is (and intelligences are) the most interesting dimension of the situation of human life, but not the only one. There is a contrast between acquaintance with material surroundings on one hand and acquaintance with manifestations of intelligence such as the impulse to question and discover on the other, standing as a fundamental dualism in the quest for improved acquaintance with intelligence. Acquaintance with intelligence would not need a quest unless our ordinary acquaintance is mainly with something else, something not-spirit, normally identified as material nature or inertial nature, forces of unfreedom. Intelligence confronts nature. Deliberate teleological striving confronts lifeless falling. The freedom of curiosity confronts the unfreedom of inertia. Non-actuality (interior to an intelligence) confronts actuality (exteriority or the space of nature). Subjectivity confronts objectivity.

This dualism of human embodiment is not incidental to our situation but is essential and fundamental. Human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between non-actualities of our subjectivity (futurity, memory) and the brute actuality of objective nature. Many people find this dualism to be unsettling, even unthinkable, but to deny it is to evade the dynamic forces at the core of human lives. Philosophical consciousness is an orientation based on recognition of self as intelligence, but an embodied intelligence in a horizontal dualism with the non-intelligent (unfree) actuality of nature. In other words, it is an orientation based on recognition of self, paradoxically, as a spiritual presence with no appearance, with no-thing-ness, an embodied interiority of non-actuality, constructing and projecting freedom by constructing time within nature.

Metaphysics: Time is the Mirror of Intelligence

On the question of intelligence encountering and discovering itself (in its own blind spot), time is the crucial consideration, the self-revelation of experience. If you are searching for subjective intelligence in the perception of the world, you identify it in the essential temporal dimension of the world as perceived, in the subjectivity of our human position in time. Contemplation of time is the portal to the self-discovery of an intelligence. Time is, not incidentally, the main inspiration for metaphysics, an example of time being the mirror of intelligence. All metaphysics points to intelligence, but unfortunately often misconstrued as an alienated or disembodied cosmic intelligence.

At the edge of every conceptual system of reality there is some unavoidable vision of metaphysics to deal with the contradiction between actuality and the non-actual certainty of change, the contradiction between actuality and futurity, between actuality and memory. This is true also of materialism, which makes heroic efforts to avoid recognizing the creative contributions of intelligence in constructing reality. Material objects are models of perfect self-subsistence except as they exist under the aspect of time. There is always more than meets the eye, since time is non-apparent. Saying that there is an interiority to subjectivity is a way of acknowledging that it is non-apparent, and the non-appearance of time is exactly the non-appearance of subjective intelligence.

Looking Up

What often stamps a form or structure onto the dualism of the spiritual quest is a very old idea, already formed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the intelligence of each ordinary individual person is a limited and inferior replica of, particle of, or a window on, a single grand intelligence, the cosmic intelligence. The spiritual quest then becomes a search for that obscure source intelligence, the greatest or highest intelligence, and the conception of the source intelligence typically expands into a conception of the creative source of everything, because only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. (This teleology of creation is another identifier of intelligence, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive voice.) So the idea of the source intelligence becomes an idea of intelligence as “higher” than the material surroundings in which it finds itself, higher conceptually by being the creator, and experientially as being represented in the ethereal vista of the starry night sky.

Lessons from the Failure of Alchemy

There has been a long history of searching nature for signs and signatures of the great source spirit or intelligence, since the personally interior intelligence, in its aspect of blind-spot, resists attempts to pin it down as anything in particular. Perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated search program in that history was practiced by alchemists, who thought that the material world must be some sort of map or image of intelligence or spirituality, designed by a gracious Creator as a guide for humans to find a way out of our spiritually fallen condition (trapped by ignorance within matter and time). Their idea of the philosophers’ stone, for example, was part of a projection onto nature of the spiritual quest. Alchemists thought that if they could find the process that transformed base metal into gold it would be a guide to moving the individual’s spirit out of its confinement in time and matter, along an upward path, to be reunited with divinity and eternity, a fulfillment of the spirit’s ultimate divine destiny. The philosophers’ stone was supposed to be the missing link between both base metal and gold, and between the mortal life of spirit and its divine life in eternity or timelessness. Alchemists were searching for eternity (immortality) as an escape from time itself.

So science, the study of nature as strict actuality, was a spiritual quest in the beginning, rigorously developed by alchemists. Alchemists made the mistake of supposing there must be a mirroring, a sameness of structure, dynamics, forces and processes, of intent, between the spiritual (which they conceived to be primarily inner in some way, as well as higher) and material nature (outer, lower). The researches and experiments of alchemists failed to discover the upward path they predicted, but their failure established quite convincingly that material nature is not a guide to the destiny or nature of intelligence, and does not present messages, signs, or signatures of a grand source intelligence. That was and is progress. Indeed, the failure of alchemy also goes a long way to proving the futility of the whole idea of the source intelligence, the grand master intelligence. There is nowhere in the world for such a thing. Their search was self-defeating all along because it is exactly time as the form of freedom which requires and so reveals intelligence in ordinary individuals. However, the alchemists’ error is still with us, as for example in the academic philosophers’ obsession with language as an objective map of thought or human interiority, instead of as a culturally constructed mechanism of imposing a collective orientation.

Something that stands out in alchemy as a spiritual quest is its acceptance or assumption of metaphysical hierarchy. The spiritual quest was preconceived as an upward path which rose from the low world of time and material objects, soaring to the glorious and noble heights of pure spirituality and eternity, to a reunion with divinity, hinted at by the ethereal vista of the clear night sky. This is an illustration of a profound problem with traditional conceptions of dualism, namely its vertical orientation, with spirit enjoying dominion or mastery over nature.

