Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchy, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, Freud, intelligence, nature, philosophy, Plato, reality, sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes

Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Equality, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power

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aristocracy, civilization, class, culture, History, human parasitism, oppression, politics

The Malice of Civilization

Human-on-human parasitism is not something civilization strives to overcome, not some accidental or unanticipated by-product of the social and political institutions called civilization, but rather is the entire intent and matrix of, the fundamental goal and reason for, the arrangements of civilization. Political and economic arrangements originated historically in the violent coercion of human communities by certain human factions determined to enjoy the benefits of parasites by means of that coercion. History reveals a human community divided between parasite factions and the human masses they prey upon. The most obvious lesson from history is the global triumph and entrenchment of a culture supporting top-down human-on-human parasites. It isn’t human nature which preserves the common injustices which constitute parasitism, but rather a specific dominant, pervasive, and institutionalized culture dependent on inequality and subordination, a culture which could be called will-to-power masculinity. For oppressions of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or religion (or atheism), it isn’t human nature that has to be confronted and somehow overcome, but the parasite faction’s culture (a “unified field theory” of oppression). What is waiting for everyone riding the social mobility bus north into the corporate and investor class is benefits from the practices of parasites.

A clear view of the malicious culture at the heart of civilization can be found in The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt*, in which a close study of medieval chronicles shows the values and patterns of perception characteristic of European aristocracy, the cultural faction pioneering economic and sovereign power as it still exists, forming institutions of sovereignty, nationality, war, high culture, and wealth distribution that still function throughout the modern cultural system. It is the ethos of an absolute and unending quest for splendour of personal reputation, the culture of manly honour/ profit that still plagues humanity in many forms. Those aristocrat knight/ barons and their literate intelligentsia took themselves (barons) to be models of human nature at its purest, which is to say devoid of and contemptuous of empathy. They also conceived their Christian deity as very much like themselves and as such the source and proof of their superiority. Something that Brandt does not say, but which is implicit in his observations, is that those medieval barons (armed men on horses) were consolidating a way of living as human parasites on many levels. They were parasites on the females of their own class (for their reproductive and nurturing labour), on people outside their class working to create the necessities of sustainable lives, and most immediately on animals, the horses that were forced to carry them and the dogs that did their hunting, for example. The barons acquired ownership of property of all kinds by lethal assault, and refined a culture which glorified their looting. Brandt refers vaguely to the fading of their culture, sometimes called feudal chivalry, but it cannot be doubted seriously that there is a direct line of cultural descent, a single ethos, extending from knight/ barons in the chronicles studied by Brandt to contemporary crime families, corporations (such as investment banks), and governments (especially in their military culture, covert activities, and ‘foreign’ relations), all of which have the means of evading law and so the immunity to act out patterns of behaviour which channel the culture of the barons. The households of barons were organizational embryos of the governments of modern sovereign states, of corporations, and of crime families; and their personal ethos remains the cultural ideal of capitalism and masculinity generally.

Culture is Strategic Propaganda

In their fetish for display, ornamented decoration, pageantry, ceremony, and elaborate entertainment the barons inaugurated the models of high culture and fine art which still endure. The people who can afford to consume the work of artists on a moderate to large scale, to employ artists and to commission particular works, are royals, aristocrats, capitalists and their wealth organizers, princes of the Church, and people in power. When they have their portraits made or commission architecture and monuments, the intent is to idealize, glorify, and immortalize themselves, their culture, and the whole parasitic system of power and wealth they represent. Works of art in that context are intended to overpower and bedazzle, to halt critical thinking by invoking emotional currents with the specious beauty of an image or an impression. Of overriding importance for fine art in the capitalist economic system is that it is a branch of the finance/ investment industry, a luxury goods trade dealing in trophy items promoted as so rare, unpredictable, and impressive that they become an investment hedge for surplus wealth. Of course individual creators are capable of removing their creative process from that superstructure of art culture, but in no case are the artifacts produced important enough, neither individually nor in sum total, to count as justifications for, or legitimizing achievements of, parasitic culture and practice.

The coercion practiced by parasite factions has been normalized through efforts of that faction’s intelligentsia to construct benign explanations and justifications for it, normally by appealing to an omnipotent divine intelligence, to “justify the ways of God to man” (John Milton, Paradise Lost). Any religious culture featuring omnipotent cosmic forces serves instantly to justify whatever happens to exist. Intellectual work, including philosophy, is always written in a cultural context controlled by top-down human-on-human parasites, and intellectuals normally belong to, or owe their livelihood to, the parasite faction, and like everyone have to contend with the coercion of ambient parasites. In that context many philosophers devote themselves to an attempt to justify, even sanctify, existing institutions and avoid thinking beyond the belief system which supports inequalities of wealth and power. The fact that Aristotle invented justifications for slavery, for example, illustrates the longstanding effort by philosophers to conceive grounds of morality other than empathy, so that universal equality could be avoided and the brutality of sovereign states and the baronial classes which operate them could evade a true moral evaluation.

So, not only are the parasites diverting benefits disproportionately to themselves, but, far more importantly, by decisive influence on both high culture and popular culture, including religions, art, entertainment, media of advertising and journalism, and intellectual culture, they arrange messaging to convince everyone that their arrangements are inevitable, pre-determined by higher powers, by God or nature, the best of all possible worlds. In aid of that, there is cultural support for the assumption that individuals are not competent to identify and think about this issue, that we do best keeping a narrowly practical focus, earning and consuming as much as we can manage, refreshing ourselves with cultural entertainments and doing our utmost to ride the social mobility bus up, changing nothing but our personal circumstances. The idea of human equality has such a difficult time being broadly understood and embraced because the entire culture of institutionalized sovereign states and their economic organization is founded on top-down human-on-human parasitism constantly declaring justifications for itself.

