A Syllogism in Homage to Martin Heidegger

31 Friday Jan 2014

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Being and Freedom

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

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

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

Concerning the Second Premise: Creativity and Time

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

Concerning the First Premise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Lines of Human Parasitism Through Western Civilizations

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacies of The Crusades

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

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

Defending Parasitism with an Ideology of Nihilism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

The Cultural Construction of Blind Spots

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Stories

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

Emotional Structuring: Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama, Farce

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

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

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

Suspension of Critical Disbelief

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

Gangs are Stories

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

That Big Thing

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

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

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

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

Thinking

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

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

A Quarrel with Buddhism

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

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

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

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

Intelligence, Nature, Time, and Illusion

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

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

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

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Seven Propositions On Transcendence

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

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One: A New Identification of Transcendence

Transcendence is freedom derived in the construction of time, including futurity (a construct of pretendings), by an individual intelligence.

Two: Always and Only

The experience of subjective transcendence described in Proposition One is always the original case, the authentic and defining instance, paradigm, or model of transcendence.

Three: The Primordial Philosophical Problem

Authentic transcendence, being in the blind spot of intelligence, namely the very being of intelligence itself, gets largely overlooked and unidentified, and a distorted representation or image of transcendence (capricious personality) gets inappropriately and falsely projected outward onto entities in nature and culture, as imaginary disembodied spirits, demons, personality in nature or in collective entities and institutions such as tribes and nations, for example.

Four: Political Appropriation

Those externalized and falsely identified instances of transcendence get appropriated by the carriers of a parasitic culture of cowboy masculinity (paradigm Genghis Khan) and used as a technique to sanctify, legitimize, justify, and normalize (by “noble” lies, for example) their parasitism on other humans. In that way the primordial philosophical problem gets complicated by the addition of a political problem, since it becomes illegal to question the externality of transcendence, and so philosophy and politicized culture become inextricably entangled.

Five: The Two Problems

This leaves us with two main problems, one philosophical and one political. The philosophical problem is, how do we elude the influence that the dominant culture has (distorting reality to sanctify top-down human-on-human parasitism) on our general orientation and perceptions, so that we can re-orient toward authentic transcendence? The political problem is, how do we de-legitimize, de-sanctify, de-normalize the culture of cowboy masculinity which has institutionalized human parasitism and so enslaved human kind without any widespread recognition of that enslavement as anything other than economic and social organization within a framework of religious and nationalist organization.

Six: First Response

The strategic response to the philosophical problem is to find in experience those elements which operate in intelligence prior to acquisition of culture, so to escape the distorting influence of culture and reconstruct a new orientation from innocent experience. Construction of time is crucial among those elements of innocent experience.

Seven: Strategic Response

The strategic response to the political problem is to overcome the philosophical problem. The plague on human kind, which is normalized and sanctified human parasitism, has in that way an unintended consequence, that overcoming it directs thinking inward onto thinking’s own blind spot, inspiring the perspective required to overcome the primordial philosophical problem.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Time as an Innocence from which to Judge

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

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Foundational Time, a Place to Stand

Obviously it has been impossible so far to dislodge the rule of cowboy masculinity, crime-family masculinity, but progress might be possible if we confront it with an entirely novel system of orientation in which individual intelligences, only and all individual intelligences, are acknowledged instances of transcendence, specifically the transcendence of creative freedom. This can be done because a place to stand outside gender roles, social/ economic class designations, ethnic placement, and culture in general has been identified. All those roles and designations are cultural tags, all arbitrary artifacts of political and economic systems riddled with injustice and distortions of reality.

Time, however, is foundational, and time is inconceivable without an encounter between individual intelligence and nature. Please see posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, and  posting 60, May 4, 2013, The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror. Time is a construct of creative intelligence encountering the brute actuality of nature. So individual intelligence is foundational in an encounter with brute inertial nature. Certainly there is social and cultural structuring of time, but the original experience of time is not socially constructed. It is a construct of individual intelligence. Therefore, although much of reality is socially constructed, not everything about experience, about reality, is socially constructed. It follows from this, since time and individual intelligence are inseparable, that the individuality and self-identification of individual intelligences are also not entirely constructed socially or intersubjectively. There is a place of innocence from which to judge the influences of culture, indeed to judge the reality of social constructs. This contradicts the understanding of human subjectivity and of culture based on the Freudian model, which is still profoundly influential.

The Freudian Model

It is commonplace to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of psychology in the Freudian tradition, expressing forces other than individual freedom. In that model the main vectors of force are the Id (representing bestial lusts for pleasure and power, the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model of a three-part soul, but on the Freudian view supposed ultimately to be biological imperatives), and the Superego, (representing authority figures, such as parents, police, priests, from ambient society, internalized by the individual’s exposure to education and socialization). Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the Ego, or personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that Ego image, no reality. The Ego has only the force of Id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of public authority figures. That is all there is to a Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature driven by original sin and constrained only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

The Civilizing Force

Theorists in the Freudian tradition could proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or their origin, and people must socialize by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of a Christian appeal to divine intervention in the appointment of social supervisors, Freudian theory could also use something like Hobbesian social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures. Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity: a war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the cowboy masculine will-to-power agree to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by participating in a social contract by which a monarch, with absolute power over life and death, is instituted to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t think of any way around enforcement). So, from nothing more than cowboy self-interest (ultimately determined biologically), the authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain somewhat the many faces of Id. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science.