Re-Orientation to Horizontal Dualism

The fundamental situation of any person, the relationship between actuality (nature) and non-actuality (intelligence), is not hierarchical, but is instead horizontal. This is contrary to the historically normal assertion that spirit stands higher in the spirit-material encounter. The encounter of intelligence with nature can still be said to be horizontal and non-hierarchical even though the intelligence side (freedom) is also said to transcend the brute determinism of nature. The creative life of intelligences does have freedom-in-time whereas inertial nature does not, and that is a profound transcendence. However, the survival and freedom of intelligences is entirely dependent on engaging with nature. There is no immaterial heaven or occult dimension from which intelligences were somehow exiled and where we might return to manifest our full transcendent freedom. We depend on our embodiment, embedded in nature, in our very construction of teleological time and so of our freedom. The embeddedness of intelligences in nature prevents any assertion of metaphysical hierarchy giving spirit mastery over nature. The two sides of the dualism are so profoundly other with respect to one another, and yet so entangled, that there is no scale applicable to both to rank one above the other. Nature seems to subsist quite independently of intelligences. Having life-in-time does establish intelligences as profoundly different or ‘other’ with respect to nature, one side of an insurmountable and spectacularly creative, dynamic, and yes, freedom-producing dualism. Intelligences aren’t things of nature in spite of our embodiment (because freedom is not something of nature), but the bodies of intelligences are things which project or present the creativity of intelligences into nature. That is the situation and matrix of freedom. To embrace any universal totalizing absolute, you would have to abandon individual’s freedom-in-time, life itself.

The historical norm has been a misconception of transcendence as a soaring beyond experience, out from placement within time and so out into eternity. However, time itself is transcendence (freedom/ non-actuality) and the only transcendence. (Perhaps there is some sort of timelessness in acquaintance with time as an interior construct of personal intelligence.)

Pity the Culture-Bound

In the absence of an inherently clear individual self-intuition as autonomous intelligence (non-actuality/ time/ freedom), macro-parasitic cultures (sponsored and enforced by human macro-parasite factions, developed around ideology which legitimates and sanctifies such parasitism) declare that individuals carry an inherent vice, an original sin, from which we must be saved or redeemed by a higher exterior power. Such cultures exploit our blind-spot-ness to ourselves, our lack of a clear self-intuition, just as they exploit the whole complex of experiences inclining us to settle into a top-down model of reality, as described in posting 85, July 15, 2015, Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality. The parasite faction asserts itself as representative of the higher power, claiming to maintain the social order that God or nature decrees from above, and in that effort assigns individuals personal identities and values that fit a macro-parasitic agenda. When hegemonic cultures define and value individuals in terms of their economic niche, for example, the overall message is that the individual is a product of, a creation of, the social and cultural system they operate within, without which they are nothing. This has even acquired an academically rigorous ideology and the status of an indisputable given.

Human cultures misrepresent that which is peculiarly human to their host humans and so make an institution of our alienation from authentic self-acquaintance. For example, intelligences are not naturally prepared to fit easily into particular economic niches. Economic niches are always artificial. Yet every individual must find some niche in the social structure of an economic system, and focus considerable devotion to it. In capitalism, individuals are encouraged to construct a sense of personal identity and value from the economic niche they inhabit, and on the reward patterns of commercial consumption constructed into that niche. Under peer pressure we do our best to represent ourselves as some version of “economic man” expressing competitive self-interest in the hierarchical arrangements. Correcting this is a matter of identifying that which is peculiarly human in the human situation, or personal in the personal situation, which is intelligence (freedom, time, non-actuality) in a horizontal dualism with the brute actuality and unfreedom of nature, also encountering, within nature, multitudes of other embodied intelligences, all normally expressing the normative and controlling influence of an ambient culture. Culturally constructed self-alienation is what misdirects us to expect to locate transcendence in some ethereal milky-way of the supernatural, outside time. But no. The freedom of time is the only transcendence, and it is interior to individual lives, embodied and engaged with nature and with culture tainted with the macro-parasite orientation.

The taint at the source of human brutality and injustice is culture and not human nature (intelligence) which is non-actuality/ time/ freedom at the individual level. The failing is in the historical legacies of a particular human culture, derived from the essential thing about the lives of cowboys (armed men on horses, prehistoric, ancient, and modern): their violent macro-parasitism on migratory herd animals such as cattle and horses. It is a macro-parasitism anciently transferred onto human collectives. Cultural forms and traditions which structure the interconnection of individual intelligences, all tainted by human macro-parasitism and ideological efforts (metaphysical, ideological) to justify and legitimate that parasitism, are the source of the brutality and injustice in the systems of interconnection among individuals, and of our stubbornly persistent self-alienation. These are systems of reality in which the main value promoted by cultural incentives and rewards (proofs of manliness) is to be a parasite. However, that is not the way to freedom. There is an innate individual freedom which does not depend on brutality and injustice, or on the force of a higher power.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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cosmic personification, critique, intelligence, nature, non-actuality, philosophy, science, systems of reality, the cultural orientation grid, the supernatural, time

Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Nature, Transcendence

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Blind-Spot philosophy, dualism, ethics, evil, freedom, Gnosticism, pessimism, subjectivity, the Fall from Grace, the human catastrophe, time, tragedy

