Sunday, August 16, 2026

Fragment 227, word count: 2,091.

Tags: philosophy, history, fearful unknowing, apex existence, caring-ideality, inquisitive innocence, vast externality, teleology, time, hive-mind, knowledge, drama, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

An interest in philosophy is inseparable from an interest in history because philosophy exists first within the fabric of drama in which people live and that we feel ourselves playing out day to day. ‘Philosophy’ here denotes a configuration of orientation, a culturally shared set of features that structure the subjective interiority of individually embodied future-opening caring personalities. This is ‘wallpaper’ philosophy, uncritically familiar as casual background encompassing ways of understanding what is foundational, primordial, and ultimate within the personal experience of human existence. There is also artisanal and ‘fine art’ philosophy, original questioning of orientation from inquisitive innocence, resulting in texts or utterances, personal voices expressing that questioning. Whereas there is a reliable market for normal fine art as investment grade items of luxury decor, the audience for artisanal philosophy is typically non-commercial and almost entirely scholarly. Artisanal philosophers mostly form academic guilds, clusters and streams of influence, homage, and conceptual cohesion, each stream with school-defining celebrities, methods, questions, and pre-approved conclusions. The thing to watch for is that philosophical conceptions sometimes burst beyond their niche of origin and change the cultural taste in wallpaper.

From this context, it is clear that the work and ideas of any inquisitively innocent writer must be considered in relation to the wallpaper ideology-of-reality at their cultural time and place, the ancient Greeks in relation to Greek mythology, or Enlightenment-era rationalists in relation to post-Reformation Christianity, aristocracy, and monarchy, for example. Greek philosophers often conflicted with their ambient culture of Olympian gods. Socrates was executed on the charge of introducing new gods. Again, during the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a politically radical philosophical movement that was officially persecuted. However, usually the philosophical ‘fine art’ tradition has accepted much of the ‘wallpaper’ embraced by politically powerful factions who benefit from and defend the dystopian culture of their violently stratified societies.

Existence as Caring-Ideality

The most common philosophical conceptions of specifically human existence, existence as embodied caring-ideality, have been diminishingly oversimplified, reflecting the requirements of ambient culture. In the context of Christendom, for example, it was mortally dangerous to propose a concept of human spirituality with anything but a minimum of creative freedom, for fear of seeming to rival deity. The shocking degree of this problematic self-denial or self-effacing in the legacy of human reflections on what is ultimate and primordial in our existence defines the core of philosophy.

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

Metaphysically Apex Existence

The only direct acquaintance anyone has of ideality is their own experience of living as a dramatically caring person embodied in the world, supplemented by expressions of bonding over shared caring by familiar people and other animals. It is clear from cultural constructs all around this that caring-and-creative-ideality is often enough intuited as an anomalous metaphysically apex existence. The materials of our surroundings overwhelmingly lack evidence of a complicated and peculiarly individual interiority of caring out of which they express well-being or ill-being, urgent intent, or discretionary attachments. They do not question, remember, or foresee their future. They present a specifically material nature that is already everything it can be. In relation to that material nature, the desperate vulnerability and power of foresight and effective agency in personal experience is taken to qualify as anomalous, with a different order of purposive outward reach, sensitivity, apprehension, conception, and ideation, a metaphysically apex existence. However, because of the vastness of fearful unknowing in human experience, and our genius for forming imitative attachments, there has been a collective unwillingness to accept the exclusiveness of this apex existence. The specific fear often preventing this recognition has been fear that accepting the status of metaphysical apex would enrage some other more powerful metaphysical apex and result in retribution in the form of punishment and destruction. In the common discourse of communities, the freedom and creativity of ideality has been conceptually and culturally alienated from humanity, exported to suppositional other beings, and replaced in ourselves by diminishing versions of determinism.

Fragment 216, October 2, 2025, Self Portrait as Spirit (Word count: 311) deity

Two additional reasons that have made it variably dangerous to acknowledge the full creative freedom of embodied ideality are coercive hierarchical politics and deterministic materialism. First it was politically dangerous to recognize too much inherent dignity and power in individuals universally because that would undermine justifications for the coercive top-down social control and human-on-human parasitism that hierarchical power arrangements manifest. When the demands of apex social factions began to be contested, there was a cultural turn to materialist explanations for everything, banishing all spontaneous personally discretionary teleology and insisting that the brute physicality of nature required everything to exists exactly as it was, is, and has to be, completely determined by mathematical cosmic laws. There is no room anywhere in this strictly scientific view for the dignity and discretionary power of individual creative freedom.

Even with conceptions of ideality distorted by these manifestations of fear, it still must be attributed in some form to ordinary individuals because we obviously care and impose our dramas of caring in arcs of teleology vectoring future-ward, but ordinary ideality is culturally required to be restricted to include only enough creative freedom to justify individuals being punished for certain actions, and otherwise overwhelmingly determined by forces beyond ourselves. In the process of being exported and alienated from individuals in the conceptual construction of communal cultures, the personal ecosystem of ideality as lived has been disassembled and reduced to subsets of its existence in versions of idealism. In Plato’s idealism, for example, there is an eternally unchanging primordial mind, the One, contemplating the complete set of Ideal Forms of objective existence. Personal discretion in the face of a risky and only partly predictable future has been removed along with the whole lived complexity of agency-in-time. An even more common form of exported apex idealism retains the creative improvisational spontaneity of ordinary ideality but completely removes the limitations of embodiment by conceiving the apex ideality as omnipotent, omniscient, and disembodied, resulting in the terrifying concept of deity.

