Gender Culture in the Political Situation

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

The international financial collapse of 2008 completely revealed the contemporary high culture of leadership. The undeniably world-class leaders of the biggest financial corporations in world history, along with the political leaders of the most powerful nations in world history, could think of nothing better than to use any means at hand to get back to the way things were before, as quickly as possible, all the while denying all responsibility for any problems. Creative reform for accountability and transparency was ridiculed as impractical.

As such a fresh and vivid example illustrates, what keeps the whole social system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, habits repeated unthinkingly, traditions, sometimes encouraged by appeals to popular misconceptions such as “we’re all in this together”, “people reap what they sow”, “our political representatives have our best interests at heart”, or “there is a meritocracy of the most competent people in control”. However, even more important than habit, tradition, and popular misconceptions, is the interconnectedness of intrinsically rewarding human attachments learned within the female-managed nexus of first-language acquisition, child nurture, play, unconditional love, practical support and care, sharing, and mutuality. Please see below, blog posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations for some elaboration of nurture culture. Those are the binding forces of social systems, a framework within which ordinary individuals work at building interesting and sustainable lives, and in doing so keep production and support systems working. Recognition of these foundations of societies is the root system of left-wing political thinking and the reason it can be described generally as “bottom-up” politics.

It is remarkable then, that the extraordinary cultural emphasis on leadership reveals a worldview in which it is a superstructure of leaders who hold the social and economic system together. In the discourse of management/ professional ideology, it is leadership which brings a community together and makes it function, and in doing so sustains and benefits everybody to the degree possible given the specific powers and impediments that individuals bring with them. The leader is presented as bringing people into effective accord by displaying superior energy and dedication, hard work and a work ethic, optimism, self-confidence, self-knowledge, communication and visioning skill, prudent judgment, strategic plans, in sum a tower of strengths upon which others can fix their gaze and be inspired together. This ideology of leadership is the taproot of right-wing political thinking, and the reason it counts as “top-down” politics. That this is an especially alpha-male cultural product reveals that the key to differences between leftist and rightist policies is not class war based on wealth inequality but instead it is gender culture.

There is a deeper layer to the culture of leadership. There is an assumption that leadership is so essential and effective that it brings into being a sort of singularity, a version of the idea of divine power, a power of sovereignty. In the case of sovereignty, the divine entity is “the nation”, “the people”, a social collective united into a “more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” creature, superhuman and even supernatural, meriting privileges, powers, and licenses that no individual can claim on his or her own, such as sending people to death in war, or deliberately exposing them to dangerous living and working conditions generally. Sovereignty is an extraordinary abstract power imagined to reside in a supra-individual social entity, and it is often invoked to create a warm glow of uncritical belonging in residents of a geographical area, sometimes with a uniformity of culture, language, and ethnicity, but more often not. (In appealing to the warm glow of interconnectedness, leaders are stealing credit for the nexus of first language acquisition, which is really created by people who nurture children.) For achieving the magisterial feat of leadership, the stars of the system take credit for creating legitimate power over life and death, and entitlement to act beyond law and morality to whatever extend they may wish.

People talk about “rising above” or “getting beyond” the political division between the left wing and the right wing, but beneath that division are profound conflicts which are standard features of human communities. Due to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) there is elaborate ideology basing the left-wing orientation in the working class of industrial societies. Left-wing political activists do their best to represent the interests of people who must earn a living by working for wages. However, placing exclusive emphasis on the worker – capitalist relationship is a vast oversimplification, and has been used to cast leftist ideals into disrepute as merely the politics of envy.

Plural Conflicts

Certainly there is an opposition between those families who can live from ownership and those who must live from working for wages. Working for wages is a life-warping burden. However, a far more pervasive and longstanding conflict is between an especially masculine trophy culture and an especially feminine culture of child nurture. There is also a structural conflict between generations, between people old enough to be approaching the last stages of life in opposition to those in the first stages of life. Young people generally are still carrying memories of the female managed culture of nurture, and without having been bent out of shape by irresistible incentives and rewards, have little but an innate sense of justice to guide them.

Appeals to “family values” sound like bottom-up politics, but in fact refer to family values as perceived by the alpha-male focused patriarchal family. The female managed first-language-nurture culture tends to ignore family separations and instead creates informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. It is the culture of predatory masculinity which insists on using family groups as rigid stand-alone cells, reminiscent of the alpha-male harem social organization of gorillas, for example. Again, gender culture illuminates the political alternatives.

Groundwork of Political Dualism

The domestic nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. In addition, the domestic nexus always had a competitive alpha-structure to struggle against. The agenda of that trophy-winning superstructure has always been to use the commonality of people to fight wars, cook, clean, work plantations, mines, and assembly lines; and to have them part with their wages to borrow money, land, or a roof. Problems with that result from the retrograde culture of norms and values cultivated by the alpha-structure. The gender culture of novelty seeking masculinity could be progressive, but is exactly the opposite because of historical courses of development.

Alpha Trophy Ideology

The most glamourous culture of masculinity has its source in the ancient life of nomadic animal herders, a variety of cowboy. Ever since human communities began to abandon the nomadic life of gathering and hunting and created surpluses of vital resources, wonders of physical culture, and records of wisdom, their outlying surroundings of still nomadic peoples were drawn in to loot. An important part of the attraction of looting is to avoid having to live by daily work. A whole system of masculine pride was founded on living by other people’s work. It was the high point of accomplishment to murder rival males, destroy what property could not be used and take the rest, including women. Looting is inseparable from mass murder, rape, and enslavement, and those are still attractions of war. Empire building is nothing more than sustained looting. A remnant of the romance and pride of looting exists in the glorification of trophies won in competitive sport, and fortunes won from financial speculation.

Nomadic tribes that devised ways of surviving by animal herding often turned that parasitic technique onto communities of human farmers and city-dwellers. The cowboys became aristocrat estate owners. Social control by aristocracies, warrior-estate families, derives from that innovation. It was capitalism within the context of a rural agrarian production system. Settled aristocracies had the same values as the nomadic herders from whom they descended, values limited to maintaining a life of manly fun, competitive pride, pleasure, power, and risk-braving-adventure, not much different from capitalist elites. We see in ‘crime families’ of the mafia the identical cultural pattern still being re-created. Some families conceive extraordinary ambition and devote their energies to achieving ever more control of resources by whatever means they can get away with. In pre-modern times ambitious families controlled private armies to enforce their possession of lands. Armed violence was their source and refuge. Their focus was protecting and expanding their private property by organized and cultured violence. Their culture was built around organizing subordinated persons into gangs to carry out looting and destruction of other peoples property as well as assaults, murders, and enslavements for the purpose of exercising possession. Other humans were often simply a feature of geography to these families, to be used or removed as needed. Such military families named themselves aristocratic and noble. The use of the term “crime family” here is a means of balancing the usual academic tendency, derived from an art-history “golly-wow” approach, to admire and project positive value on whatever was dominant and powerful, the glorification of winning and wealth as such. That approach is not objective or value-neutral, and merely accepts without question that victors are privileged voices in the telling of history.

Crime Families

The narrative at the core of crime family culture is that the senior members of the family are natural and legitimate authorities and supervisors, and that no authority is superior except possibly supernatural power. All other authorities are merely rivals and threats to the family’s power. Your family is “us” and everyone else is “them”. The vast resources of the family are there to reward and assist those who dedicate themselves loyally to protection and advancement of the family as envisioned and declared by the patriarch. The prizes are high status and influence in the family hierarchy, conspicuous and intimidating wealth, gestures of subordination from everyone, power over others, and immunity from criticism.

Crime families or warrior-estate families were serious organizations who based collective ambition for wealth and power on a core of blood relations aided by carefully selected servants of various ranks and functions. These organizations recognized no outside supervisory authority. They were powers and a law unto themselves, competing with other families of a similar kind for the greatest possible control of people and resources. In ancient Rome the patrician family patriarch was the sovereign law within the bounds of his estates, with power of life and death over his family, servants, slaves, and tenants. The only help or protection possible for any individual was from one family or another. Royal families of Medieval Europe were later examples of this type of cultured family. Their willingness to make war is an illustration of the normalization of violent assault in their culture, and much of the war and business they practiced was conducted covertly by spies, assassins, and agents provocateur. These were the families for whom Machiavelli’s The Prince was written. Another modern version is the capitalist or investor family, hoarding important capital wealth. The hoard is the central value, and the need to protect the hoard inclines such families to distrust whatever they do not control. The origin and continuing main support of the political right-wing is that crime family.

Two Groups

In the anarchy after the Romans abandoned the western regions of their empire, two groups wanted control of resources on a vast scale, including control of populations. The first was the collection of warrior-estate families, and the other was the organization of Christianity. Both were alpha-male culture pods, still carrying the alpha-glorifying cult of looting. Since the personnel of the Church were nominally celibate males without children, the upper offices of the hierarchy were recruited from warrior-estate families, and so the two cultures had a lot in common. Radical inequality was the focus of the former and collective belonging was the focus of the latter. Crime families and religious cults will always be the winners from anarchy, and both will be leader-centric, animated by the alpha-male legacy of looting culture, rallying people to devote their efforts for the ultimate benefit of the looters.

Warrior-estate families formed a league that combined brutal rivalry with the cultivation of inter-marriages and mutual support. In the middle ages the families who would eventually make a reality of sovereign power were working out their techniques. They were social fetuses which would grow into modern government. The focus of the collective based on this narrative is capital concentration and control, private property and a security apparatus for protecting the privately concentrated capital. Behind it all was still the culture of alpha-type males proceeding with continual war against all other alpha-type males, principally for the fun of it. Their families carried the culture of war and there was no limit to their cruelty in pursuit of supremacy. The general practice in medieval warfare was for armies to break into small units to carry out a widespread looting and burning of villages and crops in a deliberate creation of famine and disease. Sovereignty was focused on private property and securing its ownership by force.