Gnosticism is somewhat difficult to pin down. Roughly, it is a construct of ideas about what is supernatural and the relationship of humans to the supernatural. It seems to have been developed mostly in the first few centuries A.D., with an important concentration of activity in the Greek/ Egyptian city of Alexandria when that city was an international centre of scholarship, research, organized curiosity, and invention of ideas. From the point of view of the orientation being developed in these blog postings, call it Blind-Spot philosophy, Gnosticism is a metaphor or allegory (not entirely successful) for important realities of the human condition, and so possibly a helpful reference in sketching an overview of the Blind-Spot positions. There are gnostic elements in, and a gnostic structure or flavour to, Blind-Spot philosophy. For one thing, there is a fundamental dualism in Gnosticism, the dualism of spirit vs material nature, since, on that view, the whole drama of human life flows from each human spirit being catastrophically imprisoned in matter or nature. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is also a fundamental dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, or intelligence (freedom) vs brute actuality (unfreedom). What is conceived in Gnosticism as spirit has some congruence with what in Blind-Spot philosophy is called the interiority of an intelligence. The idea or fable of disembodied spirit(s) can be plausibly interpreted as an allegory for the experience of the interiority of personal intelligence.

The primary task of early Gnosticism was escape from demonic control, especially control by the demons of stars, dictators of astral or astrological fate. Some specialized knowledge (gnosis) was necessary to enable that escape, knowledge of the supernatural origins of the human imprisonment, and of the structure and history of the supernatural world, leading to discovery of how to be fully human by the memory of being divine. The shape of power in that view is emphatically and quite literally top-down: the demons in the starry sky have overwhelming power. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the idea of disembodied intelligences, including demonic ones. However, as the star-demons represent a dominant evil, an imposing of control and subordination on people where there should be freedom and equality, there is a congruent dominant evil in Blind-Spot philosophy. In Blind-Spot philosophy the dominant evil is not supernatural but is instead cultural and historically rooted. Specifically, the dominant evil is a cultural stream of human macro-parasitism, a cultural, political, and economic faction which successfully maintains and evolves a culture (Aryan or patriarchal masculinity) of macro-parasitic control over masses of other humans, where there should be freedom and equality.

Recognizing the broad dominance of evil, injustice, and oppression within a supernaturally top-down perspective, gnostics thought there had to be two gods, a greater and a lesser, the greater one good, the lesser one evil or at least prone to catastrophic mistakes. Gnosticism is, therefore, often construed as a religion (in one form, a version of Christianity) or a religious philosophy since it has much to claim concerning supernatural divinities. By contrast, Blind-Spot philosophy is nothing like religion since it has nothing to say about supernatural divinities, except that the idea of disembodied intelligences, personalities, or ideas is not rational, neither locally nor cosmically. Blind-Spot philosophy does have a claim about transcendence, but not in the form of omnipotent or all-encompassing divinities who shower gifts or miseries down upon humans from on-high. That would be the supernatural top-down perspective. In Blind-Spot philosophy, intelligences are all embodied and individually creators of freedom, which means we are individually transcendent with respect to the brute determinism of nature or strict actuality.

As discussed in recent postings (Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New, and The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One) there are certain circumstances of human life which make it very tempting and easy to imagine a profoundly top-down shape or structure to reality. It has been traditional for cultured humans to be trapped mentally within such top-down visions. Gnostics were early promoters of a version of that idea known as The Great Chain of Being, a prime example of top-down metaphysics. That was the context in which the gnostic views of time, freedom, and subjective identity were conceived, an extremity of top-down thinking. That perspective is rejected and opposed by Blind-Spot philosophy, which recognizes embodied intelligences as individually or autonomously creative, and as such presents a strictly bottom-up perspective, yet still recognizing transcendence in human experience. Gnosticism was and is a kind of obsession with transcendence of a supernatural kind. The idea of supernatural transcendence is an allegory for the reality of the freedom of individual intelligences.

Both Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy recognize a dominant evil which perpetrates a profound distortion of reality on a mass scale, creating a ‘hidden or secret reality’ which is normally unidentified because of (cultural) distortions arranged and maintained by the dominant evil. In both, the core secret to be discovered and revealed is about the power and freedom of the individual self or subjectivity (the blind spot). Both claim that in ordinary circumstances we function in a condition of relative disability, imprisonment, or slavery through accepting misrepresentations of reality, including alienation from our personal subjectivity. The main aspiration is direct self-acquaintance, based on recognizing a difference between the crippling concept of individual subjectivity promoted by top-down culture as compared with the self of immediate and innocent acquaintance. The supernatural imprisonment or slavery of human beings depicted in Gnosticism is an allegorical identification of the imprisonment of individuals within cultural traditions which legitimize and sanctify a perpetual macro-parasitism. In both Blind-Spot philosophy and Gnosticism, philosophy is conceived and practiced as a way of evading and resisting the dominant evil, first identifying the dominant evil and then re-positioning the self beyond the control of the dominant evil. In both, it is self-recognition which enables personal liberation, achieved by an act of taking possession of personal innocence, always available (gnostic “remembering”). However, there are at least important differences of emphasis in how knowledge is conceived in these two orientations. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is more emphasis on attending to a thinking process, self-directed reorientation, than on any special knowledge (although a knowledge of human history is relevant). Practical acquaintance with the innocent creator of interior non-actualities is basic. In Gnosticism, secret and arcane knowledge of the divine origin of human spirit, passed in person from master to worthy disciple, is the key to liberation and personal freedom. However, the disciple still has to use the knowledge to “remember” innocent or primeval life, to reawakening an innocent intelligence.