Determinism

Determinism in various forms has been the official version of human behaviour and mental activity. The determining forces mainly fall into the categories of deity or brute nature, so either an external primordially apex teleology or a world of utterly unreflective materiality in which any identification of teleology is false, deceptive, a mirage. (Note that mistakes and illusions are exclusively features of ideality.) A third category of determining force sometimes separated off from the others is a universal human nature which imposes, from within every individual, urges, impulses, drives, and pre-conceptions which remove any profound freedom or spontaneous creativity from individuals even if their occurrence is so random or chaotic that predictability is difficult. The Freudian model of subjectivity represents the scientific requirement by attributing an individual’s self-sourced motivation (id) to animal biology, in a remodelling of the conception of human nature from feudal Christendom featuring enslavement by the inherited taint from the sin of Adam. Vicious motivation from inherent vice is taken to be easy to reduce to mechanisms, and so suited to scientific explanation.

Knowledge of the Vast Externality

Both Rationalists and Empiricists were focused on understanding knowledge. Mathematical science was showing great power and promise. In this niche intellectual culture there was considerable optimism about finally achieving an empowering certainty about the non-teleological vast externality that envelopes the human body, not ephemeral or localized but plausibly constitutive of eternal and universal Nature, a presence that earns some recognition as perhaps the actual apex existence, especially with recognition of the power of human ideality repressed and conceptually alienated. Rationalists and Empiricists each had a core conception of that ultimate object of knowledge, the vast externality to be grasped. Both accepted that their object of knowledge was elementally prior to and more important by far than knowers. For Rationalists it was their version of Logos, the underlying principle of math, language, intelligence, and material reality, at once interior and exterior to knowing individuals. For Empiricists it was the world of brute actuality, measurable and map-able nature comprising the whole cosmic setting of human lives, distinctly exterior to the knowing of individuals, and revealed only by objective perception.

Martin Luther as Philosopher:

The Metaphysics of Eternal Necessities vs 

The Metaphysics of Creative Caring-Ideality

Luther merits considerable credit as a philosopher. So much of modernity derives from his assertion of “Justification by faith alone”, which translates directly into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I exist.” (Descartes’ dualism, featuring extended substance and thinking substance, was his inevitably awkward effort to combine all-determining mathematical ‘Logos’ partly revealed in clear and distinct perceptions, with the Lutheran subjective power to overcome the most profound doubt in a creative act of self-definition, all in the context of an ambient culture of an all-determining Catholic Deity.) “Justification by faith alone” also translates directly into Kant’s vision of the self-legislating moral agent, also into Fichte’s self-positing “I”, and into Kierkegaard’s self-sufficient inwardness. Fichte’s vision is completely congruent with Sartre’s existentialism featuring “existence before essence” as the heart of human existence. Luther’s assertion of an individual’s power of faith in the context of unanswerable uncertainty is pure metaphysics, a recognition of the anomalous creative power of individual caring ideality. As such, his intervention was crucial in the historic shift of influence between two great adversarial systems of reality, first, the metaphysics of eternal necessities, asserted by Plato, Christianity, and science, for example, here contested at last by the metaphysics of creative caring-ideality in embodied individuals.

Luther and those inspired by him were not focused on knowledge. Luther experienced profound uncertainty about what he considered most important in existence, the presence of God, creative and discretionary teleological caring-ideality as apex existence. That vast externality for Luther was a cloud of unknowing, unanswerable doubt, instead of knowledge. In the face of that uncertainty Luther turned to the creative power of caring ideality interior to each individual, the power to create and impose structure within the drama of living. To choose faith is to set the future shape of the personal drama of caring. What matters in the future-facing life of a person is not determined by any vast externality, since no externality includes or creates a person’s caring or the future opened by that caring.

Luther, Nietzsche, and Hive-Mind

“Justification by faith …” cashes out as: you can’t live in the world as a spiritual power of agency if you are expressing a culturally imposed hive-mind, doing conventional things such as ‘good works’ assigned conventional values. Instead, to own your apex existence (or in Luther’s case your likeness to apex existence) you have to go profoundly alone, to a personal interiority which no one else can surveil, judge, police, or stipulate. This rejection of immersion in the orientation of a human herd was something Nietzsche got directly from Luther.

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

The Philosophical Turn From Knowledge to Drama

Nietzsche has been identified as a pioneer existentialist and as a Romantic (recall Wagner), expressing both of these conflicting but closely related visions of specifically human existence, each inspired by Fichte’s philosophical voice. Romantics and existentialists are not so interested in knowledge or any grand and ultimate objects of knowledge (remarkably, since Fichte’s big project was constructing a science of knowledge). Instead, they are focused on the dramas of living as a person embodied in the world, on the dramatic quality of personal experience. Drama was the new focus because drama is the temporal shape of any person’s caring, improvised among stakes and risks in the ephemerality of living, and as such caring-in-time is metaphysically anomalous as apex existence. Here is the epochal turn in western philosophy away from the metaphysics of eternal necessities and toward the metaphysics of subjective caring-ideality. The former is the foundation of everything politically conservative, whereas the latter leans into a profoundly different political future which is yet to be worked out, a post-hive-mind collective bonding. The looming of this unfinished business is the root of the current malaise of the polarized and aimless Euro-American cultural system.

Cultures of the past preserved ways of facing a fearful unknowing. It is perverse to cling to that condition. The very common impulse to preserve at all costs a legacy language, religion, or the charming trophies of a wealth class or other niche culture always leads to a repetitive dead end of violent exceptionalism, cruel repression, and disabling isolation. No communal bonding can ultimately negate the metaphysically anomalous creativity of every individual caring-ideality.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.