*The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt, published by Schocken Books (1973), ISBN 0-8052-0408-3.

Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Nature

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determinism, drives, freedom, intelligence, motivation, nature, philosophy, questions, science, Thomas C. McEvilley

It has been normal in philosophy and science for human motivation and behaviour to be conceived and explained in terms of supra-individual forces, sometimes called drives. Drives are a kind of compulsion, often only semi-conscious or even unconscious. Compulsions for food, sex, shiny baubles, or power are common examples. Drives are impersonal and generic, even though, as in Plato’s conception of a three-part subjectivity (consisting of appetites, competitive spirit, and contemplative (passive) rationality) individuals display a distinct personal prominence of some over others. In any case, motivating drives are not creations of an individual intelligence, but instead derive from something outside and prior to the individual. In modern culture, such appetites or desires are assumed to derive from biological structures, to be ‘hard wired’ and so manifestations of a general human nature which is ultimately inseparable from the rest of what might be called the laws of nature. There are debates about a hierarchy of drives, about which is more powerful, the drive for pleasure, for power (the will to power), or for meaning (echoing Plato’s three-part structure). Drives for power or meaning are less plausibly derived from simple biological mechanisms, but they have been interpreted as expressing some physically based compulsion toward general self-interest (more or less rational), self-gratification, self-preservation, or self-advantage. In that vision, intelligence or rationality is conceived as a biological mediating mechanism translating the primordial compulsion into actions adjusted to a particular environment.

The idea that human behaviour and motivation are explainable in terms of impersonal compulsions comes from visions of determinism, usually materialist or economic determinism, which is to say, conceptual systems which ignore or reject profound individual freedom. The impulse of determinists is to complete a picture of the total world in terms of pre-determined laws of motion, and so human motivation and behaviour have to be kept as simple as possible to be fitted into that picture. However, there is a clash, a mis-match or discontinuity, between the conception of human behaviour as determined by impersonal drives, and the identification of humans as performers of certain acts of thinking, such as a kind of philosophical thinking. For example, it was a basic understanding of the nature of philosophy, as early as the Iron Age, that it was individual intelligence contemplating its own interiority. That historical observation is documented in The Shape of Ancient Thought*, by Thomas C. McEvilley, most explicitly in the chapters on Plotinus, especially starting around page 558. Ordinary knowledge comes from an outward gaze (science), but ultimate knowledge is the same as profound self-knowledge and comes from thinking inwardness. The subsection “Knowing the One for Plotinus” (p. 560) includes references to Aristotle’s idea of “thought thinking itself”. Identification of that philosophical act as characteristic of human individuals, an inclination to explore self-identification in the way required by that conception of philosophy, reveals humans as a sort of entity that can and does contemplate and question its own self-identification, from a basic curiosity.

That clash highlights the need for a paradigm shift in human self-identification: the difference between thinking of behaviour and motivation in terms of drives (instinctive, biological, or metaphysical) as conceived by Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Freud; as opposed to conceiving behaviour and motivation in terms of an individual’s questions that set bearings for personal orientation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness” that illustrates the difference. Roughly, any person will learn best what he or she is already wondering about from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. The pre-linguistic nature of curiosity, wonder, or questioning means that it includes features that are often semi-conscious or sporadically conscious. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be, but can be re-awakened or re-discovered. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Doubt is an instance of this king of wondering, and doubt is often non-linguistic and distinctly individual, definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Each person’s wondering or questioning process could be seen as a peculiar creative force that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia. Questions are creations of a particular intelligence, and intelligence is the matrix of questions, of wonder, curiosity, a particularity of exploration. Having a question, an orientation that is sensed as peculiarly incomplete and so searching for something more or less indefinite but not entirely out-of-reach, is already the realization of freedom and self-direction. To have a question or a doubt is already to act autonomously.

* 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.

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture, empathy, Enlightenment, freedom, innocence, intelligence, nature, self-possession, teleology, time

The reason for the seventeenth and eighteenth century efforts at Enlightenment was to unseat the entrenched top-down human-on-human parasites plaguing Old Regime society. Those parasites were disguising themselves as avatars (monarchy, aristocracy, and Church hierarchies) of a fictitious Supreme Parent (projections of the universally imprinted parent), and in that guise systematically curtailing the liberty, initiative, individuality, and material prosperity of the great mass of the population, with the intent to channel disproportionate wealth and privilege to themselves. The purpose of the Enlightenment movement was to improve the conditions of human life generally by dismantling the effects, material, cultural, and psychological, of top-down human-on-human parasites.

Orientation from Strict Rationality or Intelligence

In the work of Spinoza, one of the founding visionaries of the Enlightenment, there is a quite Stoic identification of philosophical thinking with strict rationality, such that a person is thinking philosophically to the extent that their thinking goes entirely beyond the influence of traditions, habits, imitations, the talk going around, commonly accepted assumptions, fads and fashions, the declarations of authorities, or any other cultural givens and influences, not to mention personal guesses and fantasies possibly expressing wishes and fears, and instead proceeds entirely on the basis of clear evidence and mathematical (geometrical-logical) rationality. On that view, l’esprit philosophique is a dedication to thinking rationally and to building a general orientation by a consistent practice of thinking rationally.

In his lecture series about Pre-Platonic philosophers*, Nietzsche focused on the novel kinds of persona constructed and projected by individual philosophers in their philosophical presentations. Spinoza’s strictly rational philosophical person belongs in that line of thinking. To take that line to a conclusion, it can be said that when any sort of person thinks philosophically about issues, they do so entirely as an intelligence. If a person presents claims from thinking as a representative of a particular race, gender, body type, social stratum, ethnicity, religion, profession, or even age, then those claims are limited, culturally biased, parochial, and special, in a way that philosophy needn’t be and shouldn’t be. To think philosophically is to act strictly as an intelligence, but philosophy as such is not the only way to express personal existence as intelligence. Acting creatively from any personal creative process also qualifies. So, to think philosophically in the tradition of Spinoza is to think from a self-identification as pre-cultural (innocent) intelligence.