There are two conflicting ethical tendencies within Gnosticism. The dominant one is elitism, special entitlement, or exceptionalism, in which those initiated into the sacred knowledge are the exceptions. People who accept the reality of The Great Chain of Being have a difficult time avoiding a supernaturally ordained hierarchy within the human collective. Fables of “the higher Being” make everyone accustomed to various forms authoritarian control, and to lack readiness to question authority in general. Gnostic dependence on secret troves of sacred knowledge makes initiates accept subordination to authorities claiming to guard the knowledge. Elitism also tends to condemn the majority of people as beyond help or unworthy of anything better than existing injustices, even sometimes declaring that misery somehow benefits the victims. However, there is a vestige of an opposing tendency arising from the gnostic conviction that all people have a divine or supernatural origin. That would tend to inspire a universality of respectful, loving, and nurturing treatment of others. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects exeptionalism and subordination, and bases ethics on the insight which must follow from authentic self-acquaintance, that all intelligences are individually transcendent creators of freedom within the unfreedom of brute actuality and the crippling dominance of macro-parasitic culture, and that, as such, all intelligences merit respect and nurture.

The conceptualization of time is also crucial to both, but the attitude to time, or the orientation toward time, is completely opposite in Blind-Spot philosophy as compared to Gnosticism. The gnostic obsession with eternity is absent from Blind-Spot philosophy, replaced by the love of freedom within time and only conceivable within time as a transcendent creation of individual intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the quest for eternity, infinity, or Being. In Blind-Spot philosophy the transcendence of individual intelligences is not achieved by recognizing a unity or identity with an omnipotent, universal, and eternal deity on-high, or with eternal Being, but instead is achieved in individually creating personal freedom by the use of the non-actualities of interior subjectivity, so creating freedom-in-time in the process of living a particular life.

Rebel Angels

The gnostic myth of the catastrophic rupture of human spirits from their primeval union with divinity and the fall of human spirits into the iron embrace of nature and time, is recognition of a self-alienation within conventional styles of living, a sense of being misrepresented, misevaluated, and diminished by the personal identities offered by the ambient culture and economy. The gnostic myth of the Fall from Grace is an allegory for the loss of recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of every individual. The sense of being punished for some primal fault or crime is misidentification of self as blameworthy because it revolts against the determinism of nature by spinning freedom in an unfree world: the rebellion of the angels. Escaping, transcending, the iron embrace of material nature is exactly what intelligences already do in the ordinary world by constructing the conditions of personal freedom, constructing teleological time from discretionary interior non-actualities.

The differences between Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy have consequences concerning social, economic, and political situations. There was a sense in Gnosticism that the world within time is irredeemably bad, justifying pessimism such that it would be pointless to invest any effort into improving the common predicaments of human life. Such quests as that for eternal Being or for the remote god beyond the hierarchy of astral demons, always provide an excuse to leave institutional injustices as they are. In Gnosticism the only hope of improvement is available to small groups of initiates, and that hope is of escape into the supernatural through arcane knowledge of invisible things and rigorous personal detachment from material nature. This is similar to systems of reality which identify salvation or resolutions of injustice only in an afterlife. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects both of those otherworldly fables. This world at hand, and only this, is the one in which the transcendence of intelligences gets to express itself. Catastrophe is not the same thing as tragedy. Tragedy is final but catastrophe can be overcome. It is true that the current state of human life generally is catastrophic, but that does not make it tragic. There is no fatal flaw in fundamental human nature, no universal taint from an original sin. Autonomous freedom is not a crime against anything. Being free is a crime only when it is exercised and practiced by reducing, restricting, or denying the freedom of other intelligences.

Some Sources

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Frances A. Yates (1899-1981), University Of Chicago Press (first published 1964. Midway reprint 1979. Paperback edition 1991), ISBN-10: 0226950077, ISBN-13: 978-0226950075.

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, written by (Dame) Frances Amelia Yates, Published by: Ark Paperbacks, an imprint of Routledge & Kegan Paul plc (1983) (first published 1979), ISBN 0-7448-0001-3.

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.

Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, written by Tobias Churton, Published by Ten Speed (2005), ISBN: 1594770352.

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy

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bottom-up reality, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, idealism, Immanuel Kant, intelligence, Johann Fichte, Martin Luther, materialism, Romanticism, subjectivity, the great chain of being

Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Reality

We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by the awesome vista of the starry night sky as experienced from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to the ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also by our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local parts of the vast environment, and on our bodily contact with its solid structures. Those are important but contingent and incidental circumstances of intelligence, and individuals are quite capable of maturing beyond their influence as complete models of reality. Conceiving the cosmos as the Great Chain of Being (which is always a top-down chain of command) is not a feature of human nature nor necessitated by human nature. It is circumstantial and cultural. What is far more important for a mature orientation within elemental reality is that human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of our individual subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. As long as we are caught in impressions of the Great Chain of Command, we are vulnerable to a certain sort of macro-parasitic fraud. Factions which assert their seniority, divine inspiration, natural, or even merely cultural superiority can take control of vast numbers of subordinated people by claiming to represent the great cosmic chain of command.