Seeing social behaviour, culture, and history as a manifestation of instinctive human nature as envisioned in Freudian theory has the same effect as seeing history as acts of God, namely the effect of making history necessarily as it was in every detail, entirely pre-determined and unquestionable. When history is taken as divine (or natural) utterance, then the facts of history are self-justifying and unimpeachable. For example, on those views, both slave-masters and slaves are equally manifesting the same inherent human nature. All are equally sinners in their nature (the will-to-power has the same force as original sin) and the forces of nature are merely working themselves out. That is why, in Foucault’s analysis of oppressive power, it is impossible to identify either a perpetrator or a victim.

However, with the foundational experience of time revealing that individual intelligences are instances of transcendence in their creative freedom, the Freudian type of model fails completely, and what stands out is the monumentally important fact that intelligence exists uniquely in individual embodied units, individual persons. Seeing history as a manifestation of a large number of human intelligences, intelligences with individual creativity and freedom, reveals history as largely provisional, imperfect attempts at indistinct and creative aspirations, where mistakes were made, and where crimes, with identifiable perpetrators and victims, were committed.

There might seem to be a contradiction between the fact that intelligence comes only and always in the form of individual persons, and any criticism of cowboy masculinity, which claims to be the natural expression and pure realization of individualism, rugged libertarian individualism. However, cowboy masculinity is not and never was independence, but instead is always parasitism, and so not an expression of autonomy-of-intelligence. In spite of the claim to be rugged individuals, the primordial cowboys were never actually independent, but always parasitic on herd animals. In addition, they did not choose to stay with the free open wilderness of desert and steppe, but instead formed confederacies and preyed on the settled communities of farmers and cities, and took possession of them to secure the higher level parasitism that human hosts enabled. That is the historical origin of top-down political forces.

As already mentioned, Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature (a war of all against all) is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity. The carriers of cowboy masculinity resist emotional or empathic (social) interconnections with other people, because they want to be parasitic and to use others as hosts. Decently ethical behaviour arises from empathy, from an ability and a willingness to appreciate and care about the interiority of other people’s experience, and to act from that caring. Morality depends on empathy, is a function of empathy. However, empathic or emotional interconnectedness is exactly what parasites refuse to enter, and so is conspicuously absent from the Hobbesian social contract. That particular unwillingness is the definitive condition of cowboy masculinity and the kind of individualism characteristic of cowboy masculinity.

That intelligence exists only in individual persons is in fact far more compatible with a different kind of expression, especially considering that intelligence is clearly gratified and amplified by identification of and empathic interaction with other intelligences, so much so that the human interconnectedness is the most magnificent creation ever of our multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), even though it still needs a lot of work. The current culture of femininity cultivates and encourages the attaching/ relationship talent of intelligence, the interconnecting talent. However, champions of communitarian or collective power and cultural authority (normally preserving systems of parasitism) need to stop resisting the elemental truth that intelligence exists only and always in individual persons, which makes it necessary to re-conceive the human interconnectedness on the basis of empathic interactions among individuals. That is the entirely novel system of orientation which eliminates the need for anything like the Hobbesian social contract, and finally dislodges the rule of cowboy masculinity.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Political Situation of Personal Identity: Identity Politics, Identity Theft

22 Monday Jul 2013

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The situation in which any person seeks to clarify or define his or her personal identity is inherently political. Even before the beginning of any individual’s existence there are external claims of ownership (sovereignty) over the individual, both religious claims and secular political claims, and those include claims on the right to define and identify the individual. Such imposed definitions of identity make it difficult for individuals to recognize their personal freedom and the transcendence of that freedom.

Collective Rights

Collective rights are usually claimed by religious communities, such as Roman Catholicism, for example. It is claimed that the collective culture has the absolute right to perpetuate itself, to force its children to embrace its religious and linguistic heritage, all overseen by a leadership structure, the supervisory control and power hierarchy of the collective. Such claimed collective rights have no grounding in anything but the institutionalized power of hierarchies, and they are clearly parasitic on innocent new arrivals. “Collective rights” always translate into the rights and privileges of a faction practicing the supervisory culture, the pinnacles of the controlling hierarchies. Collective rights are just rights to perpetuate parasitic inequality in the name of leadership. Individuals are just as much colonized by the “mother” culture as they might be by any “foreign” culture, and a foreign culture might distort reality less, might legitimize human-on-human parasitism less, and might enable more self-possession.

Political Sovereignty

It will be no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology (for example, myths of meritocracy or good breeding ) by which the economically dominant faction of a community legitimizes its powers, immunities, and privileges also has profound influence on thinking generally and on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly. Efforts at thought control always begin with utterance control, restrictions on speech, often informal sanctions in support of a political correctness or politeness. (That is based on a false belief that thinking is limited to language, that thinking is a function of language.)

Politics is the struggle among factions to gain control of sovereign law and law enforcement, the struggle for institutionalized powers of sovereignty, including the sovereign monopoly on violence, a monopoly often conceived as unlimited. Although those terms of politics bring to mind the social stability based on law codes, books of regulations, questions of compliance in behaviour, and armed hierarchies such as police and armies to supervise and enforce compliant behaviour, there is vastly more, a demand for spiritual and psychological subordination of the individual, sometimes called patriotism, allegiance, civic duty, patriotic duty. That duty of spiritual subordination or submission, a quasi-religion of the nation-state, is an issue of self-definition for every individual.

Personal unfreedom is the condition of self-alienation caused by the suppression of innocent personal identity as elemental intelligence-as-such, replaced by a definition of personal identity drained of personal transcendence, and instead limited to ethnic group membership, nationality, religious tradition, and the economic situation determined by competitive placements, trophies, and grade of parasitism in the mountainous economic/ production hierarchies cultivated by those collectives. The primal crime against the individual is the suppression of innocent personal identity from a personal intelligence.