*The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated from German and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Greg Whitlock, Published by: Urbana, University of Illinois Press. (2001), ISBN: 0252025598. See page 58.

In present circumstances, just as in the Old Regime era, the intent in developing a philosophical consciousness, a practical identification of personal subjectivity as innocent intelligence, is to re-model ordinary culture-influenced consciousness to remove the internal “receptors” that give human parasites the opportunities they need to trigger subordination and the whole system of false values that goes with it, and so to gradually dislodge the current collective of top-down human-on-human parasites, and eventually discredit the culture of parasitic will-to-power masculinity permanently. Getting beyond every vestige of the imprinted parent, probably the most important trigger of subordination, is an aspect of recognizing both personal freedom and the fundamental equality of intelligences.

This is not a move in an endless cultural evolution from one form to another, not a change of fashion resulting from some fundamental instability, dialectic, or taste for novelty in nature or human nature. There is a destination, an end point of this process, which might be described as the popular and widespread achievement of a philosophical consciousness, beyond all vestiges of the imprinted parent and the cultural tags of subordination.

Time is the Form of Freedom

Notwithstanding the spectacular advances of science and technological engineering, the enduring relevance of philosophy derives from its specific orientation to the questioning in any human gaze, and especially to freedom in that individual gaze. Without the question, there is no gaze, no perception, no knowledge. The freedom in that questioning is inseparable from teleology, from futurity, the construction of time. Time is not a substance, nor substantial in any way. No theory of substance, not even the single substance of Parmenides or Spinoza, will help with understanding time or teleology, because teleology is a construct of what does not exist. Time is interior to each individual questioning gaze, and in fact, time is nothing but the question in the gaze. Time is not a dimension of objects (or of nature) except insofar as objects are identified by an intelligence in its building a life.

Empiricism, a strong feature of Spinoza’s vision, depicts an impossibly passive intelligence, and does its best to diminish and marginalize the questioning in the individual gaze, attempting to construe knowledge as if it were entirely a product of sensations. Empiricist knowledge, on that view, is merely an effect of non-intelligent givens, of natural causes. However, contrary to strict empiricism, before an intelligence reacts to its surroundings, or even receives effects, it questions, reaches, searches, selects, and makes some kind of sense of what it finds. There is always an indispensable contribution to what is perceived made by the perceiver. Some conceptual form or sense must be applied to givens, and such conceptual form is a creation of intelligence and is not a sensory given. (That is a version of Kantian idealism, an interpretation of rationalism.)

Nature Excludes Teleology (Freedom)

It would be difficult for anyone to disagree that there are events in the world, such as one’s own deliberate actions, which can be understood properly only as teleological, the results of purpose, aspiration, intent, or the prior conception of future goals in the context of building a life. Yet it is also evident that not all events are teleological. Nature is indeed a completely non-teleological realm. There is no teleology in strictly natural processes, in the playing out of natural laws in the cosmos as a whole or at a local level. However, since we began by recognizing teleological events, that we create them, it is difficult to avoid envisioning a system of two different but interacting sets of events, one of which consists of the deliberate actions of humans or generally intelligent beings. There is nature and additionally a complex category of teleological non-nature. Teleology is temporality, futurity. Orientation toward a future constructed of intelligently conceived but strictly non-actual possibilities, negations, and estimated probabilities is the framework of freedom. The category of non-nature includes both the population of individual (embodied) intelligences about whom it makes sense to talk about teleological freedom, and the cultures which that population has created. Culture is the creation of the population of individual embodied intelligences engaging with one another exterior to exterior, making use of nature to do so. However, the longstanding success of certain factions of humans at being parasites on other humans, and in that effort constructing culture as a mechanism of inequality in power and control, makes culture inextricably coercive, which is to say, political.

Culture as a Parasitic Weapon of Mass Disempowerment

It is not difficult to see how religion, managed by a faction with large-scale parasitic intent, works as mass disempowerment. An organization or person can play on the pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, some parental-type authority and the superstitious expression of that conditioning in beliefs about all-powerful free-floating parental-type spirits such as a father-god in the sky. Such an organization or person only has to pull off a convincingly theatrical assertion of receiving divine revelations to establish themselves as the chosen prophet, the messenger, the instrument of the invisible Supreme Parent, and suddenly the mass of believers is at their mercy. The Old Regime parasite factions had succeeded in contaminating western culture with superstitious myths of omnipotent disembodied avatars of the Supreme Parent, an ideology which allowed them to carry on brutal parasitism with nearly complete impunity. It is crucial that they based their legitimacy on metaphysics, the metaphysical claim of an omnipotent disembodied super-intelligence, because it turned out that a more plausible metaphysics (and only that) could reveal the falseness of their claim to legitimacy. That was and still is a stunningly surprising vulnerability in the operating of human parasites. Human parasites always appeal to metaphysics, such as cosmic intelligences or materialist determinism, to proclaim the ultimate necessity of human subordination and hierarchy, the institutionalization of parent-child type inequality; and so metaphysics is the first and crucial place they must and can be discredited. That is the enduring relevance of metaphysics. Only a philosophical consciousness (l’esprit philosophique as it was named in the eighteenth century) as distinct from a consciousness projecting and accepting Great Parent avatars of the internally imprinted parent, can think beyond the myths of power entrenched within prevailing culture. A philosophical consciousness implies bottom-up rather than top-down access to reality in the power of critical and creative thinking inherent universally in individual teleology.