The Keystone of Romanticism

The nub of philosophical Romanticism is a clash between ancient and perennial top-down visions of cosmic reality (such as the Christian doctrine of an omnipotent God, or Plato’s ideal forms) and the local experience of individual creative freedom, as evident especially in artists and art. By the time of the early work of Johann Fichte (1762-1814) the line of philosophical thinking about individual freedom that went from ancient humanists (Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic) to Luther and then to Kant should have been profound enough, finally, to support and enlarge the egalitarian forces launched previously in the radial Enlightenment. The recognition of individual freedom should have been ready to subvert and overturn the age-old top-down conceptions which always alienate creative freedom from individuals. Instead, Romanticism actually subverted that line of progress and just revived Medieval fables of exceptionalism, hierarchy, and The Great Chain of Being. The position of Romanticism in the history of ideas reveals that the top-down orientation of all codified and institutional systems of reality has been the crucial barrier to progress, the tragedy of ideas.

From Novalis

Romanticism always includes a conviction that there are forces, or a reality, that is higher than (and very different from) the ordinary everyday work-a-day world, and that the higher ‘something’ is difficult to recognize or to perceive, if not invisible (occult). It includes a declaration of the active presence of a force of spirit (disembodied intelligence). (It can do this either seriously or ironically.) In romanticism lower is fragmented and higher is progressively more unified, all the way up to a total-oneness at the cosmic level. The higher reality is one spirit, free of causation (the magic idealism of Novalis), but not merely random. Events are the caprice of a discretionary intelligence. Dreams, after all, are free of internal causal chains but not free of personal relevance associations.

Can Rationalists Dream?

Romanticism was a reaction against a misrepresentation of Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics comment on rationalism as if it were a campaign for a total focus on humdrum practicality, utility, and efficiency in all human affairs. In fact, the radical Enlightenment rationalists were campaigning for rationality as a way to improve dramatically the claim to autonomy and dignity of every individual. Rationality was their shield for every individual against the established and oppressive ideology of a universal taint in human nature itself, original sin, which benefits from authoritarian control. Efficiency and utility are top-down administrative and economic ideas which were quite foreign to radical Enlightenment philosophers, who were riding the coat-tails of the new cultural wave of scientific ideas with the hope of achieving their own social, political, and cultural improvements. Spinoza and his interpreters were rationalists and not romantics, and yet conceived the Enlightenment. Rationalists dreamed of an equal society in which all people would have rights and freedoms in a bottom-up political system operating to improve the lives of all. That is their radicalism. They embraced the scientific metaphysics of materialism as a potentially bottom-up vision of reality in opposition to Christian spiritualism, which was profoundly influenced by Plato’s idealism and which justified authoritarian control as divine command.

Failing to recognize that Enlightenment rationalism’s main intent and effect was to empower and enhance the dignity of individuals universally, romantics saw in rationalism only disenchantment, formalism, the tyranny of brute material actuality and determinism, including “laws of thought”. Searching for reasons to reject such things, romantic philosophers were inspired by the early work of Johann Fichte which places emphasis on the creativity of individual subjectivity, the personal “I”. Fichte created his innovation out of an insistence on making Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Fichte’s entry point into philosophy) consistent by eliminating the idea of an ultimate external reality, an objective “thing-in-itself”. To Fichte’s way of thinking there was no reason, on Kant’s own basic principles, for supposing that there was a thing-in-itself, although the thing-in-itself was apparently crucial for Kant’s overall vision. In the absence of acquaintance with a thing-in-itself the individual subjective “I” must perform a creative act in which it “posits” (conjectures, pretends, considers, day-dreams) its entire world, including itself.

Note on Idealism

Romanticism is an idealism, since the most fundamental character of the cosmos, on this view, is intelligence. Idealism comes from recognition of the interiority of intelligence (discretionary non-actualities), in contrast to materialism, which rejects such interiority, and restricts existence (ontology) exclusively to what is exterior to intelligence, the strict actualities of physics, pre-determined, measurable, nature. So any philosophical idealism is some model of the interiority of intelligence, and a recognition of interiority of intelligences as elemental or non-reducible. Recognizing the interiority of intelligence gives any position an aspect of idealism.

Kant vs Fichte: A Bottom-Up Re-Conceptualization

Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (noumena) retained the old top-down orientation, in spite of his recognition of individual freedom. His main emphasis was on scientific knowledge, on the importance of, and difficulty of, achieving acquaintance with what was external to and vastly more elemental than individual intelligence. However, Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. (The atomic materialism of Democritus is another contender, as suggested above, and so is Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was, of course, Christian, which is an assertion of a top-down supernatural model of reality. More on this later.) The main importance of Fichte’s vision is his unprecedented re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Fichte.

Fichte and Luther: The Personal Power to Posit a Reality

Fichte’s concept of subjective interiority, the personal “I”, in its creative act of “positing” itself and the cosmos, is doing something comparable to Luther’s more Stoic and more strictly personal “leap of faith”. Both are subjective and deliberate acts of creativity going beyond acts which can be guided completely by previously acquired knowledge, direct acquaintance, or rational calculations. Both Fichte’s and Luther’s creative acts are assertions of a particular intelligence, acts of self-declaration, self-definition, or self-creation, with both the intent and effect of projecting the peculiar power and freedom of that intelligence. Both acts are projections outward into nature and culture of inwardness, of the freedom of an intelligence. However, Fichte’s idea of a subjectivity “positing” dreams leaps well beyond the sort of creativity required by Luther’s leap of faith. There is still a leap, an assertion and a projection of the freedom of an intelligence, but in Fichte’s conception the projection has far more shape, content, and self-sufficiency. It is not just Luther’s act of embracing or assenting to reports of a divine plan supposedly revealed to some distant source and passed along. Fichte’s subjectivity is its own transcendent source. The freedom of Fichte’s subjectivity is richer by far than Luther’s at the same time as being rooted solidly in Luther’s vision. That is the basis for claiming that, in spite of problems, early Romanticism represents a philosophical advance in conceiving subjectivity and its creative freedom.