Ordinary Illusion

Based on these observations, ordinary life, and especially identification of personal identity in ordinary life, really is full of illusion, as claimed by ancient philosophers such as Plato, for example, in the narrative of the Cave of Shadows in his Republic. Day to day life in hierarchical societies really is a fallen condition for us, unworthy of intelligence-beings. Only, the illusion, the misidentification of what is real, is not imposed by nature or by human nature (and not by metaphysics) but instead is imposed politically through an accidental culture which distorts reality. On that interpretation, the state of disgrace, the fallen condition, is the one in which culture, poisoned with legitimations of parasitism (collective rights) by the most powerful groups in the social structure, has alienated every individual from self-possession or self-knowledge as transcendent intelligence-as-such. (By “pure reason” Immanuel Kant plausibly meant much the same as intelligence-as-such.) Philosophy, to the extent that it is elemental re-orientation or elemental thinking, is an intrinsically political and personal act, an act of self-possession as intelligence in the teeth of cultural claims of sovereign possession. The discontinuity between an elemental identity definition (for example, the construct of actuality and non-actuality in personal agency-in-time) and a cultural identity definition reveals the ordinary illusion of everyday experience.

Elemental and Innocent Orientation

Although there are lots of internal parts and distinctions within nature, subjective intelligences, and culture, none of them can be reduced, translated, or broken down into one or both of the others. (Well, culture does break down into projections of intelligences onto nature, but culture is so important in connecting elemental intelligences among ourselves, and in mediating between elemental intelligences and nature, that it merits mention as being itself elemental in some relevant sense, maybe as the category of primal combination of the other two categories.) There is an irreducibility to that set of categories. There is an elemental simplicity about them as a set and as such they are crucial reference categories in an alternative and innocent framework of orientation. You unplug from culture by paying attention to something else, to pre-cultural reality which has never gone away and is always still there.

The situation of subjectivity in terms of an elemental orientation is this: subjectivity is intelligence embodied in nature but with the power, peculiar to intelligence, of overcoming nature’s absolute particularity. Subjectivity is embodied in nature but as intelligence attaches with a vast interconnectedness of other individual intelligences, largely through culture, but always grounded in the individual interiority of intelligence, the inwardness of subjectivity.

Every individual has an innocent grounding of experience that does not depend on the cultural constructs in the human environment. Neither a personal orientation nor creative self-assertion is dependent on cultural constructs. Every individual has his or her own questions, curiosities, doubts, and means (a body) of investigating the surroundings to construct an orientation and launch personal vectors into the brute actuality of nature. Intelligences have inherent powers of transcending actuality, simultaneously pretending many non-actual variations of what might be made actual. That is the freedom of an intelligence, and, given the completely pre-determined nature illuminated by science, freedom is the transcendence of intelligence.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Philosophy as The Upward Path

20 Thursday Jun 2013

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Everyday Propaganda

It is commonplace to claim that mass communication (education and religious indoctrination are also mass communications) has a psychologically controlling effect on the populations it reaches, especially in technologically advanced nations where the ambience of persuasive messages is intense and constant. That claim is generally understood and there is a certain amount of common sense recognition of mass media influence accomplished by the application of advanced research in social science, especially by commercial interests but also in support of the political agendas of groups and individuals with great wealth, since crafted mass communication is within the reach only of great wealth.

Every publisher or broadcaster, as well as every school board and pulpit, has an editorial policy which always picks a worldview to promote, and always expresses the hopes, fears, and beliefs of owners, investors, or funding source, whose interests are never to reveal disinterested truth, or even just to make an honest buck. Editorial policies merge into broad codes of political correctness, often unstated but distinctly enforced. Concentration of ownership and funding in journalism, entertainment, and cultural industries generally, means a uniformity of political correctness, consisting of opinions that may be said safely, facts that may be mentioned safely in public conversations or presentations, the unspoken rules of a discourse, altogether creating an edited and artificial model of reality. It is no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that always influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology by which the ruling faction of a community legitimizes its privileges also has profound influence on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly, and so on the thinking considered reasonable. There is no other plausible reason for anyone to edit and alter reality by creating discourses of political correctness, to be so dedicated to maintaining control over others by all means necessary, than to legitimize specific forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Consequently, one thing always excluded from respectable discourse is top-down human-on-human parasitism.

Private ownership of the means of production in itself does not tell the story of capitalism. It is also necessary to recognize that ownership is the same thing as wealth, wealth equals income-generating ownership, and since the vast proportion of wealth is concentrated in about 1% of the population, the private ownership of means of production is concentrated in that 1%. Now that is a story of inequality of control and so of parasitism.

The Matrix

Maybe the best artistic metaphor of mass thought control was in the movie The Matrix (released in 1999, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving). In the dystopian future depicted in the movie, the brain of every human is supplied electronically with impressions of a fictitious reality by a vast system of computer-based artificial intelligence. The deception permits the artificial intelligence to carry on a secure parasitism, drawing for itself the energy from human bodies. The vision is not unlike that of Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716), in which completely isolated person-monads (individual minds) are supplied by God with impressions of an eventful external world which does not otherwise exist. In Leibniz’s vision the interiority of monadic minds is the medium in which God creates the best of all possible worlds, all pre-determined.