So consider, what metaphysics would illuminate the conditions for general human happiness and well being? What is the metaphysics of universal human rights, democratic equality, and individual freedom of thought and expression? In other words, what metaphysics would discredit and remove from the great mass of humanity the burden of top-down human-on-human parasites? The Enlightenment idea of a philosophical consciousness was indistinguishable from the emerging scientific consciousness in which disembodied teleology and parent-type omnipotent teleology were removed completely. Spinoza’s materialism was understood to discredit the pretensions of reigning violent families to be legitimized by divine determination of human affairs because with materialism there could be no divinity distinct from determinate nature to intervene in human affairs. In the vacuum left by the destruction of that traditional authority, the importance of every person as a rational being, and the general will of the collective of all people, emerged as the only plausible foundation of authority. The power of individual rationality was combined with the consequences of materialism for myths of the great unthinkable parent. That was l’esprit philosophique emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The same pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, parental-type authority still exists in mostly unidentified obscurity. The old father god is still widely taken for granted and, even without that superstition, the idea of parental-type sovereignty of the state is still largely unquestioned, as is hierarchical subordination generally, structured by competitions for recognition, rewards, and upward advancement for those proven most pleasing in the calculating gaze of some great parent avatar. The competition to reach the top in business organizations or professions has a semi-unconscious, unstated, informal, agenda. Just below the surface, the competition is about projecting a sustained impression of masculinity, a culturally stipulated masculinity as the systematic invulnerability to empathy. To be chosen for top positions, females would have to be the most masculine candidate in the competitions, but not many women can do that.

The condition of adult orientation in which no vestige remains of an imprinted parent would be a philosophical consciousness, recognizing bottom-up access to reality, since individual intelligence is what remains when authority vanishes. It was already clear to Enlightenment activists that the crucial means by which to get beyond the universally imprinted parent at a broad cultural scale was to identify, clarify, and distribute l’esprit philosophique as individual empowerment. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now should include awareness of the fundamental importance of l’esprit philosophique in the Enlightenment effort for universal equality and human rights, the unique historical precedent of accomplishing a large-scale cultural movement to get beyond the effects (inequality and subordination) of the universally imprinted parent which has been fundamental to entrenchment of human-on-human parasites.

The Question of Enlightenment Individualism

One of the limitations of Enlightenment materialism with its shift of sovereignty from divine Providence (as expressed through Churches, aristocracy, and monarchy) to the general will was a certain lack of attention to human individuality. The principle of the universality of human rationality did serve as a grounding for universal human rights and individual freedom and dignity, but the tendency of strict rationality is generic, and the more creative aspects of human individuality and freedom were not clearly founded in Spinoza’s monism. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now must include awareness of the real foundation of universal human rights and equality, which is to say, awareness of individual intelligence-as-such, innocent teleology, the fundamental humanity which eliminates all the culturally determined tags of subordination, alienation, and de-humanization which work as barriers to universal empathy. It should also include awareness of the cultural mechanisms and techniques of the parasite faction to present and preserve inequality as a positive value, and that the crucial challenge of philosophy in the twenty-first century is to repudiate the claim of parasite factions to be justified and legitimized by nature as represented by science.

The Will to Power vs Empathy

The idea that a “will to power” is the core of all vital force, all vitality, an idea from Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) as interpreted by Nietzsche, is just another expression of the persistent culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, and as such narrowly biased. Another philosophical expression of the same culture can be seen in the idea Hobbes had of the state of nature, a war of all against all, quite accurate within the dominant culture of masculinity. Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all childless males with few profound attachments beyond a small cohort of male peers. The theory of the will to power is properly appreciated as a revelation of their culture of masculinity, what could be called will-to-power masculinity. The overwhelming predominance of males in academic professions, all immersed in that culture, still enables the theory of human nature as will-to-power to be pervasive and persistent, for example in contemporary deconstructionist theory. It dovetails with the legacy of Augustinian Christianity, declaring human nature universally to be the unalterable source of injustice. Such a bias obscures the very possibility of progress (illustrated by Foucault, for example) and also blocks identification of the culture of will-to-power masculinity itself as the historical, and very alterable, source of injustice. Culture is mutable even if nature isn’t.

Empathy

The parasitic culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, cowboy masculinity, works by exploiting opportunities presented by the universally imprinted parent to disable universal empathy. It is difficult to imagine eradicating that whole poisoning culture, but what it comes down to is whether or not it controls you personally, and there are ways for innocent teleology to cultivate its self-possession. Beyond the imprinted parent lies a truly empathic philosophical consciousness. Only when you strip away from personal definition everything except bedrock innocent intelligence (and you can) do you escape the prejudicial tags used within cultures to mark out constructs of superiority and inferiority, tags such as race, gender, ethnicity, abled-ness, body-shape, size, strength, wealth, extroversion, and so on. Those tags are cultivated by the culture of will-to-power masculinity specifically to obstruct any straightforward empathy with other intelligences (people) universally, but when the cultural tags are discredited and ignored what remains is innocent teleology which is discernible, although individual, in all individual eruptions into nature of intelligent animation. Nothing but a philosophical consciousness, which is just self-consciousness as creative teleological freedom, innocent intelligence, can disempower the controlling effects of culture poisoned by the ethos of human-on-human parasites. This all points to a metaphysics that can reboot the Enlightenment movement to dismantle the material, cultural, and psychological effects of top-down human-on-human parasites, and that metaphysics is not any form of deterministic monism.

Beyond the influence of myths and projections of a universally imprinted parent (a dominating super-intelligence or institution of subordination) dawns the recognition of a large number of individual intelligences, each with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other teleological individuals. (Self-consciousness as intelligence includes awareness of both inertial nature and human culture as external to personal innocence.) The same empathy that empowers individuals to sense teleological behaviour, intelligence, outside ourselves also empowers us to sense the effects that inter-intelligence parasitism has on its victims, and so reveals such parasitism as categorically immoral, ugly, vicious, and repulsive.