For the “I” to posit a world, as it does according to Fichte, is not to create an actual world (which would be a thing-in-itself) but rather to create a subjective non-actuality, interior to a particular intelligence (with the unbounded malleability or mutability of such interiority). Romantic philosophers recognized the difference between objective actuality (thing-in-itself) and subjective non-actuality, and they recognized that culture is mainly a construct of non-actuality, that is, orientations which are internal to individual subjectivities. However, they could not accept that individual subjective non-actuality is the matrix of real creative freedom. What prevented them from recognizing that truth of freedom was their (romantic) inability to get past the age-old top-down conception of reality. Anything profoundly original had to come from “on-high” somehow. So the problem for romantics was how to reconcile their top-down conception of reality with their subjective idealism. The easiest way out is to universalize and unify subjectivity and posit a single top-down omnipotent subjectivity, thus to conceive everything as a play of ideas in that divine subjectivity, and that is pretty much what romantic philosophers did. Considering this from another perspective, the problem with dismissing the thing-in-itself is that it seems to license dismissal of other-intelligences-in-themselves also. That would leave a single absolute subjectivity as the entirety of existence, and, in fact, that seems to be the way Fichte’s thinking developed. Such an absolute subjectivity or intelligence is a variant of the concept of God.

Romanticism began with an assertion of individual freedom by Fichte, who picked up and developed the radical Enlightenment thread of empowering and enhancing individuals in his early work on the all-positing I. The Fichtean “I” is the reality of freedom. That in itself is congruent with Enlightenment rationalism up to a point, but of course it cannot accept materialism and determinism as conceived by Spinoza and his fans. So, even though the Romantics were reacting against (a misrepresentation of) Enlightenment rationalism, they were also building on the main feature of that rationalism, up to a point.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, published by State University of New York Press (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3272-6.

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

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

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.

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.

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature

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anarchism, culture, freedom, law, left-wing politics, sovereignty, the great chain of being, Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described his imagined ‘state of nature’ as a vicious anarchy that was a continuous war of all against all, and Hobbes’ vision has become the default or common idea of anarchism. Hobbes did not recognize that the humans of his vision, who behave as missiles of (aggressive) self-gratification, are under the influence of a certain culture, a culture of human macro-parasitism perfected by nomadic animal herders in very ancient times and soon enough transferred to conquered human communities. A suitable name for that macro-parasitic culture would be ‘Aryan masculinity’ from the most famous historical group of conquering herders out of the great Eurasian steppes (‘Aryan(s)’ means ‘lord(s)’*). When there are lords, or better, barons, expressing the culture of Aryan masculinity there are always human livestock, underling workers forced into servitude to the barons. Since that is a culture and not a racial trait (nor inherent to human nature), the practitioners are long past being visibly Aryan or anything else in particular. The cultural poisoning from Aryan masculinity ( “to the victor belong the spoils”, glorification of living from top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism) is even now pervasive and normalized, and was so already in Hobbes’ time, which accounts for his (and the previous Christian) view of human nature. The war of all against all is the concept of ‘anarchy’ from within the cultural matrix of Aryan masculinity. If the human population consisted entirely of Aryan-cultured males, each expressing his alpha-trophy-looting will-to-power impulses, then indeed the human condition would tend toward a war of all against all.

Law

When the Aryan-cultured barons got around to attempting to limit their own lethality among themselves, they constructed a personified law by making a person into law, a sovereign, constituting the nucleus of a single Aryan superman on a massive collective scale. They did it by designating the most dominant among them as sovereign leader and then all aligning as projections and extensions of that person. The alignment was primarily military, an organization of aggressive violence, with all sovereign operations conceived as variants of the military organization and spirit. The collective beast so created, which Hobbes called Leviathan, a sovereign-owned-and-operated collective (and which we still endure today) is a mammoth replica of the individual Aryan male driven by competitive ambitions, with a brittle pride (honour) quick to take offence at disrespect, insubordinate autonomy, or resistance; its acquisitive appetites engorged by culture to smother universal empathy and nurturing impulses generally. Devotees of the macro-parasitic culture are persuaded to put up with some personal limitations within the social beast Leviathan because each one can participate in the institutional projection of a massive will-to-power and feel himself enlarged by the conquests and sparkly trophies of his sovereign Leviathan, a share of those trophies becoming personal rewards for devoted loyalty. The most commonly recognized form of Leviathan is the sovereign state, originally some form of monarchy, but other forms are common and can include corporations, crime families, and organized religions, as well as less formal cultural associations or communities of ethos such as organized class consciousness.

The father-figure sovereign, as sovereign, was mythologized as a redeeming force, seeming to lift individuals out of their selfishness, but in fact just absorbing them into a larger selfishness. Rejection of that kind of sovereignty, lordship, and hierarchy is the essence of the egalitarian political left-wing, but rejection of Aryan-type or Leviathan sovereignty, in which the body social is an institutionalized Aryan male on a gigantic scale, is not promotion of war of all against all. Instead, it is promotion of a richer understanding of individual creative intelligence, lacking the top-down idea that humans as individuals need to be redeemed or saved by a herder of some kind, inherently in inescapable debt, owing everything to the higher power which was able to herd them (obvious Aryan propaganda).