The other cultural entity with aspirations toward total ownership of populations was the Christian Church, based most powerfully at Rome. The main focus of that theocratic engine of sovereignty was control of individual religious belief and obedience to dictates of the Church. Organizational unity over vast expanses, in addition to a grip on fundamental and universal fears, enabled the Church to attempt a theocracy in Medieval Europe. However, the Church was not strong enough to exercise sovereignty on its own. It required alliances with particular crime families and generally with the collective of crime families, the class of aristocrats. That combination developed, especially during the crusades, a military-Christian culture known as Chivalry, which provided great advantages to both groups. Patriarchs of religious ceremonies were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still carried the developing culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable, keeping records of costs, products, properties, distributions, and consumption. That uneasy alliance between religious and military cultures in the exercise of sovereignty is very ancient.

Historical Arc of Crime Families

The historical arc of crime families began with control of productive land by brute force, terrorism, and extortion. The power exercised by crime families went through a process of sanctification in the post-Roman history of Europe. Even before the full elaboration of chivalry, the Roman Church had a policy of placing bishops in the households of crime families to organize and advise, and enforce recruitment to the Church of everyone under the family’s power. That supernatural association had a legitimizing effect for the chosen families. The bond between Roman Christianity and power-families became deeply fused by the Crusades. The looting aristocracy of Europe created a new brutality in holy wars against the Islamic middle-east. That brutality was brought back to Europe fused with an outward enamel of religious ritual and pageantry.

This is not fable but history. The power vacuum, created by first bloating and then abandoning the Roman empire in western Europe, was filled by two groups: confederacies of crime families and the organization of Christianity, headquartered at Rome. In the course of the crusades those groups formed a partnership under the title Chivalry, superimposing symbols and pageants of divinity on the mechanisms and practices of lethal brutality, thus hatching the military-spiritual engine of sovereignty, gradually downloading the mechanisms of power to increasingly independent regional dynasties. Hierarchies of crime families and Christianity wanted populations to be devoted entirely to the systems which generated wealth, power, and a sense of superiority concentrated in the hierarchies. Crime families needed people to work the land and the mines, and the Church needed sinners to threaten and punish into begging for divine intervention, tweaking their odds by donating from the little they had. Each had their pageantry of superiority. Because the medieval alpha structure wanted populations to be totally devoted to serving the wealth and grandeur of the alpha-structure they did not want the commonality of individuals to be inwardly self-possessed through the creativity of their own subjectivity. Such a condition would distract from devotion to the very outward work of the hierarchies and possibly hatch rival organizations of effort and discourse, diverting energy, grandeur, and celebrity from the established order.

Such is the value nexus that established the culture of sovereign power and social control which we still take for granted as government. The two medieval groups supplying incumbents in power were replaced, in the course of the nineteenth century, by captains of business, finance, and industry as the economic organization of wealth came to base itself on energy from combustible minerals instead of on muscle-force from animals. The new captains remodeled sovereign culture slightly into the modern military-spiritual-industrial state. Captains of industry are much the same as their medieval counterparts, maintaining and elaborating systems of pageantry depicting their special importance and superiority. However, industrial captains could not claim divine appointment, and so had to arrange some fig-leaves of legitimacy through gestures of being accountable to the governed and being constrained by law. The ideology of sovereign control remained much as it was in medieval times. The notion of institutional hierarchy as the primary organizing principle of life is still a staple of market-society, and originates by direct lines of imitation from the ancient crime family.

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funneled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves economic and political control and the fruits of control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Employment is structured as a systematic psychological confinement. The reality-distorting demands of the alpha-stratum superstructure (detailed in blog posting 10, Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality) suppresses self-possession as a psychological and cultural commonplace. It isn’t that the alpha-structure knows anything about the creative freedom of subjective intelligence. It does not intend its strategic agenda specifically to deny that experience. Subjective intelligence is the blind spot of the alpha-stratum. The alpha-stratum acts as it does because it is immersed in the age-old culture of masculine pride and the value alpha-male trophy culture assigns to public displays of adulation. The history of leadership is in the refinement of a caricature of masculinity, pageantry of divine immunity proved by bravado displays of risk-defying, daredevil feats and victories, acting out sufficient contempt for personal danger to call up gasps and cheers of adoration from the crowd.

Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, there were beginnings of what promised to be real cultural change. However, whenever there was a life-style experiment which began to broaden the orientation grid of the commonality of people, such as the French Revolution of 1789 or the Baby-Boom Revolt of 1963-74, there has been a mighty backlash mounted to roll back the advances, so that wars can still be fought and transferrable wealth concentrated upward. There is nothing authentically transcendent in that masterly style-of-life. It has nothing to teach the commonality. It just needs to interfere in order to cling to its own sense of specialness. That alpha-structure sense of superiority is the only thing threatened by general self-possession. A luxurious and opulent style-of-life for a few is certainly not the problem. The problem is that the stratum which celebrates wealth addiction imposes an agenda of strategic control and interference with the discourse of the commonality of people.

By contrast, the history of nurture culture is in the chain of generations joining linguistic communities and getting on with life. To break the death-grip of war and refined forms of looting, to remove the disincentives and barriers to basic self-awareness, a way has to be found to limit the legacy of looting culture and greatly enlarge the influence of the nurture culture practiced by women. It will be necessary to devise a civil society and government based on nurture instead of on looting.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

The mission drift from escaping misery to escaping determinism for a profound experience of freedom developed with the gradual success of the project to remove disembodied personalities and intelligences, spirits, from descriptions of nature. The project eventually extended to human nature. The strength of the process became irresistible when combined with the modern reiteration of determinism by Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza attempted a thorough ‘disenchantment’ of nature. In his philosophy the world was completely pre-determined and unitary. All was one “God or Nature” and all features and events were considered logically necessary, like steps of a proof in geometry. There is some irony in the fact that Spinoza’s philosophy generally looks like a re-statement of Stoicism in terms of seventeenth century mathematical reasoning and emerging science, but it muted the Stoic emphasis on an individual spark of freedom.

The answer to scientific determinism was created by philosophers still working with the Stoic tradition of humanist rationalism. Stoic double-aspect theory, emphasizing a discontinuity between outward experience and inward experience, is crucial in their account of how freedom can be possible. The answer to this version of “How can freedom be possible?” is substantially this: Since the evidence for determinism is deliberately cherry-picked from a narrow range of experience, freedom still can be encountered directly as both possible and actual on the basis of an enlarged survey of experience.

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a providential Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. A realm within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated. A link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on inwardness is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the end of the Roman Empire in the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity was continued in the work of Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but it runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

The evidence for determinism is entirely outward, and selectively disregards, without convincing justification, the inward experience of immediate freedom. Spinoza did not demonstrate how inward freedom is reducible to the determinism of objective nature, but only declared his preference for pre-determination, in the spirit of Calvinism which was “going around” at the time.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Revival of Freedom

Kant was responding to Spinoza’s vision of total determinism, which still loomed as the central philosophical challenge a century after Spinoza’s death. Influenced by the rationalist tradition also via Leibniz, as well as by Rousseau and Hume, Kant argued that individuals are nearly trapped within our own psychology and our own creativity, and consequently have no perception of objective things-in-themselves. Leibniz and Hume had presented versions of that same isolation from nature, and in a sense Kant was trying to get the genie back into the bottle, trying to justify philosophical thinking and a life of duty and virtue within an orderly society even when ultimate Truth and Knowledge were not achievable. Kant was responding to Hume by following Hume’s own investigative procedure, which might be called reflexive self-consciousness, an intentional consciousness of the ordinary course of subjective activity and experience, with a special interest in distinguishing subjective contributions from those imposed on experience from outside subjectivity. The mental activity encountered by Kant in that process was far richer than what Hume had reported. For Kant, the apparently outer world of appearances or phenomena is not the be-all and end-all it appears to be, since the structure of phenomena is largely supplied by a perceiving subject, by requirements of any possible consciousness, such as a requirement to identify substances, space and time, cause and effect.

Freedom, and the Genie of Lower Human Nature

Kant’s work focused on freedom, very much following issues raised by Lutheran Protestantism. Kant’s identification of freedom used the subjective experience of moral choice as its occasion. There are moments when a person can be aware of the freedom to act either according to a principle that could be willed as a universal rule or entirely from immediate self-interest. In those moments a person can be aware of freedom to take the leap one way or the other. That moment of moral decision is direct acquaintance with freedom. On Kant’s view, exactly that freedom is the thing-in-itself as experienced inwardly. The ultimate principle is one thing-in-itself, freedom, as experienced directly by individuals in the subjectivity of their moral decisions. It is in stark contrast to the world of outward phenomena, the world of objects present in perception. In that outward world of measurement and science all is found to be determined by the principle of cause and effect. For Kant, phenomena (outward appearances) display a complete scientific determinism, but the moment of moral choice, the choice between acting from a universal principle of justice instead of from a self-gratifying impulse, can be experienced undeniably as freedom. The main duality in this vision seems to be between ‘inward’ experience of freedom and ‘outward’ experience of determinism, but the higher vs lower conflict is still present within inward experience. It is present in the alternatives the free chooser must consider: the moral rule or simple self-gratification. Of course in Kant a choice of the moral rule manifests the higher human nature, and self-interest a lower humanity. Since the exercise of moral freedom is transcendent for Kant, it is a vision of transcendence on the level of the individual.

Kant’s idealism, with freedom as thing-in-itself or metaphysical nature, reduced “body” or “substance” to a misunderstanding or a mistaken impression. Fundamental reality became spiritual or subjective, what it is that can exercise freedom. In Kant, the direct personal experience of freedom is immediate awareness of identity with the ultimate thing-in-itself. For a person facing a moral choice to be truly free, the leap one way and not another must be created in the instant of decision. The assertion of rationality was not dependent on cultural norms but on individual creativity. The free agency of subjectivity is identified with strategic rationality creating a balancing force against animal impulse. Acting on the principle was always the actuality of freedom, the higher power, in Kant, but it is especially discernible when noticed against a contrasting self-interested impulse. Acting on the principle would never happen on impulse, because a mental process of inventing a rule had to be accomplished first. So acting on the principle is always deliberate. Freedom requires creativity. The individual is the author of moral choices and actions. Creativity for Kant was not very colourful but it was fundamental and crucial, and his idealism rests on it.

