Fragment 177, word count: 450.
Tags: sociability, human attachment, war, caring, perception, knowing, collective identity, herd mind.
Recognizing the presence of a separately embodied intelligence, another caring, sensitive, knowledge-building, and future-opening agent, is a different order of perception from recognizing sand or a piece of wood. There is a kind of perceiving going on in the recognition of another future-inventing agent that requires something other than an empirical explanation. Recognition of caring is crucial in this perceiving and another person’s caring is not an arrangement of sense-data, not a visual impression nor any other sensory impression. Sensory perception cannot assemble an objective image of whatever questing sensibility is expressing the arc of its personal drama in its acts, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of open possibility. Sensibilities as creative shapers of actuality require a conception such as ideality or intentionality that distinguishes them from strictly perceivable actuality. There is an absolute dependence on inherently personal, interior, sources of knowing in the recognition of another sensibility, since familiarity with sensibility as such is entirely self-acquaintance. This is more like a rationalist sort of knowing. * You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your drama. We find in the presence of other caring agents a reflection and a variation of our own dramas of fear and delight, misery and ecstasy, and there is an irresistible sense of enlargement, of energy and exciting possibility, in this not being alone.
It isn’t long into a person’s life before the most important and interesting focus of awareness is an ambient collective of separately embodied intelligences: bodies expressing the spirituality, ideality, or intentionality that is caring sensitivity, searching curiosity, and ever-increasing knowledge in aid of the actualization of personally created intentions. Of course a person learns a sense of location within a structure of surfaces and objects, of food, shelter, and footings for power-projecting activities, but constellations of other people displaying caring intentionality always form the core and organizing pattern of the world that matters.
The reality that hive minds make war confronts us with the challenge of conceiving a way for people to express and enjoy the profound human talent for interpersonal attachment and social interconnectedness without constructing or participating in collective identities which prevent personal creativity from forming an identity grounded on spiritual autonomy and individual agency. We can be sure that the surrounding population of separately embodied idealities remains personally crucial even when an individual dismisses the misconceptions, prejudices, and superstitions which form the common currency of a human hive mind, herd mind, or collective identity. In the arc of human interconnectedness, the socio-cultural formation of herd identities, hive-mind identities, will become an artifact of the past.
* Compare Avicenna’s “inner senses”, in particular: wahm. The sheep recognizes the wolf’s hostility. This is empathic recognition of an outside intelligence with conscious intent and emotional force in that intent. See p. 137 of:
Philosophy in the Islamic World: Volume 3 of: A History of Philosophy without any gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2016), ISBN 978-0-19-957749-1.
Embedded links:
Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).
Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3) (word count: 390).
Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.
in the blind spot 