The Big Lie of the Macro-Parasite Faction

Whenever there is an authoritarian form of society, a chain-of-command society with a top-down structure of power, it is a legacy of the culture of Aryan masculinity which glorifies macro-parasitism. The grand strategy of the macro-parasitic patriarchy is to convince everyone that Aryan masculinity is the inevitable essence of human nature. “Yes, we all contain evil, but we are the same as everybody, just doing what anyone does when they can, because that is human nature. We need a higher power to press us to do somewhat better.” (The real essence of “human nature”, or rather human individuality, is living in time, which is to say, freedom. Culture has the effect of masking the creative freedom of individuals.) As long as the Aryan view of human nature is accepted, then some authoritarian sovereignty, such as the one described by Hobbes, is necessary for the most basic security of person. However, Aryan masculinity is not inevitable human nature, and insisting that it is is the Big Lie, the Big Ignoble Lie, of the macro-parasite faction. Fear of philosophical thinking is built into the culture of that faction because a philosophical ‘phenomenology of innocence’ refutes the lie and enables a more accurate recognition of human individuality. Another way of saying this might be be to say that the strategy of the macro-parasitic faction is to convince everyone that there is a determinate human nature within a determinate Great Chain of Command (Being), whereas a personally conducted phenomenology of innocence reveals freedom.

* Indian Thought and its Development, written by Albert Schweitzer, translated from German by Mrs. Charles E.B. Russell, published by Henry Holt and Company Inc. (1936). See page 20.

Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Subjectivity

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critical thinking, eternity, freedom, identity politics, metaphysics, Philosophy of Time, politics, transcendence

The Politics of Eternity

There is a tradition in metaphysical philosophy of defining transcendence or ultimate reality by a special relationship to time. Specifically, the transcendent or metaphysical is supposed to be what is eternal, with a special mode of being which is outside of time. That tradition expresses the assumption that there is something deficient and derivative about change, about becoming, things that are ephemeral, things that eventually transform into something different, and about time itself. It was thought that temporary presences, continually passing away and being replaced by other temporary presences (including the world-within-time), could not be real as such, but must be a kind of illusion explainable as effects, creations, expressions, or distortions of some other mode of Being which is eternally the same and so perfectly real. Supposedly, only the perfectly real could be the ultimate ground or cause of the transitory things of ordinary experience. For ancient philosophers, identifying the eternal metaphysical source of changing appearances would be knowledge properly so-called, since only eternal objects can be objects of genuine knowledge or reliable references of names, which they thought necessary to make language meaningful. (Behind that is an idea of discovering the ultimate unity of language, thought, and objective reality.) Possibly it was the shock and fear of death approaching, of personal not-being, that inspired this fascination with eternity. Possibly it seemed that achieving knowledge of eternal Being would overcome the apparent inevitability of death and so achieve a kind of immortality.

However, that ancient philosophical reverence for eternity is peculiar, perverse, and self-defeating. If anything is well and truly dead it is eternity. Eternity is not immortality. The kind of life that is definitive of human individuals is impossible without change and becoming. Living intelligence is devoted to an evasion of finality or completeness, an evasion of being finished and forever the same. The crucial point, though, is that this assumption of the superiority and priority of eternity or Being immediately sets up a top-down structure of reality and places ordinary life and experience in a disadvantaged or deficient position. It projects a parent-child hierarchy onto the cosmos at large, with a senior layer in control of a junior layer. It denigrates the life of human intelligence and especially the life of individual intelligence which is so clearly ever-changing when flourishing, and flourishing only ephemerally. That conception of a hierarchical structuring of reality at the largest scale has social and political consequences, because there are cultural factions of humans who mimic the structure in that fable of metaphysics and use an association with symbols of eternity such as monumental architecture, art, and institutional scale and stability to support their claims of superiority to, authority over, and ownership of the lives of ordinary individuals.

The top-down structure of reality codified in the metaphysics of eternity is still current and foundational in conceptions of modern science. Although things move and grow and die and decay in the objective world, scientists proceed with the identification of eternal natural laws, mathematical patterns, or underlying elements that do not change, eternal foundations within the objective world through which change is reducible to permanent formulae. So the objective world, to which in science anything and everything reduces, can be made, finally, to reveal the truths of eternity. If the individual life of intelligence is to be rescued from that ancient philosophical perversion, then it should be the freedom of a life in time rather than eternity which is recognized as transcendent. When freedom, instead of eternity, is identified as transcendent, then the conceptualization of reality as a whole becomes dramatically different and presents us with a bottom-up structure.

There are many culturally ingrained suggestions that we are not competent to confront profound issues, that we should accept authorized teachings, a recognized creed, a formula, given us by authorities of our culture, but those suggestions reveal only a culture constructed to be disempowering. Authoritative declarations of individual incompetence are just reprints of Christendom’s fable of original sin. One form of warning away from questions of transcendence is something like: transcendence is so remote from common experience that it can’t be encountered and critiqued by people in general. However, it turns out that common experience is full of the transcendence constituted by teleological time, which is not remote in the least. In a re-conceptualized bottom-up system of reality, everything that is supernatural, metaphysical, and transcendent gets restored from cosmic objectivity to individual subjectivity, where it was and is actually experienced in the first place. Some find it difficult to let go of parental deity and sovereignty, but recognizing those as bogus does nothing like plunging us into an abyss of meaningless chaos. We can deal with this re-conceptualization of transcendence, along with a thorough re-conceptualization of nature and community. Critical thinking is strongest when applied to a whole system of reality, starting with the most revered and supernatural features, and weakest when applied piecemeal to individual claims and assertions.