This is Not Theory

Personal cultivation of that kind of philosophical consciousness (self identification as teleological freedom, without parental-type authorities) is distinct from ideological sophistication, religious faith, speculation, or theories of anything. We don’t need revelations, faith, ideology, or theories, because we can know personal teleology or intelligence by immediate acquaintance, achieved in a process of letting go of cultural influences. Transcendence (freedom) is thinkable and clearly defined without appeal to occult or obscure forces or powers, hidden principles, aliens, or magic. However, there certainly is a contribution to be made by self-directed education in support of sophistication about history, culture, and ideas.

Metaphysics of Freedom

The most important challenge and purpose of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was disputing the metaphysical claim asserted by operators of systematic Old Regime lethal power (Churches, aristocracy, monarchies) to be justified by divine intervention, by Providence, in their violently coercive social supervision. However, the crucial program facing philosophers of every era is to understand individual human freedom (the questioning in the gaze) in the face of so many clearly controlling and determining forces. The roots of a metaphysics of individual freedom go deep in the history of philosophy. The discovery by Martin Luther (1483-1546) of an interior power of teleology to take a creative leap (of faith for him personally) was the breakthrough in modern thinking about individual freedom. Luther drew on ancient Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism which he encountered in his humanist education. The Stoic version of individual freedom was much more limited. Stated strictly, it was just a freedom to assent to the universal Logos in every detail of reality or else to dispute or resist it internally. The personal interiority from which that Stoic freedom emerged included deliberate rationality interacting with emotionally charged appetites and competitive impulses, for example, and the power or freedom of rational deliberation was considerable in that interior context. Luther’s identification of the creative leap was an interpretation of that Stoic interiority, but also a crucial creative leap beyond it.

Luther, Kant, and Freedom

A form of Luther’s idea of the individual leap of faith became fundamental to Kant’s self-legislating ethics, and in fact to his whole kind of idealism as sketched above. Peel away Kant’s technical terminology and the fundamental insight underneath is the personal creative leap that Luther made famous. Fichte’s self-positing ego is yet another expression of the same basic insight. It is no great surprise to find such a Lutheran grounding, since the religious upbringing of both Kant and Fichte was Lutheran. Kant’s contribution was to recognize the broad personal freedom implicit in the power of an intelligence to take creative leaps, that if an intelligence could take a leap of faith then it could take a multitude of different kinds of leap, and so Kant de-coupled Luther’s insight from the conceptual universe of Christendom and Abrahamic monotheism generally. In Kant’s work the leap became an individually created rule or conceptual pattern for structuring personal orientation within phenomena. Still another step is required to de-couple that basic interior creative freedom from the conceptual universe of sovereignty and sovereign rules in which Kant was still immersed.

Kant did not specifically relate his rationalist account of freedom with his recognition that time is contributed to experience by the experiencing intelligence, but he should have. Both the subjectivity of time and the individuality of freedom become clearer in that combination. Time, teleology, is the form of freedom.

The tradition of metaphysics recognizing a plurality of embodied teleologies with individual creative freedom is the philosophical legacy to draw upon to support human rights and freedoms far better than materialist monism or any other kind of fatalist determinism. The Lutheran line of freedom philosophy provides the matrix of an understanding of teleological freedom and the transcendence of intelligence.

The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment attempted to replace a Christian ideology sanctifying arbitrary oppressions exercised by institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and Churches with ideas supporting democracy and the global equality of all people as individuals, requiring the abolition of slavery, torture, serfdom, and the oppression of women. However, the weight of opinion within the politically engaged public was always skeptical about the competence of individual rationality and generally supported traditional religions and institutions of wealth and subordination, probably out of fear of the unknown, of unpredictable social change. Consequently, strong democracy and global human equality have still not been accomplished, but they are ideals still inspiring many people and having unpredictable political consequences. The forces of top-down human-on-human parasitism have always been winning, most recently since the suppression of the anti-war and counterculture movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s which blossomed around the early cultural impact of television. (The only intensively televised war, the most realistically communicated and the most popularly questioned and hated by spectators, was the American war in Vietnam 1965-75.) Here in 2014 the top-down forces are winning spectacularly, although there is also surprising new resistance.

The Enlightenment is not yet a story from history with beginning, middle, and end. We and our times in culture and politics are still very much part of the ongoing struggle of ideas and social arrangements at the core of the Enlightenment movement. The cultural and social transformations effected by rationalist philosophy, especially as presented by Spinoza and his eighteenth century French materialist interpreters, notably Denis Diderot (1713-84) and (Baron) Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723-89), who worked to define and communicate l’esprit philosophique, defining the categorical criminality of torture and slavery, for example, unquestionably earn the radically bottom-up political philosophy of the Enlightenment a central place in modern philosophy. It is remarkable that the mainstream work of contemporary philosophy shows so little vestige of that legacy.

The reflections here on Enlightenment history, Spinoza, and in particular l’esprit philosophique, have been informed and inspired by:

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.

A Philosophical Consciousness

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Strategic thinking

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bell hooks, Enlightenment, freedom, human-on-human parasitism, imprinted parent, philosophy, politics, Power, science, sovereignty, time, transcendence

Toxic Consequences of the Imprinted Parent

Human cultures have been poisoned by both direct and indirect consequences of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence, the universally imprinted parent, and because of that it is urgent for individuals everywhere to search out and discover the non-poisoned pre-cultural features of their personal powers, sensitivities, and impulses, which is to say the features of experience which express their innocent intelligence. The interiority of every intelligence has both innocent foundations and additional conditioning by the culture or ways of life of the people surrounding it. (Meditation in traditions related to Transcendental Meditation, for example, has innocence-rescuing aspects such as disengaging from language.) A movement of individual re-grounding in personal innocence is the only way that cultures and the human interconnectedness that those cultures condition can be reconstructed to eliminate distortions of reality, injustices, and other poisons which currently damage and restrict the large numbers of individuals exposed to those cultures. Searching out and discovering the innocence of personal intelligence is a critical thinking process, the building of a kind of philosophical consciousness.