Even though the impression human perceivers have of the objective world is pervaded with psychological contributions on Kant’s view, he remained convinced that the impression still bears some unidentifiable relation to a thing-in-itself which exists externally prior to being experienced. Consequently, even though there is inward experience of freedom in intelligence and outward determinism in nature, it is not legitimate to impose the system or principles of one side on the other to declare a tidy monism. You can’t justify an exclusive preference for inner experience or outer experience as the grounding of everything, since there is such a stark discontinuity between them. Embracing that irreducible discontinuity for the broader understanding it enables is exemplified also by the Stoic treatment of Logos, Luther and the inward leap of faith, and Schopenhaur’s explicit double-aspect reality.

Kant’s response to Spinoza and Hume, both of the latter ‘philosophizing’ aspects of Calvinism, inspired a great pulse of philosophical creativity, especially in Germany. Kant’s identification of a subjective experience of freedom inspired subsequent German idealism, Romanticism, and Existentialism all the way to Sartre at the middle of the twentieth century. In answering scientific determinism, romantic philosophers, originating with Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) tried imposing the inner subjective side of experience onto everything, in a mirror-image of Spinoza’s declaration of his preference for outward determinism. Fichte declared preference for the subjective aspect of experience as a revelation of fundamental cosmic nature. The claim is that it is less denying of important dimensions of experience, more inclusive of the richness of experience, to give preference to the inward side, subjective intelligence, than to declare an objectivist monism. In romanticism, whimsy and creative spontaneity were the portal to the individual’s freedom over stark scientific determinism. On the question of the relative merits of rationality as compared to bestial lusts and impulses, romantics departed from the mainstream of humanist rationalism by expressing a certain contempt for strict rationality and an admiration for nature, unrestrained energy, and boldly quirky individualism.

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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How can freedom be possible? Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

The Stoic answer is that individual freedom is achieved when a person cultivates and asserts his or her innate rationality. Rationality is difficult to define precisely, but there are fairly clear starting points. Rationality is linked to the quality of a person’s voice. A person’s voice is rational if it can be understood, matches norms of linguistic and logical competence, and shows a sense of relevance to the occasion. A person is rational when she can speak her mind and say what she means in a way others can understand. Rational thought can be spoken and understood by others. Existence in linguistic form gives it a kind of objectivity and graspability. It will hold its form while people reflect and evaluate. This is related to a broader meaning, something like “reasonable” or “in agreement with good sense.” Rationality stands up to reflective and collective evaluation and judgment. In addition, rational action, for example, demonstrates a functional awareness of the shapes, costs, and benefits in the natural and social environment. A person’s acts can be seen to have a reason.

Perhaps rationality is clearest in opposition to natural impulse, for example, an impulse to avoid working by simply stealing what you need. The account of Hobbes’s thinking in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era is exactly relevant to that point. ‘Will’ is the product of rational deliberation in evaluation of consequences, as distinct from merely following immediate inclination or impulse. Bestial reflex or impulse, pre-set by something like biological instinct, is not free, but acts of ‘will’ are discretionary expressions of deliberative calculation. Rationality empowers personal freedom by matching a person’s interests and expectations with the broader structures of the world and with verbal-linguistic accompaniments to acting in the world.

Stoicism was founded on experience of a personal force of mentality which can over-ride habit, appetite, first impressions, and impulsive passion or emotional response. Questioning those responses, delaying or denying action on them, magnifies consciousness of their force and of subjective forces which balance and modify them, specifically the force of rational intellect. That is strictly subjective virtue, a way to encounter subjectivity which bestows new meaning on appearances and objects.

Behind the common sense rationality of an efficient matching up of a person’s activities and vocal performances with features and occasions in their surroundings, there is a philosophical quest for a deep congruence uniting the objective world with the language which refers to its features and with subjective knowledge of the world. The Stoic idea of Logos was taken to imply such a metaphysical congruence or literal unity among matters of fact, knowledge as a mental state, and the linguistic presentation of knowledge. The logic of language was interpreted as the bridge, with rationality or intellect grounded in language. The inward mental activity of thinking was understood as linguistic and propositional, essentially the same in form as a conversation among a number of people, in writing or in speech. A rational self as the locus of thought, in the sense of knowledge of and practice of language, is a crucial piece of rationalism. On that view it isn’t only thoughts that manifest rationality. The objective world is also rational in being lawful, determinate, and predictable; and statements in language are rational when formed according to normal rules. Rationality is a characteristic of all three, just as Truth is. The idea of Truth expresses the fundamental unity of these three modes of being.

Virtue and Individuality

Stoicism was based on the idea of world-intelligence or Logos, which acquired the presence of a benevolent or providential God, identical with the whole of nature. Logos was an all-inclusive principle, completely pre-determining every detail of cosmic existence forever. Stoics attempted to identify some personal individuality within that framework of determinism, fatalism, materialism, and eternal recurrence of historical events. In spite of being officially materialist, Stoics emphasize a special ‘fiery’ nature in Logos. Stoics believed they were aware of that world-soul or ordering intelligence in microcosm in each person’s power of reasoning and choice. With events unfolding according to Nature’s Law the individual could control nothing but his or her own thinking, and could find freedom only in choosing to accept Nature by achieving as broad and inclusive a perspective as possible. Divine Providence determines human circumstances and behaviour to such an extent that the best a person can do is to love his or her fate, but individuals have the power to choose for or against assenting to and loving their embeddedness in nature. However, Stoicism was not mysticism. The desirable condition for Stoics was emotional aloofness from surrounding conditions and events, achieved by awareness of cosmic order and especially by self-control.

The metaphysics of world-Logos, the divine Word or Command, established a heavy framework for the very limited freedom or divine spark of each person. The fundamental insight is that Logos is experienced in two ways, both externally as objective nature, and internally as personal intelligence in which an element of freedom is exercised. Basic to Stoicism is a great divide between the outward world that is beyond the control of any individual, and the inward existence which is entirely under each person’s individual power. There was a core teaching dealing with the individual’s identification of and exercise of freedom. Their teaching was to minimize attachment to the external, and maximize subjective control. In order to develop mental skills, thinking, they used thinking to control attachments to external goods, properties, prestige, reputation, trophies, wealth, and even health, values arising from appetites and ambitions. They emphasized that even when worldly rewards and reputation are taken away, the dearest value remains.

Rationality against Passions, Immediate Impulses, and First Impressions

Stoics identified freedom with ‘reason’ and contrasted it with ‘passions’, and that can be taken as a higher vs. lower distinction. They came to identify abstract reasoning or calculation as the inward spark of divine freedom-fire. It tended to set up an identity between reason and order, law, rules, formality, and control. The focus of Stoicism turned to preventing or controlling flights of passion. Virtue was acting from a practiced process of reasoning. There is ‘pure-reasoning’, such as logic or mathematics, and also ‘practical or moral reasoning’ in decisions about action and behaviour, but on the Stoic view virtue requires a practice of mental calculation, application of principles to particular situations. Passions vs. intellect is an inner conflict. Thinking can achieve control of passions but the outer world is entirely the expression of Logos and beyond the control of any individual’s thinking. Rationality distinguishes between what can be controlled and what not, and highlights the indifference of everything that is beyond control, externalities. The higher vs. lower conflict translates into an inner vs. outer conflict. There is an absolute limit to determinism in Stoicism and that limit is the individual’s intrinsic power of will, understood as an executive expression of rationality.

Ancient Stoicism was officially empiricist. Knowledge was achieved from sense-experience, from the impressions made by sensations on the ‘blank slate’ of individual consciousness. Long before John Locke, Stoics understood persons as ‘blank slates’ onto which impressions were left by the sensations of the body. Sense-experience was the source of truth and knowledge, and not a realm of illusion as it was for Plato. However, since individuals could keep passions in their place by developing a practice of reasoning, the ‘slate’ of individual consciousness could not have been completely blank. A blank slate does not have the ability to reason, nor does it have forceful passions which compete with reason to edit and organize impressions of the body.

It would not be accurate to say that Stoics hated and feared nature at large, and yet they hated and feared nature in the passions of human subjectivity. Stoic acceptance of Logos meant that nature at large was a manifestation of divine providence, and a great accomplishment of thinking was to understand this sufficiently to accept acts of nature as providential. Although social and political role-fulfillment was considered necessary, Stoics practiced non-attachment, indifference, to events, objects, and conditions in the world, and that indifference has much in common with a rejection of ‘outer’ nature in favour of transcendence via a particular power of subjectivity, the inward spark of intelligence.

Intelligence as Virtue

Hellenistic Stoicism and other philosophical sects of that period attracted an important following, even though the world people faced then was hardly more horrifying or discouraging than what most people throughout history have faced. It was a creed that appealed to the powerful classes in the social order of the Roman Empire. Stoicism was widespread and influential in Roman culture during the period when Christianity was developing within the Empire, and made important contributions to Christian thought. Stoics approached ‘religion’ as a mental exercise of rational thinking, rule-governed calculation. The life of freedom based in rational thinking was considered happiest. Mental exercise was their portal to freedom, intelligence, and virtue or authenticity as humans, as well as their personal contact with the spark of divine Logos.

For Stoics, virtue was a focus on what is completely under the control and authorship of each individual, contrasted with ‘external’ conditions which the individual can never fully control. Stoic virtue was precisely subjectivity itself, aloofness from the effects of external objects and circumstances, and instead a concentration on subjective control in personal acts of thought. It was supposed to make a difference and accomplish something crucial for Stoics to do the small personal act of taking hold mentally of their own virtue by thinking about emotional reactions, impulses, and habits. No claims to surpass, defeat, control, lead, or exploit anybody else are involved. You recognize what is most certainly and undeniably your own, your intelligence, and give it a chance to exist. What can be completely authored by each individual is exactly what is most important and fundamental, an inward act of self-realization.