In the actual world of the present, the system works by getting people to identify with the interests of oligarchs, but not in a straightforward way. Take a soldier in battle, for example. The deceptions and propaganda involved in persuading him into the foxhole effectively reduce him to a slave, enslaved by being conditioned to believe that he is heroically resisting enslavement. That is a tricky operation involving layers of deception. People are persuaded to identify with a fictitious superhuman collective entity which is effectively controlled as a parasite’s host by semi-covert oligarchs, as a projection and expression of the ethos and will of those oligarchs, and institutionalizing their parasitism.

To end war, pass a law requiring that the owners of the most wealth and property to protect, say people in families with net worth greater than five million dollars, must be the nation’s protective combatants, must serve in the military roles most in harm’s way, as grunts, marines, paratroopers, and front line troops.

The Downward Path, the Upward Path*

Although the effectiveness of commercial, religious, and political propaganda is generally accepted, there is not very much discussion about how and why the illusory reality constructed by mass media was founded nor about how to break out of it to a better alternative, and there is certainly no consensus on a reliable process by which to escape its influence. That’s where the idea of ‘the upward path’ kicks in. The idea of ‘the downward path and the upward path’ is a metaphor borrowed from ancient theories of reincarnation, where it refers to narratives of the soul’s descent, on the downward path, into entrapment in the illusions of time and material embodiment, and then what an individual must do to rise above that entrapment on the upward path. In the present context, the downward path refers to the historical conquests and evolving influence of parasitic animal herding cultures from the semi-desert pastures of the world. They subjected the human communities they assaulted to the same parasitism they had imposed on herds of migratory grass-eating animals, but to stabilize their human parasitism they found it necessary to construct distortions of reality through cultural doctrines which legitimized their parasitism, such as wildly exaggerated criteria of individual merit and identity based on their nomadic cowboy ideal of masculine accomplishment, alpha-trophy-looting masculinity. The upward path refers to what must be done to rise above the illusions, especially illusions of personal identity, constructed by the current carriers of the ancient parasitic cultural legacy, controllers of mass media, religion, and education. The upward path is not a common sense idea, but in the present context involves cultivating elemental innocence, elemental orientation, and the application of what is learned in innocence.

* 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. See page 41, but read the whole book.

Philosophy is a scholarly tradition, including a considerable body of literature, with a history of engagement in political struggles for individual freedom of thought such as in the historical movement called the Enlightenment, for example. That scholarly tradition is at present barely clinging to the outer margins of respectability because of current academic fashions, but some of it is worth dusting off in the context of resisting the thought control created by mass communication.

There are two realities “hidden in plain sight” which are made recognizable by philosophy’s elemental thinking. The first is the transcendence of individual intelligence in its conceiving futurity, thereby creating freedom and grounding personal identity in an interiority of intelligence. The second is patterns of human-on-human parasitism, legitimized in violation of that fundamental identity of intelligences-as-such. Philosophical thinking enables recognition of those two “hidden” realities by fostering a search for the elemental grounding of intelligence-as-such, and in doing so developing an orientation which is independent of any culture. It is a monumentally important fact that intelligence exists only in individual embodied units, individual persons, but champions of communitarian power and cultural authority always resist that elemental truth.

Historically, there have been strong streams of philosophy with a focus on individual intelligence as identity, beginning most clearly in the humanism of ancient Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. The significance of philosophical studies of the interiority of intelligence such as Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and much of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is that they show the grounding of pre-cultural identity in individual intelligences, in every individual person. They show that the interiority of intelligence is not a mere screen but is instead a particular and original force and power with a great deal of independent originality, a grounding of every person’s innocent identity. That provides a fundamental means of evaluating the injustice of identity definitions derived from ambient culture, a means to recognize and understand the political entrapment those identity definitions impose and enforce on individuals. People cannot be seen as equal because of the identity definitions imposed by their cultural situation.

The philosophical search for grounding in intelligence-as-such gets started by the personal experience of culturally derived negations of an intuition of transcendence, an intuition that is often only semi-conscious and unidentified. The intuition of transcendence is normally resisted by ambient cultural discourses, cultural “correctness” concerning a focus on economic practicalities, traditional religious beliefs, and specific political possibilities. Communities certainly recognize the individual intuition of transcendence, and normally arrange to channel it into external and formalized expressions of spirituality and religion controlled by top-down hierarchies. Dissatisfaction with such externalizations can inspire a personal search for clarity on the conflict between culture and personal innocence.

The subjective intuition of transcendence can be an interior force which is offended by culturally assigned personal identity definitions drained of transcendence to accomplish a complete immersion in established patterns of economic inequality which always normalize and attempt to legitimize top-down parasitism. The upward path out of a thought controlling environment begins with recognizing the identity theft involved in the imposing of such cultural identity definitions. Authentic identity is something that indisputably belongs to each individual and nothing justifies repressing it. The fundamental parasitism of the cultural regime is evident in the hierarchical placement intrinsic to definitions of personal identity assigned to people. When you are looking at the people around you for their original intelligence as definitive of their personal identity, then it becomes obvious that the identity designations assigned them by the socio-cultural system are distortions of and constraints on their intelligence and so also on their freedom. You can see the injury and insult that results. If you want to evade the psychological control and conditioning of mass media and “politically correct” journalism, entertainment, religion, and education then think past the evaluative definitions of personal identity assigned to people, and instead find the elemental ground of equality, which is the transcendence of individual intelligence-as-such.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

A Journey into Elemental Innocence

02 Sunday Jun 2013

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The Perfection of the West

We know now what fully formed, perfectly realized western civilization looks like. We see the realization of the promises of monotheistic religion, professional scholarship and research, law, high art, professional journalism, mass media, popular culture, science, technology, industry and free market commerce. The final destiny of all these cultural treasures is fully on display in the 21st century USA, the America of Bush and Obama, in its acts as a nation: arrogant, brutally violent, contemptuous of law, treacherous, perfidious, fair of speech but foul of act, secret and covert, obsessed with weapons and intimidating force, internally celebrating a gloating dominance of the few super rich over the rest and expressing the same spirit externally by malevolent manipulation of outsiders, with an economy based on war, addictions, and financial industry profiteering on insider technology, insider knowledge, and rigged markets; operator of assassination drones, offshore and secret prisons, torture chambers. Here is the highest creation of human history so far, and surely it represents the ultimate failure of the threads of culture just mentioned.