Direct consequences of the imprinted parent are personally embedded habits and expectations of dependency and subordination expressed in a continual search for and orientation to authority figures, leaders, elders, and supervised sophistication. Indirect consequences are cultural distortions of reality and elaborated ideologies developed and broadcast by parasitic groups and factions with the intent of exploiting standard parental conditioning to establish themselves as legitimate, stable, and institutional authorities and supervisors, dominant powers, controllers of wealth and general behaviour in a community as a whole. It is the universality of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence which has enabled human-on-human parasitism to establish itself securely in all kinds of communities and to use culture to mask its true nature.

bell hooks on imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy

The vicious qualities that bell hooks identifies in the ordinary functioning of Euro-American society, described as imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, all resolve into top-down human-on-human parasitism. The overt purpose of imperialism is to acquire the benefits of human parasitism as specified in posting 73, May 21, 2014, bell hooks on Freedom, and war as the instrument of imperialism is parasitic on grunt soldiers in a most overt way. White supremacist ideology (or any ideology of racial inequality) is a device to justify human parasitism by de-humanizing (second-classing) certain groups. Patriarchy is an expression of an ideology of gender inequality which provides a (false) justification for males to be parasites on females. Capitalism is an ideology of socio-economic class hierarchy (claiming scientific support from Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, or similar purported laws of nature) along with a structure of laws and organization of property, production, and distribution which glorifies and privileges owners of the means of production (capital, including conceptual property such as patents), effectively licensing owners to be parasites on non-owning employees who labour to supply, operate, and maintain the means of production. Capital arranges to increase eternally while the acts of labour continuously deteriorate aging labourers. In that way the institutionalized injustices named by hooks are all manifestations of the same underlying culture of human-on-human parasites, and an intent to enjoy the rewards of parasites is the motive for particular groups and factions to exploit basic parental conditioning to establish themselves as authorities, dominant powers, controllers of wealth, and supervisors of communal behaviour. The only way that any of the injustices of those institutions can be ended and prevented is to discredit, discard, and go beyond the culture which glorifies human parasites through exploiting the universal and uncritical expectation of parental-type authority, namely the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity derived historically from nomadic animal herding cultures.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

It is encouraging to discover that a large-scale project of getting beyond projections of the universally imprinted parent actually began soon after 1600 with the period of Euro-American cultural history known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental impulse of the Enlightenment was to improve the general condition of humanity exactly by eliminating the power and authority of churches, aristocracy, and monarchical institutions, along with their representatives and agents, thus eliminating all the externalized Old Regime avatars of the Great Indefinable Super-Parent. In the Old Regime the sovereign courts of kings and princes were staffed chiefly by activist members of the military-landowning aristocracy, the large-scale capitalists of their era. Governments were really control mechanisms of that overtly parasitic ownership class, direct constructs of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of armed men on horses which originated with conquering nomadic herding confederacies which in their conquered territories evolved into a ruling confederacy of what modern people would call crime families. That parasitic ruling (herding) faction justified its oppressions by an appeal to cosmic intelligent design, claiming appointment and support by divine Providence, the Super-Parent. Of the three main engines of Old Regime social supervision, Church, monarchy, and aristocracy, the second and third rested their legitimacy on that of the Church. The rhetoric of class conflict would clearly apply to aristocracy and monarchy, but less clearly to Church hierarchies, even though the higher Church officials would all represent the aristocratic crime family class.

In the Euro-American cultural system after 1600 there was a significant rate of literacy and advanced education which was partly the result of the humanist movement of the fifteenth century Renaissance, and since the spread of the printing press after about 1450 there had been a growing culture of debate and exchange of ideas in writing (self-consciously calling itself the Republic of Letters) which functioned outside the immediate control of governments and religious foundations such as universities and church hierarchies. People engaging in that literary culture used philosophical ideas and rational arguments to identify and specify injustices of the prevailing forms of feudalism and to propose better alternatives. Fundamentally, it was discovered that if the non-rational claim of divine appointment or supernatural intervention was disregarded then the traditional structures of wealth and power in European society (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical) were all exposed as arbitrary, unjustified, illegitimate, and plainly parasitic on the common majority of people. Credit can be given to Spinoza for articulating that insight in a broadly convincing way. It was mainly Spinoza, based on his materialist metaphysics, who argued for abandoning the non-rational claim of traditional powers to represent supernatural intervention, divine will, or a providential deity controlling human society and history.

Enlightenment in general, in the eighteenth century sense, meant recognition of the fundamental power of human rationality and universal principles derived by rational thinking and debate. The ultimate authority of reason is the crux of Enlightenment and the authority of reason both undermined claims of divine intervention in worldly affairs and conferred the crucial dignity and (potential) power of rational thinking, as basic to human nature, upon every individual. In one interpretation, it would mean being educated in the scientific approach to nature as distinct from superstitious and magical thinking typical of religion and other assumptions of disembodied spirits. Rationalists emphasized that appeals to divine will to sanctify inequality of wealth, power, freedom, and privilege are implausible, non-rational, and obscurantist. Rationalists also emphasized that, since appeals to revealed commands of a supernatural dictator are non-rational, it makes better sense to decide appropriate moral action and human interaction by calculating the resulting happiness of and benefit to humanity as a whole. What follows from that is the sovereignty of the collective of all people, the general will, and a requirement for individual empowerment through freedom of thought and expression on a base of rational education, all of which defines a serious kind of universal human equality from which tolerance of racial variety follows and which dislodges any particular culture or religion from a privileged position. Of course, the kind of thinking and expression that was legally forbidden by institutions of wealth and power in the Old Regime was precisely anything that questioned their legitimacy. They did their utmost to use the power of existing institutions to enforce conservatism, mobilizing the already active apparatus of state censorship and the Roman Catholic Inquisition to snuff out freedom of thought and expression, ideas of democracy, and legal recognition of universal human rights.