Freedom

Ancient societies were slave-labour based, and there was a very clear and immediate sense of freedom as not being controlled by a master in daily life. However, that common freedom was not the whole story. There were three levels of freedom: 1) not being controlled by a master, 2) strategic rationality overriding “knee-jerk” impulses in pragmatic situations, and 3) mental transcendence of nature. The most important freedom was conceived as freedom from nature itself, especially as represented in the body, associated with privation, suffering, illness, unquenchable desire, and mortality. Stoics can’t transcend all inclusive Nature, but they transcend the least fiery aspect, the strictly determined external aspect of Nature. Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics thought rational thinking was the route to that greatest freedom. Philosophical sects of the Hellenistic period all shared a program of development of personal rationality with a transcendent purpose, to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. In that state of developed intelligence an individual rose above the suffering of ordinary body-centered ways of life. It was a deliberate way of “being in the world but not of it”.

With Hellenistic Greek thinkers there was a rise of the individual as author of deliberation and strategic resistance to natural impulses. With Epicureans, the individual was also the sufferer of pleasure and pain. The individual as such was emphasized more than previously, so much so that this is perhaps the historically crucial conception of the dignity of the individual person which is definitive of western humanism. Classical Greece and Rome had strong literary depictions of individual personality in gods and heroes. Thinking sects of the period might be described as developing heroism turned inward.

See also the posting of October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

22 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Transcendence

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Considerable portions of the history of philosophy can be interpreted as answers to the question, “How can freedom be possible?”, especially two particular versions of that question. There is also a third version which makes a perfect series with the others and is freshly relevant in the current political and commercial-industrial situation.

Version 1: How can freedom be possible for people in a world of constant disturbance from the pain, misery, and anguish of illness, injury, deprivation, loss, growing old, and the hard indifference of nature and other people; in a world where desperate vulnerability keeps us confined to the most bestial and violent impulses, instincts, reflexes, and passions?

After Alexander (the great) of Macedon (previously tutored by Aristotle) conquered the known world of the eastern Mediterranean between 334 and 323 B.C., there was a penetration of Greek culture throughout Alexander’s area of influence, and a reciprocal opening of Greek culture to influences from the ancient east. Those events and cultural developments are invoked by the term “Hellenistic”. Answers to version 1 of our question were created by Hellenistic thinking sects: Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Their answers can be generalized as humanist rationalism, a philosophical version of transcendence. Stoic rationality was meant to be a portal to freedom in the teeth of miseries and passions arising from the body’s life in a hard indifferent world. It is not a solution to misery, but it is not useless.

Version 2: How can freedom be possible in a world of lifeless matter, from which we ourselves are formed, matter which can do nothing but fall irrevocably toward utter uniformity (entropy, indifference) in accordance with immutable forces, structures, and laws of nature?

A short history of freedom in philosophy is that it was mainly focused on freedom from misery (notwithstanding a long quest for freedom from astrological demons of the zodiac) but eventually altered to a focus on freedom from scientific determinism. In facing the challenge of determinism, it was necessary to respond to a double attack since humanist rationalism had been called into question both internally and externally. The external challenge was the hypothesis posed by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) that every detail of existence is logically necessary and pre-determined. Remarkably, Spinoza’s work was very close to a modern restatement of Stoicism but with a removal of emphasis from individual inwardness, so that the external determinism of God-or-Nature (logos) loomed in everything. Even more difficult was David Hume’s (1711-1776) Calvinistic attack on the power and integrity of subjective intelligence itself.

Version 3: How can freedom be possible in a world of scientifically engineered psychological manipulation conducted on a mass scale, where people around you, without being aware of it, might be under the influence of secretive powers? How can freedom be possible when modernity is a cultural milieu of fierce ideological intent to negate freedom through mass persuasion, often using emotional manipulation by pervasive media imagery in stealthy applications of cutting edge behavioural science?

Critical thinking skills and a skeptical turn of mind may not be strong enough defenses against advertising media and incentive/ reward packages, because you may conduct such thinking within a set of assumptions that serves the purpose of diabolical powers which want to use everyone, or at least disempower us from interfering, so that wars may still be arranged and conducted in murderous ordinariness.

The natural environment is almost completely mediated for humans by a social and cultural environment. We are social and cultural sponges who soak up, without being especially conscious of doing it, the forms of life, language games, feuds, fads, fashions, and traditions acted out around us. People are not normally conscious of the degree to which our behaviour and thinking are determined by social and cultural influences. We can feel like individuals even when engaging in imitative culturally normative behaviour such as dressing/acting like a man or like a woman. The originality of adults is buried under decades of social conditioning. Although nature has some absolute givens and limitations for any organism, there is a great deal of the human environment which is merely customary and variable through political, commercial, and other human forces.

Theological Black Holes

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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

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Martin Luther’s interpretation of the leap of faith went beyond divine Grace into individual creative power. Familiarity with the Stoic idea of freedom is plausible groundwork for Luther’s conclusion that you can’t be certain of anything except your own internal act of self-creation, self-determination, self-declaration. Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” is a slight recasting of that insight. Luther’s finding internal power to experience transcendence, overcoming the oppressive gravity of original sin and the taint of nature, showed a way for Descartes and other Baroque era rationalists to abandon the age-old terror of nature and apply rationality to understanding the laws of a merely clockwork nature. It also enabled Jean-Jacques Rousseau to experience a new kind of love of nature, initiating an important thread of romanticism in philosophy. The beginning of the change in the cultural attitude to nature was Luther’s overcoming original sin in human nature.

However, there were still tenets of religion, deeply rooted, that contradicted the tendency from Luther’s work to ascribe freedom to individuals. The natural progress of philosophical thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built on increasing appreciation of fruitful subjectivity, responding also to the increasing esteem for individual minds as literacy became more universal. For several reasons, however, philosophical discoveries about subjectivity did not have their natural consequences in the Euro-American cultural system. Instead of having a balanced understanding of subjectivity and objectivity we have totalitarian objectification.

Two metaphysical propositions of mainstream Christianity stand as barriers to progress. The first is the view, from Augustine, that human nature is so weak and prone to evil that it needs continual supervisory repression and intimidation to achieve a semblance of good. With original sin corrupting the inward person, individuals cannot be trusted to themselves and there is no basis for inward values such as creativity, which genuinely define individual persons. All virtue must be objectively defined and enforced with authoritarian systems of incentive, reward, and punishment. That ancient prejudice was re-invigorated in the backlash against the French Revolution of 1789, and has endured at a semi-conscious level as a bedrock justification for inequality and supervisory control of “the masses”. It has also served as an excuse for the powerful to torture, murder, and enslave. In addition, there is a bit of Christian theology or metaphysics common to monotheism, claiming creativity as a special and definitive attribute of divinity, so only God is capable of creativity. That rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In a cultural system still quietly dominated by Christian metaphysics there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. So, what prevents us from embracing the transcendent gusher of subjective originality, the real guarantor of freedom, is scraps of old culture such as father-in the-sky-religion which insists that only the high God is creative and good. In a culture still permeated by Christian assumptions it seems impossible to abandon the (only semi-conscious) theological principle that creativity is an attribute of God alone. The concept of God can be stretched and molded but not easily replaced by creative individual subjectivity.

Although Augustine’s Christianity still has a strong grip on western supervisory practices, its cultural dominance was affected by market-commerce and science. The transition to science was easy, as celestial father-god religions share with science a strong outward focus on eternal cosmic forces and principles. Reverence and deference toward external gods was so entrenched at the root of the Euro-American cultural system that this orientation imposed itself onto all new developments. Science became so prestigious in its mathematical precision and its rigour of measuring observations that physics and chemistry came to represent the ideal of intellectual power and legitimacy, and inspired imitation in all intellectual culture. Subjectivity, as the blind spot of science since questioning has no appearance, cannot exist officially. The consequence of scientific inability to comprehend a fruitful and complex subjectivity, in combination with the military and commercial success of science, is that modern culture is under the enchantment of an ‘objectivity fetish’ in which anything subjective or mental/ internal is suspect, and so the very reality of thinking as an individual process has been marginalized and ridiculed. Distrust of the non-rational or ‘lower’ impulses of subjectivity moves by easy extension to mistrust of subjectivity in general. Individuals have to be supervised in their obedience to military nation-states and market-wealth, the modern gods, and institutions representing those gods have much in common with ‘old regime’ patriarchies.

Market-commerce represents, in part, a revolt against the self-denial imposed by old-style Christianity. Everybody is gratified to some extent by having stuff, and after centuries of denial and an ongoing threat of denial, the glamour of consuming and having stuff became frenzied. Yet, market commerce shares with science a profound objectivity. In the market-sphere values are: accumulated property, status in corporate and professional hierarchies (quantified in money), and the glamour of trophies from competitive victories. Although these are gratifying, they are also self-denying in their own way when made dominant.

Another obstacle to recognizing creativity as the core of personal existence is the common observation that by far the majority of individuals blend perfectly into a crowd. That can be shown to be compatible with individual creativity by a study of culture and its suppression of some crucial individuality. The portal back to individual creativity is exactly to by-pass all cultural knowledge and sophistication with the goal of achieving a state of creative innocence. There is an echo here of the myth in which eating fruit from the tree of knowledge caused humanity to lose its glorious natural existence. The portal to innocence was pioneered long ago in Luther’s personal use of thinking.

The Brute Actuality of Nature

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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In every moment of experience, we are just arriving out of the past. This might be described as the newness of the moment. We arrive with expectations: looking, feeling, and listening for certain things. There is always a certain degree of surprise and the possibility of great surprise. We arrive feeling the force of contact with objects or resistances, sometimes fending them off, sometimes weighing on them, grasping and working them. Part of our energy is re-orienting, identifying, pushing and pulling against these immediate presences.

