Fragment 228, Word count: 907.

Tags: history, philosophy, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, time, religion, nature, knowledge, culture, Being, metaphysics.

Part 1.

In the long record of human worrying about and searching out the boundaries, possibilities, and peculiarities of existence as a person, a dominant feature noticed has been a stark bi-modality in the structure of experience. The duality is between, on one hand, an individual interiority of dramatic caring devoted to searching through marginally coherent sensitivities in aid of the improvisation of an arc of personal movement and agency; and, on the other hand, a vast impersonal externality constitutive of the whole enveloping setting that specifically locates and grounds every caring interiority. This fundamental duality has made possible and perhaps inevitable a quarrel over the identification of apex existence. Which of them was first, which the more impressive power? From the very early conceptions of deity in the traces of human lives it seems that the first identification of apex existence went to the creative power of dramatically caring teleological agency, but in an abstracted form free of the restricting localization of embodiment, so both like and unlike human caring, similarly self-aware and expressive but exaggerated in all ways: omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, an ultimate transcendence. Regrettably, this early assessment of apex existence featured forms of caring teleology gone wild and untethered from normal embodiment, not only in deity but also in flagrant over-personification of numerous things in nature that included examples of animism, disembodied spirits, magic, angels and demons, witches and wizards. In the context of a world full of teleology gone wild and untethered the caring interiority of regular embodied individuals seemed to be an inferior imitation, dismissible and insignificant.

Object Dominant Knowledge and Being

Probably there has always been a minority report, or a minority suspicion, that the brute actuality of enveloping nature is what really merits the title of apex existence. Nature has an implacability, a vastness of uncaring determinism, an infinity of extension and a solid core of stability that suggests eternity. Those impressions of infinite and eternal presence give the vast externality a plausible priority, a primordiality, and with it plausibility as the source and matrix of embodied teleology, of caring-ideality at the scale of the human individual, and so plausibility as the evident face of ultimate Being. The problem here is that our surroundings of brute actuality do not present any evidence of deliberation over options, of making choices expressive of marginal preferences or of desperation, not a trace of empathy or of enjoying the pleasure of improvisation, which is to say, no evidence of the power to be creative. This problem notwithstanding, the minority view has inspired the work of a ‘party of Nature’ which has much to show for itself, including the accomplishments of mathematics, useful discoveries of different categories of forces and substances, and of predictable regularities in the way certain important things exist and interact with one another.

The party of Nature goes so far as to dismiss entirely the creative input of caring-ideality from conceptions of reality. One effect of this, within the general effect of diminishing teleology gone wild and untethered from embodiment, is rejection of magical thinking and of once ubiquitous superstitions of angels and demons, witches and wizards,. However, it goes further and also dismisses the creative input of personal caring-ideality. In this way knowledge can be conceived without consideration of individual knowers. On that view knowledge is some kind of impersonal map or model of the externality, of objective reality. This transitions easily into a claim that features of Nature are more than happenstance contingencies but instead are primordial and in a certain sense transcendently imposed as fundamental Being. The move from a description of how something is to the assertion of its necessity is the creation of metaphysics. (Deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ was observed to be invalid by David Hume (1711-76).)

Eternal Necessities vs Agents of Ephemeral and Contested Futurity

Given the structural duality of experience, the choice of one side over the other leans into some particular metaphysics, which means it makes a claim about primordial or ultimate Being. In the case of caring-ideality, any claim of its effective existence as locally improvised interventions into the creation of shape in events contradicts the universal uncaring determinism of Nature-as-Being, and as such presents ideality as existentially anomalous and non-reducible in such a way as to require a separate set of descriptive concepts, including the concept of a radically unfinished world with an ever-opening edge at the coming into existence of an indeterminate non-actual future always largely still to be created but pre-conceived and made actual in certain of its fragments in teleological arcs expressive of the dramatic caring of individual agents. Teleology is a living in the future. On this view the material world is a stage-set supporting the ephemeral dramas of caring that make any of it matter, the caring-dramas of individually embodied agents of a contested future.

Either of two presuppositions make it impossible to recognize the unique creativity of individually embodied caring teleology. One is elimination of caring-ideality from conceptions of fundamental existence, as in materialism. The other is conceptions of caring teleology gone wild and untethered as in angels, demons, deities, and inappropriately personified items of nature. This alienation of caring-teleology from the only context in which it is experienced directly, in expressions of ordinary embodied individuals, is regrettably the universal norm, so that even in cultural settings which conceive caring-teleology as apex existence, ordinary individuals are not granted the dignity appropriate to that metaphysical status.

 … To Be Continued.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.