Legitimation Drift from Providence to Popular Sovereignty

In spite of the fact that we people of modernity consider our science-driven society to be well beyond the superstitions and brutalities of Medieval and Old Regime conditions, there are profound continuities as well, as highlighted by the work of bell hooks. Monarchical and aristocratic forms of violence-based sovereignty have not disappeared but only morphed into new configurations. Although the top-down faction of human parasites still clings to the conservatism of religion, it shifts the base of its legitimacy more to an identification or unification with sovereign governments as ambient cultures become more secular and governments appear more responsible to the majority of citizens. The ownership class justifies and exercises its parasitism through participation in and partnerships with the traditional top-down force of now apparently legitimate governments. The legitimacy of government is bestowed upon the means by which large-scale wealth accumulates ever more wealth: commercial corporations, businesses, and industries which are licensed and fostered by governments to encourage employment and something vaguely called national wealth. Government members must have a proven dedication to the corporate sector, and especially to banking and the investment/ financial industry. The whole ownership faction rides the coattails of the appearance and rhetoric of ‘sovereignty of the people’ created by elections every four or five years offering some choice of ruling political party.

Top-Down against Bottom-Up Political Forces

The problem with that foundation of capitalist legitimacy is that democracy is more myth than reality, and consequently the legitimacy of familiar governments is an illusion. The concentration of wealth in a small faction enables that faction to exercise decisive political influence, vastly overpowering the bottom-up political forces such as voting every four or five years. As discovered and documented by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) there is an overpowering influence of great wealth in all political processes. Behind the great wealth is the malign culture of alpha-trophy-looting cowboy masculinity which honours and glorifies the accomplishments of human parasitism. In any country claiming to be democratic, inequality is eventually fatal to the legitimacy of power because it removes even the appearance of democracy.

It is now common to acknowledge that, even in the most modern democratic countries, the top-down political force of organized wealth (class-conscious strategic action within the corporate owning and controlling faction of society) is far more influential, effective, and agenda-driven (funding political parties, political candidates, and lobbyists, for example, in addition to owning and controlling mass media, academic research, and large scale employment opportunities) than any bottom-up forces such as citizens voting for party controlled representatives in government every four or five years. That vast inequality of political influence is not new, and has been the political reality in some form since long before the emergence of national governments with democratic fig-leafs such as elections, but the current state represents the dramatic reversal of a trend in the direction of greater bottom-up inclusion. Since the Enlightenment era of Euro-American history, since the French Revolution of 1789, but especially since The Great War of 1914-18 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was a trend toward greater bottom-up democratic influence. That trend was rapidly reversed around the time of the truncated presidency (1969-74) of Richard Nixon, apparently in reaction to the American anti-war and counter-culture youth movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Nixon was soon followed by a sustained wave of political, economic, and ideological support for top-down dominance. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of The United Kingdom through 1979-90. In the USA Ronald Reagan held the presidency through 1980-88. The trend reversal against greater bottom-up political influence has been so thorough and effective that it is now reasonable to identify it as a coup d’état by the ownership class against the beginnings and promise of a more authentic democracy. It is an ongoing anti-democratic creeper-coup managed strategically over roughly half a century, maybe from around the assassination of JFK in 1963.

The Politics of Metaphysics

In the historical context of Medieval European Christendom and the Old Regime, there was a much abused identification of transcendent discretionary creativity with an externalized and centralized cosmic super-parent who commanded universal obedience: the Christian God. Spinoza’s version of materialist monism, amplified and broadcast culturally in the writings of radical rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually had its intended effect, largely discrediting the legitimacy of all institutions of wealth and power (Church, aristocracy, and monarchies) which founded their legitimacy on the omnipotence of the cosmic super-parent. That’s the big deal about Spinoza. However, a strict materialism eliminates all philosophical idealism, which in this context is the same as transcendent discretionary creativity intrinsic to some entity or entities. Materialism eliminates all forms of discretionary creativity because with materialism everything is pre-determined for all eternity by omnipotent and unalterable laws of nature. So, as a political ideology, materialism soon encountered the limits of its liberating effects, because when interpreted strictly it eliminates the freedom of all individual people as well as the authority of gods, disembodied spirits, and anyone claiming to be their appointed agents. To get beyond those limits of materialism it is necessary to re-admit transcendent creativity back into the philosophical foundation of human relations generally and politics in particular. This time, however, the recognition of transcendent creativity has to avoid the mythological elaboration of residing in an externalized, centralized, or universalized super-parent and instead accept restriction to the individual interiors (non-spacial interiors) of de-centralized animate biological entities, that is to say, all individual animals including humans. There is no super-parental entity here, although on this view discretionary creativity comes with the vulnerability and predicament of being in a particular life in time. This de-centralizing of discretionary creativity is a partial recapitulation of the Enlightenment act conferring profound dignity and (potential) power on every individual at the same time as removing claims to sovereign privilege other than from a grounding in a far stronger and more authentic democracy than has ever yet existed.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the crucial philosophical project was to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be based on omnipotent Providence. There are no parental presences in a philosophical consciousness. It was right for Enlightenment rationalists to marshal philosophy against parasitic pretenders to parental authority over whole communities, and they were right to articulate a philosophical vision, scientific materialism, that had the effect of undermining such claims. As it turned out, scientific materialism was not effective over the long run. Now, again, a philosophical consciousness is required to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be justified by materialist science.