We know from this outcome that capitalist nation-states and their economies are controlled by crime families, since corporations and nation states such as the USA are blatantly acting out the crime family ethos. Nothing about this is difficult to observe. The most advanced and enlightened nation-states are exact expressions and projections of the forces controlling them, and who those forces are is written plainly in the actions of those nations. Ordinary citizens generally, people nurturing children, are certainly not enthusiastic about war, bullying, selective and arbitrary law enforcement, or casual murder, for example. The disappointing outcome is not a result of abuses of power by isolated rotten apples, by corrupt individuals, nor even a straightforward cabal, but rather it is the consequence of a culture which is broadly and deeply entrenched in the whole human interconnectedness. If cultural communities other than the Euro-American had specialized in harnessing the powers of nature through advancing science, the outcome would have been much the same, since all are similarly devoted to radical inequality, between men and women, for example.

What of Culture has to Go, and What’s Left in Innocence

In the course of the last several posts we have been able to swept away the personal identity definitions derived from culturally poisoned ethnic backgrounds, gender, nationality, personal economic function, competition results, trophies, and height in counterfeit meritocracies. We have swept away the warped ideals of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, swept away tools of social control consisting of fables of disembodied-super-persons and fictitious personifications of collectives, swept away insignia, logos, mottoes, badges, titles, uniforms, and uniform postures and gestures. (Is this an adventure yet?) We have swept away the fiction that voting every four or five years is enough bottom-up political force to constitute effective sovereign power by the majority of voters. Now, having swept away so much that is sometimes stipulated as necessary for a happy and meaningful life, we are in a position to recognize that there is still lots to work with at a more elemental and pre-cultural (innocent) level of experience. Great swaths of poisoned culture are thus expendable without risking nihilism. We still have a set of features of individual intelligences, for example, including transcendent freedom.

Transcendence and Worship

Worship is not the appropriate response to the actual transcendence of ordinary intelligences. Worship looks like a desperate attempt to manage a powerful narcissist alpha-father transformed into a fable of cosmic force. It is begging for favour and mercy from the angry father figure. Sweep all that away. The appropriate response to the transcendent freedom of personal intelligence is the enjoyment of freedom. The cultural forms of externalized transcendence are forms of idolatry, a worship of fraudulent gods, false gods.

Elemental Innocence

What remains, the elements to recognize and live with, must include the transcendent interiority of individual intelligences, which is beyond the measuring instruments of science. The set that includes that could be called philosophical elements: nature (beautiful to an intelligent beholder, but relentlessly dislocating as determined in a way we might call entropy), embodied intelligences (each with an interiority without appearance), the interconnectedness of intelligences (straightforward communication and artifacts of culture being noticed, interpreted, and imitated), and culture. Nature, culture, and individual intelligences are not pure elements in themselves but more like elemental categories of reality. Each contains complexity.

The Elemental Category: Intelligences

The Interiority of Time

Every individual has direct access to the basic elements of being in a life, such as time as a construct of non-actuality. Both philosophers and scientists are generally unhelpful and even hopeless on the issue of the relentless dislocation that is the experience of nature in time. That applies even to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who otherwise made admirable contributions to understanding the interiority of intelligence, for example in his phenomenology of caring in Being and Time (1927), notwithstanding that his focus on monistic Being inclined him toward legitimizing parasitic Nazism.

Elemental Ontology of Time:
The Non-Actuality of The Interiority of Intelligence, basis of Freedom

The idea of the interiority of intelligence is required as a way to recognize some crucial non-actuality in the experience of time. For example, memory of the past is not an actual past (since the past does not actually exist, is categorically excluded from existing by the actuality of the present), but is instead a non-actual past in a bearing or orientation constructed by an intelligence. So, consideration of time in experience requires the idea of non-actuality in memory and in future aspiration. Intelligence is a force that actively adjusts a bearing with a self-constructed and non-actual past, and a future of mutable possibilities and probabilities, all non-actualities, which it is continuously building into a life. Since everything exterior to intelligences is the strictly measurable actuality of nature, the non-actuality in the experience of time requires the idea of an interiority of intelligence outside nature, defined by its non-actuality. (Some would call it idealist non-actuality.) It is the non-actuality of the interiority of intelligence which makes freedom possible and actual.

