Tag Archives: culture

The History of Knowledge in Dystopia

06 Monday Nov 2023

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 203, word count: 2,365.

Tags: literacy, violence, humanism, progress, ideality, time, writing, power, aristocracy, empiricism, voice, value, culture, Rene Descartes, John Locke.

It is no accomplishment to damage or wreck the established dystopia if in doing so a worse dystopia is left in its place. When undertaking to change the dystopia, which obviously has an urgent need for changes that reduce it as a dystopia, it is of the utmost importance to avoid making a worse dystopia. Any method of altering the dystopia which involves violence is certain to result in something worse. A culture of violence is a crucial part of dystopian societies. Violence, and the authoritarianism that is inseparable from it, is a great temptation to some visionaries of change because it seems to promise quick and decisive alteration in the dystopia, but the result is always worse. Violence doesn’t get anywhere near threatening the core of dystopia. The idea of progress is crucial here. Sometimes, within a dystopia, conditions can be made better for some people, and even in dystopia there are factions which are comfortable, pleased with themselves and their situation, and oblivious to dystopian reality. The idea of progress stands at the core of political debate because the very idea of progress carries a muted recognition that current societies, as devised by the ancestors, have always been disastrously flawed. People who merge their personal identities with the specific cultural forms of their society find this insulting. Reverence for ancestors and for the particular cultural forms they created dictates that this society must be the best, or nearly so. Nothing much better is considered possible because dystopian culture claims knowledge that individual human existence itself is innately miserable as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers, often desperate and vicious, and that the arrangements of society merely exhibit those flaws along with measures possible to regulate them and limit the damage. However, progress is not a simple matter of material circumstances but also touches conceptions of the self, judgments of the self, considered independently of the culture of an ambient society.

Legacy Culture

From a tender age, everyone is confronted by some vast edifice of knowledge and supposition embedded into culture, language, and institutions all around. The edifice is authoritative and fetishistic. Prior to development of mathematical/ materialist science at around the time of (and partly through the agency of) Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the various edifices of knowledge were structured around religious certainties, fleshed out with selections from ancient philosophy. In Christendom those core ideas included original sin and pervasive supernatural surveillance for the purpose of supernatural moral ledger-keeping on everyone’s every thought and deed, all leading toward an inescapable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, this made the ever-present prospect of death terrifying. The new mechanistic system of conceiving the human situation, asserted by mathematical/ materialist science, gradually disrupted and made progress in discrediting and replacing that incessant religious blame-game as the authoritative core of knowledge in Euro-American culture, at the cost of diminishing or cancelling the idea of individual freedom and originality. Perhaps because of that cost, the popular acceptance of the new knowledge, as extensive as it has been, has been uneven and shallow. The religious edifice is still asserting itself aggressively, and has always influenced crucial conceptions in the scientific framework. Overall, however, the scientific vision of the human situation did replace the vaguely imagined possible rewards of a life-after-death (earned by difficult moral accomplishments, especially obedience to authority) by embracing the pre-existing aristocratic culture of earthly rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive wealth, trophy possessions, and coercive power.

A core culture of violence is a crucial element of aristocracy. This separates aristocracy from bourgeois culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of prosperity without the overt use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Crime families and criminal organizations generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing.

Empiricism

In the cultural transition to the scientific mythos, philosophers around the time of John Locke (1632-1704) were obsessed with acquiring knowledge of an objective external reality, what they were coming to conceive as the only genuinely important knowledge. This attitude was a novel development and a repudiation of the longstanding Christian mythos that the objective material world lacked fundamental importance (reality) since it is merely the staging and backdrop for the central drama of all existence: the moral journey of the human spirit. In the new scientific mythos the two foci changed places in a certain way. The human sense of self-existence (along with its drama) was reduced to a derivative product of larger natural systems, and those natural systems, conceived as entirely independent of human experience, were newly considered fundamental Reality and so the focus of any serious pursuit of ultimate knowledge. The resulting empiricist emphasis on the passive receptivity of a perceiver receiving impressions from outside itself complements the conception of human existence as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers grasping for external gratifiers.