We arrive at particular localities and occasions partly as a result of work and effort. Some also come flowing upon us. We arrive in the act of leaving previous situations, with an expectation and attitude about what is here. An attitude manifests itself in what we find relevant and worthy of attention, in what we notice, and in our emotional bearing toward what we notice. Our attitude is the searching, vigilance, and direction of effort by which we are responding to imperfections and opportunities from before. It is a sort of memory which largely determines what is perceived. Incidents and occasions are streaking by, but something remains and accumulates in ourselves from them other than mental images, namely changes in attitude and bearing.

On one side we have the experience of arriving with an expectation of what will be here, searching for specific locations and resources. On the other side we have the experience of streaking through, streaking past this moment, going through it. The orientation of our effort is through or past what has already been identified, bearing down this corridor or street or into that room, lifting this bag of groceries, heading into the imaginary space of the future. We arrive working things toward a potential shape, pushing and pulling with the purpose of removing ourselves toward a future place. We are leaving whether we want to or not, whether we feel dissatisfied with the imperfection we sense here, or feel contented. This is the incompleteness of the moment which complements newness. The opening we sense as we look down the corridor is the future. This moment features a potential of going that way by the performance of certain work.

Taking both arriving and leaving together we still have nothing of the world but the instantaneous present. Although it has no duration, its newness and incompleteness point toward a world of context. The memory and attitude from which we reach down at the present, and the expectation we have of getting through and beyond it, are the context, and it is much richer and more extensive than the duration-less present ever can be. Questions, emotions, and dreams make up the rich context from which we reach down to the meagre wafer-presence of nature. The force of opening and vectoring into the future is exactly questions and dream-fulfillment, emotional responses to what was. Here are the ideal models by which we read the fleeting sensual impressions which are all we ever have of the world. Indeed we take up and grasp the present as we do because of that context. Nothing could have meaning and sense for us without memory and expectation, but in what way are they with us? How do we have them or sense them as part of the world? They are, by definition, things not being perceived and we do not have them in the same way as things perceived. They are not floating about separately either. They exist in a bearing or orientation built into perceptions of things, in the directionality and force of subjective intelligence.

For everything perceived there are two modes of presence intersecting: a part present by sensation, and a non-sensual context of questioning. That non-sensual context is the intelligence that is perceiving, the project or orientation within which the act of perception is performed. Memory and expectation are features of an instantaneous mental act of thinking sensations of the world. A subjective orientation or bearing is intersecting with something not originating from the self, something objectively resisting the self.

The experience of time is built into what is present instantaneously. Past and future are structural elements of the instant of experience. The past is only the newness of any instant and the place of memory in that newness, reference points receding into ever increasing remoteness from this moment’s bearing. The future is only the incompleteness of the instant and the involvement of mental projection, expectation, and self-declaration in that incompleteness. Both are features of an instantaneous mental act. It isn’t that intelligence endures but that it has, in an instant, experiences which are present in different ways. Our experience of time is the intersection of different modes of awareness. We experience time not by being temporally extended but by having binocular consciousness, consciousness of an elemental transcendence, an intersection of intelligence with object-world.

If there is to be time, there must be intelligence and its object. The object alone has no memory and no teleology, no past or future, and without duration there is nothing. The object-world, without a living intelligence intersecting it, is a wafer of duration with a smallness of infinity. Memory and purpose (predicament and orientation) give the object its appearance of duration. Kant agreed that time is a feature of intelligence, but perhaps we can say that the brute actuality of nature is an infinitesimal duration-less momentum. Past and future do not exist in the material universe. The science-fiction fantasy of time travel is absurd because past and future simply do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. Only intelligence brings time to the world, with a structure of tension stretching memory into an act to strike a self-declaring mark on the object-world, present entirely as an instantaneous bearing.

The Hieroglyph

Since the present only makes sense in a sort of triad of past-present-future, maybe a visual aid could be used, a hieroglyph, an enlarged X. That figure is made up of four arrow-heads which point toward something at the centre with no size. The top arrow of the X would represent certain features of the present. Labels for that space might be: “There is nothing but the instant…The present has no duration…”

For the bottom arrow: “… always new and incomplete… Whatever there is must be features of this instant.”

The left arrow of the X would represent all the purpose, direction, knowledge, and force-against-resistance we already bear in arriving at the present. I might put these labels there: “… arriving, by specific efforting, with a purpose … searching for specific valuables … incidents and occasions went streaking by but something accumulated other than fading impressions or images: a bearing in response to them.”

The right arrow is an opening outward, potential, possibility, and probability surrounding the pointing, vectoring, or bearing of effort and orientation. Part of our energy is pushing past the grip of the present “ … leaving specific predicaments behind with an effort toward self-declaration and creation …”.

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

01 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom

Christendom existed as a pan-European theocratic practicality from the time of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 A.D.. The centralized Church hierarchy based in Rome exerted senior supervisory control (more or less) from then until Henry VIII’s separation of the English Church in 1534: 734 years. Medieval Christendom began as a society fallen from the glories of the Roman Empire. The economy was subsistence farming characterized by tenant families bound within feudal contracts to specific pieces of land under the control of a military-estate family or a Church foundation. There was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the ‘second sons’ who could not inherit the family’s noble title and lands would often go to school for a good education and then into the Church hierarchy. The rural-subsistence economy without much money was based on contractual and traditional obligations. Peasant farming families were at the mercy of wild nature, disease, and marauders, and nature was considered to be personified by disembodied spirits who might be anywhere, unseen and yet powerful.

Christian Relics

Ancient investments of effort in monument-creating, such as construction of the Egyptian pyramids, came from ideas about a supernatural stratum of existence. The pyramids were acts to connect with such a stratum, and they illustrate an economy of the supernatural in which earthly wealth is founded upon gods and spirits and the qualities of their world. That conception of wealth was still important in the European middle ages, during the construction of the Gothic cathedrals. Those magnificent fortresses of the faith were built in part to house, in suitable glory, bones of a saint or a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, considered to have supernatural power and influence. Something of the spirit of the dead saint was supposed to reside in the material remnant. Just as a reason for achievements in cathedral architecture was to house relics, the Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth in the form of relics from the holy land. Christianity was, at one level, a cult of relics, thought to be radiant with supernatural energy. Relics were high-status luxury goods and there was a lucrative commerce supported by the demand for them. Such were the treasures of those times.

Christians, like Stoics, believe the world of bodies manifests a providential divine will. Stoics considered the world to be eternal and uncreated, identical with Logos, whereas Christians believe nature to be the creation of a separate deity. For both of them, the common world of natural bodies has much to love, distinctly unlike the visions of Plato and ancient Zoroastrians, for example. Yet there is still a crucial transcendence in the Christian vision, since God’s separateness from His creation is exactly transcendence.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)

Medieval Christianity was by far a darker, harsher, spookier world view than that of the modern Roman Church. Catholic Christendom was characterized by a human-hating obsession with hereditary sin and an imaginary after-death world. The influential writings of Augustine of Hippo asserted that human nature is essentially evil because of Adam’s original sin, and the only way people can be good is by being forced to obey the laws of God and secular authorities. Virtue is obedience and self-denial. There is in Augustine’s view a form of anticipation of Freud’s theory of the superego, that moral behaviour originates outside the individual. In Freud the superego was internalized authority figures. For Augustine, the relevant authority figures were officials of the Church. Officials of religion believed that overpowering impulses to individual self-gratification were continually pulling social attachments apart, and any loss of a popular fear of hell and satan, or supernatural powers generally, would result in uncontrolled female sexuality leading to general social breakdown.

Confirmed in Dependence on the Church

The Church was happy to encourage most people to “be fruitful and multiply”, even though human flesh and its pleasures were considered tainted, because it confirmed the sinfulness of people and their resulting dependence on magical sacrament-performing priests. Strong institutional supervision of adults was required by Augustine’s assertion that people are normally vicious and/ or weak and so can behave virtuously only by means of strong and often harsh control by a powerful hierarchy of the religiously and militarily sophisticated. From roughly 800 A.D. to 1534 the Church’s claim to legitimate authority was persuasive to most people. The influence of Augustinian Christianity went well beyond religious practice as such. It pervaded the culture of western society generally as the common-sense idea of human nature and value. The resulting fear and gloom achieved a firm psychological grip. Soaring cathedrals of stone and glass were fortresses of the doctrine, intimidating symbols of wealth and dominance, presiding over the pessimistic gloom of Christendom. Eventually the Holy Inquisition (1233) was created to exterminate people with unorthodox thoughts.

Transcendence is the link between philosophy and religion. In Christendom the culture of transcendence, which had been a minority report in ancient Greece, was made into a legal obligation by the theocratic Church of Rome. In that sense philosophy as ideology of transcendence had taken control of society, but Christianity removed the decisive power from individual intelligence at the same time as it reversed the philosophical project of understanding nature as an impersonal system. The Church taught the best way to live based on a claim of divine revelation to officials, but the work of rational proof was also considered important to confront heresy and convince the skeptical. The literate class, especially within the universities, were dedicated to recapitulating ancient achievements of rational sophistication. In the panorama of ancient and medieval thinking, a tainted nature was an enemy with humans firmly in its claws. Christianity deified cosmic evil in the demonic figure of Satan, the devil. Whereas the philosophical portal out was transcendence through a non-mystical form of individual mental focus, the Christian transcendence, greatly influenced by Augustine, was collective and corporate, a merging with the body of the Church in return for an eventual transcendent afterlife.

Individualism, Original Sin, and Augustine

The idea of original sin is profoundly anti-individualistic. It means that all human beings share in the same single, sinful, nature. Individual persons are not original on this view but merely new eruptions of one nature. So, in spite of Augustine’s Confessions exploring individual psychology in an original autobiographical way, the effect of Augustine’s teaching was not individualistic, but the opposite. His conclusion was that, although an individual might be able to figure out what is right and even want to do right, rationality is never powerful enough to overcome original sin, appetites, and selfish ambitions of the passionate and lower part of human nature. People will want to do right, but never just yet.