Plato, Illusion, Time, and Non-Actuality

Plato claimed that time is a realm of illusion (experienced in the futile strivings of appetites and competitive spirit), and the view of elemental innocence being presented here claims that the experience of time requires non-actuality of a kind peculiar to intelligences, so both views connect the experience of time with forms of non-actuality. This is an old philosophical idea. “Illusion” could be a prejudicial way of describing a non-actual construct of intelligence. Plato does not give individual intelligences credit for constructing the illusion, the non-actuality of temporal becoming (credit for constructing it, for example, from a power to escape the brute particularity of nature, to create freedom). Instead, for Plato, the realm of the illusion of becoming is a trap and a prison for intelligences, a trap constructed by a divine intelligence which Plato calls the Demiurge. So for Plato, the non-actuality of time is a trap or test originating from beyond the power of individual intelligences. Contrary to Plato, however, it is the non-actuality of the interiority of intelligence which makes freedom a reality, because it is not imposed on individual intelligences from some exterior power, but instead is constructed internally by every intelligence from a power and an intent to overcome the brute particularity of nature, to transcend nature by creating freedom. It seems that Plato was well aware that time is crucial for intelligence, but he equated the transcendence of intelligence with an escape from time into contemplation of unchanging eternity, that is with an escape from ordinary life. The Christian heaven/ afterlife is like Plato’s high contemplation in being presented as a higher realm of timeless eternity where the human essence is ultimately fulfilled. There certainly was direct influence from Plato to Christianity. However, we now recognize that the transcendence of intelligence is in the ordinary freedom of building a life in time, involving a transcendence that is normally obscured by cultural and political forces.

Epicurean Mindfulness

There is a lot in common between Plato’s conception of the fulfillment of human nature as escape from ordinary life (into a contemplation of unchanging “ideal” eternity) and the obsession of various religions with an imagined afterlife. Both reject ordinary life in the world of time as a lost cause of torment, confusion, and deception. In both cases the best human destiny is to deny life in the world as much as possible and fixate on some other “higher” condition to be achieved by a transitional process such as death, complete loss of self. Historically, Epicureans were the best at embracing the immediacy of living a life. They were in favour of enjoying physical comforts and joys as part of a sustainable and fulfilling life. They found the greatest pleasure in a sort of mindfulness that includes the context and consequences of any immediate action or life situation, and found that individuals make the most of their innate freedom by practicing that mindfulness of the transcendence of freedom. After Epicureanism, modern secularism is the most committed to embracing life in the world of time, and can no longer make much sense of a higher realm of eternity, but modern secularism lost recognition of the transcendence of intelligence, offering nothing better than the disenchantment of “natural selection” as the principle of survival.

Freud’s Variation

To illustrate the enduring influence of Plato’s vision of the interiority of intelligence, it is only necessary to recognize that Freud’s model of the id-ego-superego is a modern recapitulation. Plato’s contemplative rationality, outside time, at the top of the subjectivity pyramid, is replaced in Freud’s version by a psychological internalization of public models of propriety and authority, a considerable reduction of transcendence in the experience of individuals, reflecting the counter-revolutionary Victorian repression that was culturally supreme in Freud’s Europe, but more generally recognizing the heavy influence of ambient culture on every individual. Freud was, in his way, a continental rationalist who constructed a formal system of analysis for the forces of Romantic irrationality in the interiority of intelligences. Freud, a man of science, did not offer an analysis of time.

The Elemental Category: Culture and History

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnectedness of embodied intelligences. Culture has been constructed in history by actions of human groups and individuals in increasingly remote past times. History has to be included as a dimension of culture since particular intelligences within particular geographical circumstances had such a profound force in creating history’s peculiarities, and the history created so haphazardly has profound influence on all newly arriving intelligences. Top-down human-on-human parasitism is elemental in history, although it is accidental, manifesting itself in an extreme and eccentric culture of masculinity provoking gender-culture conflict, social class plate tectonics, and externalized definitions of personal identity to legitimize radical inequality. Violence against women is normally an expression of top-down human-on-human parasitism of a most blatant kind. The culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism has exerted heroic efforts to perpetuate itself through creating a cultural appearance of legitimacy, a legitimizing explanation of itself. The elemental category of culture is consequently tainted, including a whole nexus of distortions of reality which connect to form a zombie reality and individual zombie shells through which people project a distorted representation of their intelligence. (Please review the legacies itemized in posting 57, March 21, 2013, Cartesian First Philosophy and The Elemental Hazmat Suit, and the distortions of reality itemized in posting 58, April 4, 2013, Living in Zombie-Land.)

The interior self is being-as-intelligence, being-as-freedom, constructing a life in the nature of time. That interiority, in a condition of self-possession, is an effective hazmat suit for venturing out safely into the poisoned culture that plagues the human interconnectedness. The hazmat suit is inherent happiness from experience of the freedom of intelligences, or you could say the transcendence of intelligences, since transcendence and freedom are not separate. There is a certain happiness that comes of being in a world in which transcendence is experienced immediately at close hand, in the miracle of the non-actuality in time. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendent freedom of intelligences. This is one way in which it becomes possible to think that war, slavery, and human-on-human parasitism in all its forms can be ended.

Some knowledge is necessary for the elemental hazmat suit. Historical knowledge of the arc of human parasitism is a good example. So the innocence of pre-linguistic experiences of re-orienting to philosophical elements has to be combined with some knowledge of history. Also crucial is a new approach to engaging with human-to-human interconnectedness, based on both empathy and knowledge of the poisoned culture.

Elemental orientation is political, partly because recognizing top-down parasitism, the root source of profound cultural distortions of reality, is always discouraged by agents and symbols of social, economic, and political hierarchy; and partly because elemental thinking transcends whatever identity, status, or social position has been assigned to you by an ambient culture riddled with (falsely) legitimized top-down parasitism. The political reason that individual freedom matters is that it includes freedom to live and think elementally. You are inherently free to re-make your self-definition and your relationships without practicing or excusing parasitism, to sweep away the great swaths of poisoned culture listed at the beginning of this posting. You are also free to recognize parasitism even in its legitimized and institutionalized forms. A sense of adventure comes with leaving behind the assumptions of resigned ordinariness crafted to suit the current regime of parasite culture. That sense of ordinariness inevitably sucks the wonder and joy from the human condition. There is a mystery to personal transcendence, a happiness, that is obscured by the ordinariness of life in zombie culture.