Both of those legacy knowledge cultures maintain the falsehood that the most fulfilling peak experiences are few and rarely accessible, competitively exclusive and remote from ordinary life. This gives these cultures a narrow and exclusionary conception of a life well-lived, with the profoundly dystopian effect of de-valuing the lives of the majority of people.

Literacy

A fascinating stream of cultural development with ancient beginnings, crucial to both religious and scientific institutions of knowledge, is the technology of graphically recorded language, the practices of literacy, including its physical crafts, how it is taught, and arrangements for its preservation and distribution, for maintaining and expanding its use from generation to generation. Until quite recently, it was only a small minority of scribes in any society that was comfortably literate. If a society’s intelligentsia is that portion which has advanced scribal skills, with fluent literacy and broad education in the texts carrying a record of human thinking, then Christendom’s intelligentsia was mainly the personnel of the Church hierarchy, until universities sent enough of their graduates into secular activities to enable a Republic of Letters. With graphically recorded language anyone might put in the time and effort it takes to construct utterances without having an available listener or interlocutor who would be interested, patient, and indulgent enough to follow the threads of thought being expressed. This makes it possible to have, explore, develop and preserve threads of thought that don’t fit into an available set of conversational relationships, threads of thought that can be especially personal, original, and contrary to what may be considered acceptable, orthodox, or realistic in the cultural moment. Thought can become untethered from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that are familiar to contemporary contacts. This is a gateway to experiences of surprisingly big fun, and launches thinking as a force capable of outperforming and discrediting violence and its trophies. On this basis, the culture of reading and writing inspired so many institutions, such as universities, such monumental products, and so many innovative personal initiatives that it took on a developmental momentum all its own, beyond the control of any pre-existing authorities. It was literacy as spread by Church institutions in Christendom which created the matrix from which fundamentals of mathematical and scientific knowledge could explode beyond the cloistered sub-culture of scribes. Only in the society in which universal literacy became an urgent project of religious piety, as it was in Protestantism, could a fundamentally new public sense of reality itself be imagined. The new reality, totally impersonal nature as pre-determined by discernible laws, came into focus through the lens of mathematical/ empirical science, but there was not just one scientific vision of this reality. Marxism, for example, was a new vision of reality based on science, a science which discerned in nature laws of socio-economic development that entirely pre-determined the past and future course of human history. Like many other new visions of reality, it turned out to be pseudo-science, and incidentally it was comfortable with using violence, so doubly dystopian. It illustrates that there are disagreements about what is self-evident, that what is recognized as self-evident involves creative (spiritual) input from a perceiver in addition to purely objective conditions. Reality is mutable.

Humanism

Literacy, book culture, and literary crafts produced such a profound framework of orientation, opening vast new realms of freedom and creativity for thinking, that they also engendered or became a movement with a different focus of caring and a different sense of what is importantly self-evident from that of mathematical science, yet still cultivating an alternative to ascribing all real value to a feared but unknowable life-after-death, as was typical with religion. This movement, known as Humanism, celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality. It began as a specifically literary cultivation but gradually expanded to embrace the whole high culture of the more privileged and propertied strata of society, with an emphasis on the culturally exceptional and difficult examples of decorative and performance arts as well as especially expensive luxuries and hedonistic pleasures. It celebrates the human capacity to enjoy the pre-death world, on the quiet assumption that this is the one that matters. As with science, many versions of Humanism have been conceived, and some are as exclusive and elitist in their way as the parade of saints, the elect, or the enlightened is in religion. By embracing the high culture of the privileged and propertied strata of society, Humanism, like science, embraces the hunger games of dystopia as the default  and eternal human condition.

Living: Neither Being nor Becoming (instead Creating)

The only existence of the past is in individual ideality. Memory is ideality, individual recollection built into the sense of personal location and direction in an arc of activity, agency, some of which remains to be created by specifically targeted effort. There is no ‘the past’ otherwise. Similarly for futurity. It only exists in the orientation and bearing sensed by individual people, in the sense a person has of enacting intentions, of doing something in particular, going somewhere, having a purpose. Time, therefore, as commonly understood, is a creation of spirit, a definitive phenomenon of spiritual creativity. Spirit is anomalous existence in that, without exception, embodied spirit is radically unfinished. Being unfinished involves the individual ideation of time as an opening for personally purposive acts of intervention into surroundings, ideation of time as containment for everything that went before including a stable enough, enduring, framework or grounding for personal action. Time is conceived as world-containment, open in such a way as to be containing without enclosing.