In the Christian tradition the individual is a bearer of generic original sin as well as bearer of responsibility for moral choices in day to day life. If there is no person there is no local sin, no specific responsibility, and not much justice in punishment or reward. So, although the Church emphasized generic human nature and the human collective, the individual could not be completely negated because reward and punishment applied at the level of the individual, and reward and punishment were core values and instruments of the Church.

In the Christian world view, the after-death world was more important than the tangible world, and the reflective sense of individuality was not highly developed. Generalized ‘human nature’ was more in focus culturally, and it was considered tainted by the original sin which resulted in human exile from Eden. That is an echo of the pre-Christian sense of taint on the world of nature. The taint applied in Christendom mainly to human nature, from original sin, but the rest of nature did not escape. After all, the world in which humans find themselves is a veil of tears, a long way down from Eden.

Freedom

There was an ancient sense of taint effectively rejecting the world of the senses as pervaded by an evil power. Nature, represented by the human body and the impulses and pains of the body, was still effectively hated and feared in Christianity. In Christendom a conception of spirituality replaced rational thinking as the portal to transcendent freedom beyond demonic nature. Focus on the world to come after the death of the body seemed to offer the only such portal of escape. Official spirituality demanded blind trust in, and obedience to, the Church’s teachings on the rewards of the afterlife. Christianity also promised freedom from nature and the body through exercises which enabled a transcendent other-worldly spirituality. Prayer, penance, and various exercises could be practiced in the effort to invoke divine Grace. Once again, as in ancient thinking, freedom and experience of a higher state of being were a glorious possibility for people, but achieved only through special and arduous efforts and trials, removed from ordinary day to day living. Connecting with eternity was still a crucial achievement.

Among the educated in the Church, knowledge was thought to be mental illumination from God, the revelation of something like a Platonic Ideal Form uncovering the character of something at a particular time and place. There is an echo here of Aristotle’s “active intellect”, a single divine entity which participated in the rational mental process of each individual. The Christian theory of knowledge required such acts of divine illumination, and it was the same with freedom. The Church taught freedom of the will to make moral actions, that is, actions which are ‘self’-denying or contrary to original sin or natural impulse, but it was freedom by divine Grace. Humans were made ‘in God’s image’ by a broad original act of Grace, but some extraordinary intervention was required for a specific act of real ‘self’-denial, real freedom from tainted nature. In general people needed the grim guidance of Church authorities displaying their use of the scourge, rack, and stake. In this context freedom of the will was a weak flame largely overpowered by original sin.

Christian Collectivism

The hard-won classical advances in honouring individual subjectivity, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism, stood as a dangerous threat to the totalitarian ambitions of the Church, and the Church devoted considerable resources to burying them. When rules of living are dictated by an omnipotent god, being ethical depends entirely on compliance with the god’s dictates. Treatment of other beings is unimportant in itself. During the Theocracy of Christendom the Church claimed special possession of God’s truth and exclusive ability to teach and evaluate everybody’s compliance. The Church promoted an “other-world” focus which incorporated misery in “this world” into its myth. The other-world focus and the doctrine that human nature is intrinsically evil, condoned gross social injustice. The Catholic God was seen concretely in the feudal social order just as much as in the images collected in or carved into the structure of churches. The message was that the feudal order had to be accepted and preserved as it was, and hope placed in life-after-death. God supposedly acted through the Church to enforce the social order. The Church thus enforced a collectivism around its sacraments, rituals, art, architecture, and hierarchy. The doctrines of the Church transformed the internal individual-to-god connection characteristic of Stoicism, for example, into an external and objectified individual-to-Church-to-social-order-to-god relationship.

John Wycliffe (1328-84) and Vernacular Literacy

The Universities of Christendom, beginning from Bologna around 1088, did not monopolize literacy in Latin, partly because they did not confine their high-end scribes within their walls as monasteries did. Universities projected Latin literacy outward into their communities in the form of graduates: lawyers, medical doctors, (Latin) grammar teachers, and theologians. It is still remarkable that a European movement for popular vernacular literacy began even prior to the invention of the printing press. The beginning of the movement seems to have been the campaign by John Wycliffe, based at Oxford University, for universal vernacular literacy and translation of vernacular Bibles. That was to be the foundation of a world-changing ideal of equality in the European cultural system.

The modern notion of equality has much to do with the medieval European institution of social class (aristocracy, clergy, and peasantry) which looms as a spectacular paradigm of inequality. It was a set of laws and customs which institutionalized systematic and random insults and injuries to the peasantry, who became increasingly alienated and resentful of them. In medieval society land ownership was the main foundation of inequality, since aristocracy was defined in terms of military culture (Chivalry) and land ownership. As mere labourers in the economy of agriculture, peasants were treated as property also, attached to the land. Another crucial feature of medieval inequality was the special power of priests of the Roman Church. Since the Church owned keys to the divine realm and eternal life, there was a set of critical ‘check-points’ in every person’s life, such as joining the community as an infant, coming of age, marriage, and death, which had to be sanctioned by the presence of a priest performing the appropriate sacrament, specific bits of ritual magic. The ability of aristocracy to acquire religious relics, sometimes to donate to the Church for something like naming rights to a chapel, made them participants to some extent in the exclusionary economy of the supernatural.

The drive to make the Voice of God, as manifested in the Bible, available directly to each individual was based on a notion from humanist philosophy, now translated into a ‘proto-protestant’ attitude, in which every individual on his or her own was considered competent and worthy to understand the Voice of God and be elevated by it. Given the importance of the Bible in that culture, access to it was a profound equality and dignity that would influence every other aspect of culture. Suddenly all people, each individually, could have a really transcendent mental power in literacy. Writing is an engraving of voices, and widespread literacy vastly enlarges the cultural presence and weight of individual voices, and with that the recognition of personal intelligence. The movement was recognized as revolutionary by the Church at the time and was violently resisted. The Church restricted both vernacular literacy and direct popular access to Bibles because of the emphasis on original sin injected into Christian culture by Augustine: that individuals have such evil within them that they cannot be trusted to themselves and can be saved only by institutional supervision and control. However, in spite of official resistance to vernacular literacy, important progress was made and soon aided by the spread of printing technology, and then by protestantism.

Movable Type

Johann Gutenberg ( c. 1398-1468) of Mainz, Germany, introduced the printing press into Western culture in the 1440’s. Gutenberg’s major printing project, a Latin Bible, appeared around 1455. It was printer/ publishers trained by Gutenberg who first published vernacular Bibles, a German translation, in the 1460’s. It was duly banned by officials of the Church in 1485, but it illustrates the spread of the movement for vernacular literacy across the European cultural system. The printing press enabled a culture of written conversation outside churches and universities and independent of them, the ‘Republic of Letters’. Universities are often conservative places, as the term “scholastic” has come to mean, preserving an elite orthodoxy. The influence of church schools and universities was important, but widespread literacy outside institutions was the crucial novelty. The emergence of newspapers and a book press outside church, state, and university expanded the consequences of literacy in all aspects of society. People who read, write, and think about profound questions can do so as independent adventurers, under no authority but their own. The Republic of Letters was and is a voluntary and informal communication arrangement, carried on in writing. It wasn’t middle class literacy which ignited the fires of modernity but proletarian literacy, aided by the printing press.

Martin Luther (1483-1546): Doubt and A Personal Leap of Intelligence

Until his break with the Roman Church, Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order, and that grounding persuaded him that humans have no power at all since the exile from Eden, and are absolute slaves to the devil except by God’s whimsical Grace through which some are predestined to have faith and virtue. Both Calvin and Luther show strong Augustinian influence. Calvinism emphasized the intrinsic evil of people, as Augustine’s Catholicism did. However, Luther’s Protestants combined humanist beliefs with the acceptance of original sin and distrust of the body. Luther’s published statements about the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524-25) make it clear he was no crusader for full social equality, and it was not his intention to interfere with the other-world focus of theocratic society. Like most philosophers, Luther’s messages were inconsistent and many of their consequences were more or less unintended.

Luther had the ancient teachings of Hellenistic philosophical sects to draw upon, the Stoics and Epicureans already mentioned, and was proud of that humanist education. He applied the basic humanist insight of self-possession to the credibility of religious claims. The humanist competence of self-development revealed a special importance in the context of those most profound questions of knowledge. Luther discovered that the competence of self-development included the power to make creative leaps, which did not turn speculation into knowledge, but rather revealed God’s image in the leaper.

Christianity as a Mental Process: Luther and Doubt

On October 31, 1517 Luther posted a list of 95 theses on his church door in Wittenberg, Germany, including a defense of “justification by faith alone.” Luther’s emphasis on faith is often put in the context of a removal of emphasis from good works, but a better way to understand it is to put faith in the context of doubt. Luther’s doubt was based on courageous honesty about the impossibility of being certain of the teachings of Christianity, among other knowledge claims. Christian certainty was breaking down, and in the process preparing the way for the breakdown of Christian gloom.

Luther became a new model of the mental process of being Christian. In public debate with Church authorities Luther was continually confronted with the question of how his individual wisdom could match the accumulated store from the whole history of the Church. Luther could well have quoted Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing.” For Luther the mental process of being Christian was an intensely personal struggle against anguished uncertainty, against doubt and the dread that comes from it. For Luther the internal focus and struggle was an obsession. He confronted the impossibility of knowing human and individual destiny, even in the light of the divine revelation of Christianity, and his response pioneered an alternative to skepticism, namely a personal leap of faith. If I take the leap of faith in full rational awareness that it is absurd, it is a declaration of my freedom from ‘laws of thought’. Manifesting that freedom is actualizing human life in the image of God since God’s image is precisely freedom.