Time As the Condition of Discretionary Creativity

Nothing in nature, neither at the cosmic level nor at any local level, is moved by teleology, by intentions, goals, or aspirations, and in that sense there is no future or futurity in nature (and so no time in nature). A definition of nature could be: the set of non-teleological events and objects, what might be called the set of inertial events and objects. However, there are also a plurality of individual intelligences (ordinary embodied people) and those intelligences (as intelligences) are close to being entirely teleological, and teleology is temporality, futurity, a bearing toward a future. As teleology we are outside nature but certainly operating into or upon nature, and each intelligence is also interior to itself, which is to say, there isn’t just one great teleological striving, drive, or desire manifesting itself through all the individual intelligences. There are indeed vast numbers of separate individual teleological intelligences. Plurality isn’t tidy, so it will lack aesthetic appeal to some, but it is not helpful to ignore this untidiness of reality.

Non-Superstitious Transcendence: the Question in the Gaze

Not all conceptions of transcendence are vulnerable to the charge of superstition in the way that ideas of disembodied spirits or of cosmic super-parental intelligences are. There is a non-superstitious transcendence: time as a condition of every individual’s personal intelligence. All three of vacant space, time, and intelligences (spirits) have been suggested as ethereal or immaterial. In the case of spirits, the plausible grounding of the very idea of spiritual non-materiality is the inseparability of intelligence and time. Every intelligence is a voice, and voice exists only in time. It is a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. Since space could be described as a condition of strict material actuality, and the experience of space has to be a temporal construct, the one and only true and familiar non-materiality is time, and time is exactly definitive of the interiority of the question or teleological bearing in any human gaze. Knowledge has its existence in that bearing. Time so experienced as a fabric of possibilities does not exist in the strict actuality of nature, but is a creation of individual intelligences in their living a degree of freedom from the determinism of nature. Time is uniquely not physical, far more than a condition of material actuality, and, to that extent people have an aspect which is not material or physical because as intelligence each exists and self-creates through time and only through time, which doesn’t even exist as physical matter or substance.

Leaders perpetuate the belief that fulfillment in life is achieved from devoted service to the supervisory and educational hierarchies of knowledge, wealth, and power, from the sophistication and rewards that long service accumulates. However, the very idea of hierarchy is yet another version of the imprinted parent. Only within an uncritical acceptance of the child-parent pattern of subordination does merit somehow transfigure into meritocracy. The ideology of meritocracy is part of the poisoning of culture to justify parasitic top-down control of populations, and the glorification of parasitism discredits culture generally as a guide to reality, value, self-identification, and human relations. Philosophical consciousness of innocent intelligence enables empathy to the individual transcendence of everyone, each individual with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other intelligences. Philosophic empathy is recognizing all individual intelligences as both physical and creatively teleological entities, as individual eruptions into nature of discretionary creativity, as individual spinners of freedom in transcendent time.

My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely interpretations of:

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.

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.

The Use and Abuse of Spirituality

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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bell hooks, empathy, freedom, intelligence, personal identity, philosophy, politics of identity, religion, spirituality, transcendence

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

Spirit

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

Mysticism

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

Primordial Empathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imprinted Parent Lies About Who You Are

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

Not Saying It

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

More than Love

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

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

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

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

De-Colonization

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

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

Spirituality is Transcendence in Time

The rejection of super-parent religion is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creation of time. Time is freedom into which an intelligence creatively projects itself, a personal hyper-space of non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which intelligences build lives. This is a startlingly unfamiliar idea, but time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences.

A New Philosophic Empathy

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

bell hooks on Freedom

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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bell hooks, cultural hegemony, feminism, freedom, Gender Politics, personal identity, philosophy, popular culture, social control

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

The Question Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Question of the Gaze

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Blind-Spot philosophy, gratifications, history of philosophy, human parasitism, intelligence, nature, philosophical innovation, pluralism, science, systems of subordination, values

Golden Age Culture Studies

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

Philosophical Innovation

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

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

Begin Where You Are

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

The Question of the Gaze

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

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

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

Mindfulness

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

Philosophical Skepticism

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

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

Existentialism: The Interior is Empty

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

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

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

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

Values and Gratifications: Philosophical Innovation

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

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

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

Selected Sources

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Being, female culture, freedom, Gender Politics, History, imprinted parent, intelligence, male culture, Michel Foucault, nature, philosophy, politics, Power, social contract, sovereignty, the norms fallacy, Thomas Hobbes, time, transcendence

The Argument

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

Exploiting Child-to-Parent Conditioning

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

Real Parents are Often Self-Sacrificing

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

Just There: The Parental Alpha-Structure of Sovereignty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legitimacy of Sovereign Superstructures

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

Myth of a Social Contract

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

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

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

The Norms Fallacy

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

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

Nature Takes its Inevitable Course

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

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

Nature and Intelligences: Beyond Nature’s Parental Embrace

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

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

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

Correcting East-West Philosophical Traditions on Freedom

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Being, Cultural History, Eastern Philosophy, Ideology, intelligence, philosophy, Philosophy of Freedom

Part I: Where Zombies Come From

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

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

Modernity is Zombie-like Nearly-Nihilism

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

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

Part II: Blind-Spot Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fate of Nearly-Nihilist Zombification

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

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

Reference cited:

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

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

A Philosophical Consciousness

The Use and Abuse of Spirituality

The Question of the Gaze

Correcting East-West Philosophical Traditions on Freedom