Living existence, ideality, conceives itself within an opening at an active edge where there is a meeting between a completed and fully occupied world and an empty extension of that world waiting for the creation of what will fill it, and at that edge living existence is exerting itself to create personally crucial parts of what occupies the ever-emerging emptiness. Continuous loss and the continuous possibility of surprise make the emptiness dramatically and unrelentingly problematic. The emptiness is a relentless opening-up that brings loss and an ever-renewing possibility of surprise.

This anomalous existence of spirit within time is a constant activity which is generative, fountaining, giving, putting outward. Caring is a feature of the radical incompleteness of spiritual existence, a spiritual power. Projecting interest and curiosity is a spiritual projection of power. Part of this activity reaches for and takes hold of impressions of a not-self surroundings. An individual’s decisions, questionings, curiosity-powered searches, eureka! breakthrough recognitions and expressive acts are present to that individual as self-assertions and exertions of personal power to create, as outgoing interventions, projections of spontaneous will and the dramatic and context-rich intentions that are the focus of living.

And So

Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual self-experiencing human as crucially derivative: in religion, as the creature of a vastly greater willing and purposeful force, and in science as derived from larger impersonally natural processes. Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual human as the mainly passive receiver of a flow upon it from beyond itself, sometimes reacting to the impact of that flow. Contrary to that, it should be recognized that the flow that most characterizes spiritual existence is outward from personal creativity, creating the world both conceptually and practically. Peak experiences of value and gratification derive from that personally expressive outward flow of creative power, rather than being rare hidden treasures that need to be hunted down in the mountains. Recognition of human existence as ongoing world creation, as the cosmically anomalous fountain of ongoing creativity, changes the possibilities for human self-judgment, shakes it free of cultural determinism, and the only effective way to undertake changing the dystopia is to launch revisions to the dominant edifices of knowledge, at the level of the fundamental vision of reality.

Humanism fails through being too ready to celebrate all culture as the ultimate human achievement. In fact, culture is often oppressive and injurious to individuals. There is an individual spiritual fountain of activity which operates separately from culture, although, from a love of the pleasures of sociability, easily influenced by culture. A humanism worth the name would clarify that profound experiences are embedded in the very existence of living persons, that they fountain from that anomalous existence, and that, far from being exceptional, they are co-extensive with living persons. A humanism worth the name would repudiate the vanities and inhumanities of the trophy-merit reward economy of the aristo-bourgeois culture bubbles. There is an authentic spiritual alternative inherent in the lived experience of any person, through self-acquaintance with the transcendence of embodied spirituality.

Links:

Fragment 122, January 26, 2018, Ethics in the Philosophy Project (word count: 1,483)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 148, May 22, 2019, The Birth of the Left (word count: 628)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

On Literacy and Humanism

Papyrus: the Invention of Books in the Ancient World, written by Irene Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle, Published by Knopf (2022). ISBN 978-0593318898. See especially section 55, The Religion of Culture, pp.126-128.

Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.  See Chapter 6, Literacy, pp. 145-169.

Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (see p. 130).

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf (2023). Alfred A. Knopf Canada is a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. ISBN 978-0-7352-7430-3.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Popping Hive-Mind Bubbles

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Fragment 201, word count: 722.

tags: utopia, dystopia, politics, culture, reality, spiritual simulation, metaphysics, phenomenology.

It is typical of utopian texts from the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to idealize small societies with a strong collective sense of unity *, societies in which every individual agrees with everyone else about the dramas that constitute the emotional vectors of life and especially collective life. This collective cultural and psychological uniformity was, and often still is, seen as the foundation of social stability, and it is supposed that social stability is an ideal to be sought. However, what is always sinister, oppressive, and inhumane about repressive authoritarian governments is the deliberate social engineering of a collective single-mindedness, a cultural hive-mind in which dissent is punished with intent to obliterate. Human hive-minds are far more pervasive and ubiquitous than ordinarily recognized, and there is no point in trying to distinguishing good hive-minds from bad ones. All of them are destructive of individual self-expression, creativity, freedom, and self-possession. Remarkably, and this is the nub of the issue, the richness of sociability and the great human interconnectedness does not depend on hive-mind reality bubbles.