Luther’s inner struggles with doubt in the face of desperate need for certainty introduced a thread of ‘existential’ subjectivity into the culture of intellectual debates. Personal doubt and anguish are markers of a thinking and emotional entity, a subjective intelligence with powers of acting from judgments of probabilities, extending into the increasingly remote future. Luther had faith in Truth, but was convinced that Truth could not be known with certainty, so individuals must get along with what innocent subjectivity makes available to them. Basing a sense of identity on knowing, on certainty, makes individuals passive and it loses something crucial in Luther’s inward faith, which is not a knowing and must be active to be authentic. Exactly because it is not knowing, faith is distinctly a person’s act, a personal self-declaration and self-creation, something like “I choose faith, so I exist in the freedom which is the image of God.”

Luther’s relationship with the university at Wittenberg was an important part of the framework of his work. His writing expressed the role of a university scholar at an advancing edge. In that context it is remarkable that Luther’s thinking was personal in contrast to Medieval scholastic logic. Luther’s mental condition as a Christian defined a profoundly individual subjective (existential) state. At the same time, Lutheran inwardness was not mystical, not an abandonment to cosmic wholeness or to the love of a God who is a person. Mysticism is never individual, but instead all encompassing. Faith for Luther was a personal and reasoned decision which removed magical, cultish, and mystical features of religion.

Protestant Christianity offered a model of inward subjective value by emphasizing individual piety, ultimate justification by faith. Faith, and so virtue, is a personal, inward accomplishment, available equally to all and not just the gifted, privileged, or heroic. The thrust of Protestantism is strong and equal individualism, justification by an internal accomplishment which is socially invisible. You cannot tell who is ‘in Grace’ by social position, property, family, cash flow, physical beauty, or overt giftedness of any kind. That was the Lutheran revolution, an overthrow of “establishment” control and supervision by discovery of elemental value in individual subjectivity. Freedom of conscience placed emphasis on a personal inward process of decision. Subjectivity is the ultimate revolutionary force because it bypasses all incentives and rewards under the control of a supervising elite or an ideology. The Church became irrelevant when each individual found direct personal communication with God through his or her own competence.

With Protestantism there was a radical change of what counted as moral action, away from “good works”, which normally involved a transfer of wealth to the Church, to private grace in exercising freedom. Faith for Luther was in contrast to payment of money to the Church for certificates of forgiveness (indulgences) with specific expiry dates. So the nub of Protestantism was a rejection of overt, outwardly observable accomplishments and a concentration on individual inwardness: faith. Luther’s essay The Freedom of a Christian emphasizes a distinction between individual mental “inwardness” and “outward” appearances. That was an essentially Stoic distinction. Morality and sin no longer had to do with observing the sabbath, priestly sacraments, dietary laws, formal sacrifices and prayers, or performing correct rites of purification or charity, but with realizing God’s image in freedom of the individual will. Since God’s relation to his creation is exactly transcendence, that mental process, which recapitulates the image of God in a creative act of freedom, is an experience of transcendence.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes was an amateur genius in mathematics who had been spotted as gifted as a child and educated to be a lawyer. Next after theology, law was the most esteemed of the university faculties. Descartes never worked professionally as a lawyer nor as a university professor, but sometimes as a military aide. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) started the year Descartes turned 22 and continued until he was 52, merely two years before his death. The war raged along during all but a tiny portion of his adult life, and so military work was widely available. When Descartes was a child of 4 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed in Rome. Bruno’s execution by burning alive, by order of the Roman Inquisition, had a profound effect on subsequent generations of philosophers, Descartes among them. Bruno was savagely executed for nothing other than his philosophical thoughts and writings, and far more brutally than Socrates had been. Bruno’s killing clarified the Roman Church as the mortal enemy of philosophy and inspired a fierce determination in an underground movement for “freedom to philosophize”.

Descartes liked to get lost, and found, in thought, and became active in the republic of letters, writing in academic Latin. Descartes’ thinking was moved by doubt, as Luther’s was, and doubt was a crucial act of intelligence for Descartes. For Descartes, doubt was the matrix of personal freedom in thinking. Descartes’ “thinking substance” and “extended substance” follow fairly closely the inward-outward dualism presented in Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian. Luther had no influence on Descartes’ mathematics or science, but the philosophical side of Descartes’ work fits perfectly into the cultural context created roughly a century earlier by the existential doubt explored and made famous internationally by Luther. The demystifying force of Descartes’ science was also in the tradition of reducing magic advanced by protestantism.

Doubt is distinctly individual, in fact definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Descartes’ presentation of his method of thinking was a demonstration of the freedom of thinking. Descartes conceived ‘thinking substance’ as individual thinking persons: “I doubt, therefore I exist.” That discovery was fundamental for Descartes, so he intended no scientific dismissal of thinking. The thinking illustrated by Descartes was propositional reasoning, the action of an enduring self with a continuity of language competence, mathematical competence, logical competence, and of voice. In Descartes the “I” or subjective entity of intelligence encounters extended substance, nature, and exerts power in discovering the laws and shapes of nature. So Descartes extended Luther’s vision of subjectivity in a secular direction, but Luther merits considerable credit for beginning the progress of modern philosophy. There is much of Luther’s specific influence in Descartes’ work, as well as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Luther had a strong focus on individual mentality, of which faith was one feature and doubt a closely related feature. According to Luther, people had the mental power to make a creative leap in the absence of sufficient reason or evidence. Western people had gained intelligence in a new cultural way on the basis of Wycliffe’s campaign for popular literacy focused on reading the Bible. The value so placed on mental processes was a foundation on which Luther built. Following Luther, reading the Bible was a requirement for normal protestant piety, and so literacy spread with protestantism. Literacy brings the power to write, to invent original communications and self-expressions, as well as the power to gain awareness of the voices of others. Vernacular literacy, the printing press, and the protestant reformation raised the profile of personal intelligence in the private lives of an uncontrolled portion of the community. Broadening the base of literacy enabled cultures of written conversation, the republics of letters, to develop outside institutions, and subsequently enabled the ‘Enlightenment’ in eighteenth century Europe, when the literate portion of the population became the majority. That rationalist enlightenment was directly inspirational for the American and French revolutions, the most effective events of a spiral of revolt that extended back 400 years to Wycliffe’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Great Plague. When literacy is a minority skill it can be an effective technique of domination by a ruling elite. Universal literacy has been a profound inspiration for equality.

Elemental Orientation

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity

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Personal Agency: Good Work

Finding and exercising your ability to create good things from within yourself, practicing individual agency, is an essential accomplishment. You can’t depend on the world for much of anything. Nature will be what it will be, and so will the human surroundings. As individuals we have some influence on the immediate surroundings, but sometimes not very much. The best thing about a good job is that it presents opportunities to create good things. However, it is often not outwardly personal even though the challenges of doing a job must be made intimately personal in order to be overcome. No matter how common or menial a work-product may be, it has taken up its portion of a worker’s life, personal intelligence, creativity, courage, and commitment to the effort. Most jobs don’t provide much experience of personal agency and reduce any fulfillment by alienating the product from the worker. The product is alienated when it is attributed to the organizational machine, and credit for the product’s creation displaced upward to the directors and the C.E.O.. In this way, leaders are often looters. Workers as individuals disappear into the machinery. Since jobs are so unreliable in that way, it is of absolute importance that individuals be able to cultivate for themselves the experience of competence, intelligence, or personal agency through a creative process.

Strategic Elemental Orientation

It isn’t news that in our age of pervasive advertising media, corporate ideological advocacy, and strident adventurism from the military-financial-industrial complex (adding ‘financial’ since war and imperialism require vast sums of money borrowed at vast sums of interest to pay dealers in weapons, transport, and support services of violence), in such an age as this, then, it isn’t news that the normal individual is on the receiving end of a blast of messages intended to persuade him or her to feel good about various causes and brands. It isn’t news, but it highlights the question of how an individual is to avoid being manipulated psychologically and politically into supporting causes and campaigns which, in the light of the whole truth, are diabolical. The whole truth is elusive when both advanced science and great wealth are devoted to a selective presentation of reality. However, there might be a groundedness, a strategic self-possession, focused on personal agency, within the power of everybody.

Pulling out of Corporate and Official Propaganda

To think is to re-orient yourself. We are always re-orienting ourselves in facing new situations with new information. (I am thinking, therefore I am.) However, some features of experience are more foundational or elemental than others. The identification of elemental features in experience grounds thinking in a system of intrinsic value. Perhaps no single one of these experiences is, by itself, a portal to freedom, moral certainty, or ultimate value, but a reasonably complex collection will be an extraordinary grounding. Personal agency is central in elemental experiences, and responsible personal agency follows from the kind of orientation being proposed here. The connection of a grid of elemental experiences within a particular subjectivity is a foundation for personal autonomy.

In every age people have been immersed in superstitions, family expectations, religious stipulations, and demands from a social stratum of dominance and wealth determined to prevent competition and opposition. In that context, philosophy has always been a feeling around experience for an elemental grounding. Being there on that elemental grounding has intrinsic value. If there is no reality-distorting propaganda stealthily engulfing us, then adding some philosophical points of orientation will merely add a bit of breadth to our outlook, doing no harm. However, if reality is being distorted by the stream of messaging through which we move, then there opens the possibility of removing ourselves mentally to a protected viewpoint.

An Elemental Grid

Some reference points:

1) personal agency, as sketched just above.
2) embodiment within nature: from posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.
3) Socratic innocence: “I know only that I know nothing.” see posting 16, January 12, 2012, The Two Traditions.
4) the transcendence of intelligence: from posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence.
5) disinterestedness: from posting 5, October 5, 2011, Contemplative Disinterestedness: the Vita Contemplativa, overcoming self-absorption
6) the three graces: nature, culture, subjectivity (more anon)
7) the eternal moment (anon)
8) political consciousness: understanding left-wing and right-wing worldviews (The first law of strategic thinking is: recognize your enemy.) (more anon)
9) this moment in the history of ideas (culture). The history of ideas has been a struggle between ideas of equality and radical inequality, between autonomy and control of adult mentality.