The Elemental Category: Nature

The existence of nature does not prove or require the existence of gods or a god. All that can be said about the cosmos as a whole, other than strictly scientific measurements, is something like this: Inexplicably, there is something instead of nothing, and it seems that the various features and complexities of that something constitute a single whole in some sense. The anomalous feature is a discontinuity between the wholeness of beautiful but unintelligent nature, brute, predetermined actuality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the interiority of intelligences, each its own universe of non-actuality outside nature. In spite of that radical discontinuity, it is undeniable that actuality and those multitudes of non-actualities are profoundly entangled through the embodiment of intelligences. The non-actuality of intelligences is routinely projected onto the shapes of actuality, and brute actuality contains materials that unreliably sustain and restrict the intelligences, who are otherwise discontinuous interior universes.

Elemental embodiment is brought into focus easily from experiences of work, as explored in the four postings focused on working.
Posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky
Posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture
Posting 45, November 21, 2012, Working
Posting 10, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality

Outward Bound

Keep in mind that the zombie world does not want to be changed, is insulted by the very idea, and takes offence at any suggestion that reality is different from what is commonly believed. From within the zombie shells of culture-assigned identities, a comfort zone of thinking within a specific political correctness, it is very difficult to recognize the simple realities identified here, including the lack of sovereignty achieved by elections of party-offered candidates every four or five years and that the resulting vacuum of sovereignty is filled by a shifting confederacy of capitalist crime families expressing a value system of parasitic brutality. The brutal tools and forces of supra-personal sovereignty are all at the command of that semi-covert plutocracy of war-profiteers, so resisting must be done strategically. In any case, think this through for the wonder of elemental intelligence.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror

04 Saturday May 2013

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Something as catastrophic as, and quite analogous to, a zombie apocalypse happened a long time ago, and not just once but in many historical times and places. The enduring effect of those catastrophes is that individuals are culture-bound into conventional zombie shells of collective and personal identity, and as such, shut out from our own elemental transcendence as intelligences. That is why philosophical thinking exists and has a purpose.

What the celebrated French academic Michel Foucault (1926-84) got right is that knowledge, culture-derived knowledge, is riddled with covert legitimations of a social structure of power inequality. For whatever reason, Foucault did not recognize that the structure of power inequality is a structure of human-on-human parasitism, and that its parasitism renders all legitimations of the power structure false and deceptive. The social and cultural entrenchment of that structure of parasitic power inequality was the zombie apocalypse relevant here, the legitimation of which has poisoned human cultures by forcing externally controllable identity definitions (zombie shells) on everyone, identities which are all embedded as rankings in the hierarchy of benefits from parasitic power.

Philosophy is Happy Thought (Seriously)

Political reality in this post-zombie-apocalypse world of entrenched human parasitism is undeniably grim and violent, and improvements such as ending war, for example, seem pretty hopeless. There would have to be some seriously profound and unexpected circumstances, something really surprising, to inspire happiness and hope in the face of knowing the nasty truth of political power. Well, it happens that there is: the happy thought is intelligence, individual intelligence. Intelligence isn’t best represented by abstract operations such as deductive logic, mathematics, or the memorization of long texts, but more by, for example, enjoying music. Music is a presentation or performance of sound patterns that can be represented mathematically but which engage intelligence sensually and pre-symbolically, make immediate sense to an intelligence, and yet have no coherence, sense, or shape without being experienced by an intelligence. (Luca Turin argues conclusively that perfume also works by appealing directly to intelligence.) This is the sense in which intelligence is the political happy thought. The political happy thought is not special intelligence, but ordinary personal subjective intelligence.

The big happy thought to launch against the grim realities of politics is the same as it was in the historical Enlightenment era: individual intelligence, with something like Greek-style humanist philosophy as a rough guide to recognizing the elemental reality in which intelligence plays. It is worth emphasizing that the philosophical happy thought is not a theory or an ideology itself but instead a certain personal re-orientation to elemental reality. Philosophical writing is meant only as a guide to self-recognition as an intelligence (as a sort of mirror for something which has no appearance and is not a thing), to self-recognition as an intelligence even though you prefer listening to music to working on math or logic problems. Holding such a mirror is pointless unless it works to uncover the invisible self, and then the mirror becomes unnecessary. It turns out that elemental reality, beyond the reality-distorting force-fields of cultures which are poisoned by legitimations of human parasitism, has many surprises.

The Particularity of Personal Intelligences

Intelligence, elemental intelligence, innocent intelligence, is not featureless or profoundly opaque. For Plato, for example, every intelligence had some particular proportions of three inalienable aspects: acquisitive appetite; competitive spirit or ambition; and abstract, mathematical rationality or reflective contemplation. Plato’s conception of intelligence is not ridiculous (good of me), but it contains a fatal problem (to be specified below) because it was conceived in the context of accounting for the hierarchical class divisions in the society of ancient Greece, a slave-labour based society. Waves of the zombie apocalypse were already in the rear-view mirror of Plato’s time and its legitimations were already well entrenched.