Time, Transcendence, and Brute Actuality

Individual freedom is what is transcendent in bottom-up metaphysics, and freedom is exactly the opposite of eternity, it is having time, as intelligence does and the voice of intelligence does, and as nature does not. All physical things are strict actualities, and in nature this instant of brute actuality specifically and categorically excludes the existence of all other instants. Time reveals very little about nature but a great deal about intelligence. Time, as experienced in ordinary life with plans and expectations (teleology) and an increasingly complicated and remote past, is a personal construct of non-actualities. All expectations and intentions are non-actualities which encounter actuality at some point (are always pointed or aimed at doing so) and in doing so accumulate an increasingly rich and enduring orientation-past structured of non-actualities. Memories are points or positions of re-orientation. Time is an illusion but not a delusion. Rather, it is a magnificent non-actuality constructed and deployed in acts of an intelligence (builder and deployer of non-actualities) to be free in the world, to live and keep personal particularity indefinite, incomplete, or open. Any intelligence needs non-actualities (interior to its orientation) to survive as a living being in the world. Non-actualities are meta-physical, which is to say, they are not part of determinate nature. A crucial point is that there is no justification for exteriorizing what is meta-physical, for alienating what is non-actual from the interior orientation of individual intelligences.

There are a couple of crucial things that make bottom-up metaphysics distinct from the top-down variety, although what is transcendent is still defined by a special relationship to time. Individual freedom can’t claim to be the cause of nature at large or of everything that exists. Bottom-up reality is a pluralist instead of a monist reality. The bottom (the freedom of individual subjects-in-time) of bottom-up metaphysics is still outside physics because it is not pre-determinable in terms of universal laws or any other universals. The particularity of subjects-in-time is always indefinite because they continuously re-creating themselves merely by continuing to live. However this creative power is not omnipotent, universal, or unitary. Subjectivity is limited, localized, embodied, ephemeral, individual, and plural.

Most systems of reality include a large supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, you have a top-down system. However, attempts to describe naked actuality at large, to go beyond common objects-as-experienced in an effort to describe universal nature or what would exist if there were no embodied intelligences or their cultures, are always based on speculation, wild guesses and imaginings, hopes and fears, blatant and bogus objectification (projection) of subjectivity. As soon as you depart from the immediate presences which are the non-actualities (such as expectations and intentions) constructed and deployed by yourself or some other embodied intelligence, you create a delusional fable by objectifying features that make sense only within the orientation construct of a particular intelligence functioning and carrying on a life in the world. A person does not need to speculate about matters of direct acquaintance.

There is a distinction to be emphasized between the reality of individual intelligences and the “reality” of abstract ideas and categories constructed by intelligences in order to orient ourselves in the world of actuality. Ideas, classes, and categories are all non-actualities which have their being only in the interior orientation of individual intelligences. William of Ockham (Ockham’s razor) was correct that abstractions are all subjective non-actualities. He was on the bottom-up side of a Medieval debate on this issue, the top-down side asserting that “universals” were objective actualities, with a reality prior to and independently of ordinary intelligences. Abstractions are always ideas, which is to say, interior creations of an ordinary embodied intelligence, and, as such, non-actualities. When presented as subsisting independently of ordinary intelligences, such things are being illegitimately objectified, projected or exteriorized, sorted into the wrong category. This applies also to numbers, quantities, measurability, and comparability. Such non-actualities have the character of dreams, but that does not mean they are trivial or frivolous in any sense. They are crucial acts of intelligences constructing their freedom.

Bottom-Up Self-Acquaintance

The goal in contemplating bottom-up metaphysics is acquaintance with personal identity as a particular, autonomous, and spontaneous creator and builder of effective non-actualities, of completely personal states of orientation. Coming to that acquaintance requires a re-conceptualization (partly a de-conceptualization) of the standard modern system of reality, which normally guides what we expect and will accept in perception and experience. You become acquainted with the free creative self by focusing on the distinction between actuality and non-actuality in your own experience, and then the specific importance and role of non-actualities in personal orientation and freedom, all of which is clearly re-thinking an elemental level of personal experience. Although that consciousness is reached by a thinking process, it isn’t the conclusion of an argument. It isn’t a proposition but a direct experience, an encounter, a self-acquaintance of the questioning in your own gaze. Freedom isn’t a proposition but instead is personal orientation, teleological time itself. Of course self-directed reorientation is teleological within the framework of being in a life, crucially indeterminate and impossible without being built laboriously along guidelines of satisfaction to intelligence: sustainability, gratification, playfulness, making an accumulating mark, and interconnectedness with other intelligences.

Transcendent Self-Possession

There is here a special sense of self-directed re-orientation, based on bottom-up self-identification, as opposed to the top-down identities assigned by ambient society, stipulated in terms of cultural, religious, and economic categories from on-high, accompanied by claims of ownership from on-high. Thinking philosophically is acting on the determination never to give away the right to define who you are. As the craft of autonomous self-acquaintance, philosophy is the beginning and foundation of bottom-up political force. Any form of being owned is slavery, by definition and in practice. Since the creative questioning you encounter is essentially free, it can’t be the property of, can’t be owned by, anything, and this bottom-up self-identification is a transcendent self-possession. There isn’t anything deficient about the life-in-time of individual intelligences. Instead, that is exactly where transcendence flourishes.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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bottom-up politics, community, creativity, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, individuality, intelligence, nature, philosophy, religion, science, subjectivity

Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

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

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

Embodiment and Two Spiritual Vulnerabilities

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New

Bottom-Up Metaphysics