Changing the orientation grid in this way changes the overall project of building a life by striking a stronger presence of thinking subjectivity in relation to nature and culture. Innocent subjective creativity is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mental opening of experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities. The internal flood of questions and impulses is generally more interesting and productive than travel, professional conferences, luxurious consumer goods, winning trophies, or height on an organization chart. The internal creative fountain does more than keep a person engaged, it keeps a person grounded against the mythical spooks, feuds, and fashions glorified in culture. (How about that as a vision of freedom and equality?) It has no use for competitions, ambition, or standing, for personal comparisons of any kind, and as such is a threat to commercial values. The personal use of thinking could alter cultural values by radically raising the value of thinking itself, because thinking gives each person his or her individual genius and with it experiences of value which are prior to market value. Practicing a creative process is not best used as a gateway into the money economy but as an alternative to it.

Creative Process as Grounding Against Fads, Fashions, and Supervisory Systems

In modern market societies there is an important myth of institutional hierarchies as the primary organizing principle of life. Meritocracy is the most common modern form of oligarchy, and the cultural assumption is that there is no alternative, and so true individual autonomy is worthless and even self-destructive. Mental autonomy, autonomy of values or self-possession, is inspired unofficially by humanities studies (now under threat), but is thought to be dangerous by people within the cultural nexus of professional oligarchies. However, the much celebrated financial autonomy of commercial entrepreneurship is an illusion because money can do nothing but focus attention on the market’s incentives and rewards. Innocent subjectivity, non-trivial, dynamic individual personality is a ground to stand on that is truly independent of oligarchies. Identifying the elemental orientation grid is intended to blunt the dominance of the grid of official modernity which especially sanctions three reference points: the state, science, and money.

1) In modernity each military/ industrial state is a territorial religion manifesting an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force, demanding reverent devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedient behaviour as a framework for production of transferrable wealth (interest, dividends, speculative gains, for example), armed forces recruitment, and decisions of justice. The state is a protection device for accumulated capital (property and person) and also an internally motivating culture of social control, accepting worship as a transcendent arbiter of life and death. The state is focused on armed protection of a hoard of national resources, treasure, and weapons. The state is the framework in which politics is acted out, and politics is part of the mediation of class conflict.

2) Within science ideology the world is beautiful but entirely impersonal forces and structures, dead and falling, revealed by measurement, plotting, and calculation. This is a worldview of totalitarian objectivity. There is no transcendent questioning here, but since it builds from questions, science lurks in its own blind spot. The experience of questioning intelligence has been exiled from this current myth of reality, since there is no place for living creativity. However, as a system of denying the legitimacy of spooky disembodied personalities, science has considerable value.

3) An overriding emphasis on consumption and production for exchange, as structured into money-based competitive markets, is the mechanism by which the scribal class mediates and occults an underlying class conflict. Making a living in the modern state depends on accumulated capital, entrepreneurship, and the coordination of specialist functions, with vast consumption of the ‘found’ energies of nature. In the market or economic view of the person, human motivation and activity resolve into predictable and controllable natural drives without creative power, easily made obedient by incentive and reward. The controllability of ‘economic man’ is the basis of the scribal class’s confidence in its system of mediation. People have little acquaintance with transcendence, but there is some indistinct experience of this cultural system as a place of exile where subjective intelligence wanders unrecognized.

Briefing Notes for My Political Representatives

15 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Political Power

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While You Were Busy With Good Work

Politicians have many calls upon their attention and they have a lot of details to sort out. Dedication to routine work makes it very easy to lose a firm grip on the current big picture. So, for those of you who have been busy, here is a big picture snapshot.

Public Perception

The conduct of military forces and clandestine state functions has probably never been much constrained by the rule of law, or even by ordinary ideas of decency, but something has changed about public perception. Combining the World Wide Web with the mass distribution of pocket computers equipped with movie camera technology has made reality more broadly visible. From time out of mind it was possible for leadership elites to arrange for selective perception among the citizens of urban-industrial nations. However, peer-to-peer investigation and information sharing among ‘proletarian’ individuals and groups all over the world is now commonplace. The blogosphere is recapitulating the political effects of the Republic of Letters of an earlier era. A new consensus is taking shape against the networks which have controlled national and international narratives from the top down. In 2011, large popular protests were conspicuous in Chile, Spain, Greece, France, Israel, The North African and Middle Eastern Arab Spring nations, Russia, China, and in numerous cities across the U.S.A., Canada, and the U.K. in the Occupy Wall Street movement. That these are not isolated incidents is the really encouraging feature of the current big picture. It is the good news to keep in mind as we turn to darker features.

Subverted Democracy

From the new sources of information, it is now broadly acknowledged that democracy has been subverted by organized wealth in the U.S.A.. There has been a slow but effective coup d’etat completed by something like the military-industrial complex which was introduced into public consciousness by Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th. president of the U.S.A.. Donors of political funding, corporate lobbyists, and agents of influence of foreign governments pre-determine the candidates, policies, and programs which political parties can offer the public. Organized wealth also owns mass media, and controls think-tanks and educational institutions by attaching conditions and delayed disbursement schedules to outrageously large donations. Votes can’t influence official conduct in anything but cosmetic ways, even though public money pays for it. This is generally perceived to be the case in spite of the chatter that passes for standard journalism from the advertising and government funded media.

The success of the coup is revealed by many things. It is impossible to miss the fact that the president who got elected for change has continued the main policies and practices of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with only a more charming presentation. There remains a constant push for war in spite of the fact that the U.S.A. faces no credible threats. American police, spies, and military keep receiving additional powers and immunities, even as there is a creeping erosion of ordinary citizen’s legal protection against them. In spite of the catastrophic costs and absence of public benefits from the Iraq war, and in spite of the obvious illegitimacy of the invasion based on official lies about weapons of mass destruction, there is no public inquiry or national conversation about learning lessons and avoiding similar crimes from now on. American war crimes are quietly dismissed. The financial industry which crashed the world economy has not been changed or held responsible in any way, but instead has been richly rewarded with unlimited supplies of public money.

Moral Collapse

Public figures posture and preach as if the U.S.A. and her allies have some claim to moral superiority. However, everybody knows that the assault on Iraq by the U.S.A., the U.K., Australia, and others in 2003 was a war of naked aggression sold to the public by a complex of official lies. Everybody knows about the U.S. Haditha massacre, the conduct of U.S. officials at Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. Everybody knows about the American campaign of torture and the archipelago of secret prisons established by the C.I.A. to hide some of their criminal activity. Everybody knows about the U.S. use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah, in violation of international law, about the ongoing use of cluster bombs and land mines, and the development of new nuclear weapons. These are more than enough incidents to reveal a pervasive culture of organized criminality. Everybody knows about the willful blindness of Canadian officials and military personnel concerning the mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. It would be easy to continue this list, but the point is that the allies of the U.S.A. have thrown away the advantage of moral superiority. Law and decency are consulted only when it seems necessary because of intense public scrutiny. Public figures who do not act against this moral collapse are effectively part of it.

There is a direct connection between the coup pulled off by organized wealth and the moral collapse in the institutions of sovereignty in the U.S.A. and her allies. The think tanks and individuals who design the public relations campaigns, policies and programs, the taxes, laws, and wars of the wealth oligarchy have no grounding in any common morality. From the public record as sketched above it appears that the guiding principles are “the end justifies the means” and “might makes right”.

To summarize, while you were busy with good work, the people who consider themselves the meritocracy of the U.S.A. subverted democracy and the rule of law, drained their nation of honour, credibility, and moral legitimacy, and got caught doing it in the flash of a newly invented camera. Having been caught, they show no intention of reconsidering either their agenda of death-grip control or their entitlement. They are more aggressive than ever transferring wealth upward at the same time as denying all responsibility for anything.

The failures of this cultural system are failures of thinking and of institutions of thinking. The age of science has delivered us to an uncertain fate in a society with an insane oligarchy which is drunk on power from unlimited wealth and nuclear weapons.

Fast Forward

Fast forward to The Security Council Resolution on Syria, February 4, 2012, and the veto by China and Russia. The disproportionate force and violence being directed against the insurgency in Syria is deplorable. However, it seems obvious that the government of the U.S.A. or the U.K. would do much the same if faced with an insurgency at home. Consider the state-sponsored violence used to dispose of the totally peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests.

The veto by Russia and China must be considered in the context of both the recent NATO assault on Libya, and the ongoing assault on Iran launched by the U.S.A. and her allies. NATO used the pretext of a UN Security Council resolution to take control of Libya economically, absorbing it along with recently crippled Iraq into the all-consuming empire of the American military-industrial complex. Hundreds of civilians were killed by NATO operations in Libya, apparently without regret or hesitation. It is impossible to doubt that NATO has the same plan for Syria and then Iran. As just shown, NATO has no credibility as champion of morality and justice. Somebody had to draw a line and that is what Russia and China were doing. An attack on Iran would be a threat to vital interests of Russia and China and could well ignite World War III. Anyone who claims concern about Iran’s nuclear program must answer for the provocation presented by Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The middle-east should be a nuclear-free zone. The whole world should be a nuclear-free zone, but for now Russia and China must serve as a deterrent against a nuclear, aggressive, and trigger-happy U.S.A.. The veto was a clear warning to the American war machine that their feeding frenzy must stop. Russia and China were the adults in the room.

The only kind of international intervention which makes sense for Syria would be strictly Arab League action, in spite of the member states’ lack of legitimacy with respect to human rights, due process, and the rule of law. At least they have knowledge of local sensitivities. The American war machine must not be appeased again.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

How Can Freedom Be Possible? An Answer to Scientific Determinism

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

How Can Freedom Be Possible? A Stoic Approach

How Can Freedom be Possible? (Preliminary Remarks)

Theological Black Holes

The Brute Actuality of Nature

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

Elemental Orientation

Briefing Notes for My Political Representatives