Notwithstanding Plato, an all-at-once unity of the following experiences, cannot be separated from any intelligence:
Being located in relentlessly dislocating time, in a particular embodied life in time, within constructs of a non-actual past and an increasingly improbable future;
Curiosity;
Doubt and questioning of future, past, present;
Striving to project particular personal aspirations onto present and future actuality (acting on curiosity, for example);
Striving to enjoy the powers and sensitivities of intelligence, to remember and recognize patterns in an increasingly remote past, to think into the increasingly improbable future, to play, to imitate, and to engage with the directional force or orientation of other intelligences (in part by imitation and play);
Striving to make a distinctively personal mark on the world, make some of it a belonging, personal, a home;
Striving to enjoy the powers and sensitivities of embodiment, to taste, feel, and grip the world, to feed on it, to pass through the world.

That’s a lot of pre-cultural or innocent particularity of position, force, and quality or character, enough for a pre-cultural personal identity, and enough to enable a critique of culture from outside culture. Consciousness is no crystalline simplicity of openness or reflection, but instead is always constructed from an increasingly remote past and an increasingly improbable future. As such, it is always a construct of temporal non-actuality by an intelligence. Behind Plato’s three part soul stands a view of time itself as a realm of illusion, with reality reserved for what is eternal and outside time. However, Plato admitted mind into eternity through mind’s contemplative power, and in doing so makes his position incoherent, since intelligence and time are inseparable. If Plato means “intelligence” by the ancient Greek expression he used for mind, then he had passed into self-contradiction.

A big surprise is that, because of intelligences, there is such a thing as creative non-actuality (which science cannot even conceive) in an elemental relationship with the widely celebrated actuality of measurable nature. Personal orientation is a fabric of non-actuality and since there are individually distinctive and creative features in orientation (such as personal aspirations for a future with a particular mutability), every intelligence is a separate universe of non-actual orientation. As an intelligence, you are continuously re-locating yourself within a personal universe of non-actuality locked in an elemental relationship with the strictly exclusive actuality of a continuously dislocating nature. As a creative fountain of non-actuality, actively mutating actuality, you are transcendent with respect to brute pre-determined nature.

External Alienation of Transcendence

The subjective experience of being an intelligence, a fountain of effective non-actuality, is the only evidence there is for transcendence in the whole of cosmic being. The other phenomena sometimes suggested as evidence of transcendence, mathematics, the night sky, beauty, the accumulated knowledge and power of human collectives, are all either artifacts of ordinary embodied intelligences or obvious projections of some impression of intelligence for the purpose of providing an easy explanation for phenomena which are merely not understood and so frightening, a sort of “here be dragons” on unknown regions of old maps. However, the reality of the transcendence of ordinary intelligence is almost universally contradicted by cultural traditions preserving a social structure of parasitic power inequality, and it is not difficult to think why.

The two main clusters of distortions-of-reality in this, namely false transcendence in personifications of abstract legal fictions (school spirit, national spirit, corporate brands) and in fables of disembodied super-intelligences (demons, ghosts, and gods), are projections of the basic fable of parasitic masculinity. Both are primarily externalizations of (and as such reality-denying alienations of) transcendence. Carriers and practitioners of the culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity find subjectivity too indeterminate, too ephemeral, too private for the purpose of establishing alpha-status and justifying a chain of servitude, and so unworkable as a foundation for competitive personal identity definition. It’s also too equal from one person to another, or at least it’s indeterminacy makes it possible that it might be equal from person to person, and so, again, personal intelligence is ineffective as a public marker of victory or other trophy accomplishments. From within the logic of competitive masculinity, transcendence must be external to individuals so that it can be the ultimate un-equalizer, consecrating every conquest, every victory, every trophy. As the ultimate ground of inequality, externalized transcendence is perfectly depicted as a disembodied version of the powerful, mysterious, and capricious father, inspiring terror in everyone. Being masters of the ground by virtue of force and the wealth that parasitic force accumulates, practitioners of the warped ideal of parasitic masculinity are in a position to dictate cultural practices, to decree a cultural submission to fables of the frightening father in the sky, for example. That is how the real transcendence of individual intelligences is buried and hidden under layers of cultural conventions, traditions, practices, and things people always say and teach to children.

There is nothing necessary about that cultural ideal of masculinity. It comes from a particular, very marginal, historical origin, the cowboy culture of animal herding on semi-barren wastelands. What only feminist writers and the feminist movement more generally got right (what women know in their bones) is that gender culture is the heart of profound injustices in human social systems.

Externalized transcendence in all forms is an example of the large body of culturally imposed fables and false values that result from alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, all of which can be cleared away by anyone’s thinking, cleared away to disclose the elemental situation of intelligence. The two top-down ideologies of modern power inequality, plutocratic predator-prey theory and business/ professional ‘meritocracy of economic atoms’ theory, are both just different presentations of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity. Predators are economic atoms understood in a simplified-to-bare-bones context. In thinking the elemental situation of intelligence, clear away all the disembodied spirits, the demons, ghosts, guardian angels, collective spirits of peoples, states, tribes, teams, and all such personified abstractions, leaving individual intelligences, in the relationships they build as intelligences, to engage with nature in creating sustainable and gratifying lives.

The way to deal with the myriad of different cultures is not to respect every one equally, but to reject every one equally, at least to the extent that they impose non-transcendent identities onto individuals, or grant individuals a second class, derivative sort of transcendence. We don’t want another French Revolution (which obviously didn’t succeed), but rather an event that reverses the zombie apocalypse, that voids the distortions of reality imposed by poisoned cultures, something more like the historical Enlightenment. The European historical movement known as the Enlightenment is especially interesting because it connected personal or subjective changes of orientation with cultural and political arrangements in European society, and did so in such a way that individual initiatives of the former kind formed a foundation for profound renovations of the latter.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.