It used to be thought that if people in a community had different religions, for example, or no religion, then social breakdown would soon follow. It is now obvious that societies with a mixture of different religions and no-religion can thrive. The same thinking applied to sexual orientations, to gender identities, to a fixed hierarchy of genders, to race, language, and to reverence for a sovereign leader who, along with various officials who judge and evaluate compliance with social norms, would be universally internalized by people as a dominating superego. It is now obvious that none of these is necessary for a thriving human interconnectedness, and nor are symbols of collective identity such as flags, uniforms, monuments to glorious battles, a romanticized and sanitized history, heroes, weapons, a fearsome and contemptible enemy, an exceptional group destiny. These are all mechanisms to bind individuals into a hive-mind, and there are influencers pressuring people to embrace them, supposedly for the communal good, sometimes called the higher good. The conforming societies that result are not the realization of any higher good.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of an essential structure to existence that extends into the order of societies, are always canonized in dystopias to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. Dystopian arrangements become normalized and accepted through the use of fantasy metaphysics to persuade people that hierarchical social arrangements are the inevitable products of God or Nature, both pillars of essentialist belief systems. A phenomenology of spirit, on the other hand, establishes that social arrangements are not inevitable and certainly not pre-determined by God or Nature. Such a metaphysics of experience is the route to de-normalizing dystopia. Any exit from dystopian societies will require the individual self-possession that comes with self-acquaintance unmediated by antique cultural fantasies.

The Spiritual Simulation

The sense of the world by which an individual is oriented and grounded is built from fleeting perceptions and personally curated memory, and since it can’t be a sculptural physical likeness or scale-model of the world, nor any kind of continuous perceptual contact with every part of the world known by the individual, this sense of being oriented within knowledge of some region of the world is a personal simulation of a world. These simulations are constructed of perception-based suppositions arranged in the service of an individual’s pattern of personal caring, all accomplished in the medium of suppositions, ideality, the poise of a busy self-interested spirit at a place in the world. Spirit orients itself and survives by simulating a world un-naturally stretched in time, supposing what it no longer perceives and anticipating the world as staging for a moment by moment enactment of its self-created arc of intended interventions. Supposing, caring, anticipating, and intending are spiritual non-actualities, postures of ideality, the only metaphysical reality. This phenomenology of spirit recognizes that individual creativity in manifesting a caring personal agency is crucial to the shape of all aspects of the human environment. It reveals the very opposite of essentialism, an alternative to the determinism stipulated by theologies or by physical materialism.

  • Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (Chapter 42, pp. 298-304).

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

tags: metaphysics, existence, deity, science, politics, dystopia, capitalism, gratification, culture, spirituality.

There are two opposing explanations for the existence of something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act of intervention, OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and anticipating intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. Each of these explanations is a particular statement of metaphysics. The metaphysics of existence as an intentional act of intervention, in a variety of versions, was ubiquitous in human societies for ages, for example in feudal Christendom, and it always joined forces with the culture of patriarchal dominance which exploits and makes concrete the idea of deity by violently imposing the will of the strongest on everyone within reach (sovereign exceptionalism), and by instituting worshipful cult collectives with the softer attractions of grand cosmic visions and close personal belonging. In opposition to explanation by divine intervention, the mere occurrence explanation dawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the boutique metaphysics of mathematical materialism in the scientific Enlightenment. It began a process of removing wind from the sails of sovereigns and the social structuring around sovereignty. In the current state of modern civilization there remain these same two institutional proponents of metaphysical ideology, each supporting one of the two existential possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Religious institutions champion the deliberate interventionist side, and institutions of science and scientific education champion random occurrence, near enough. This is the shape of our civilization’s foundational culture war. Yet these two have come to an effective peace accord based on the fact that both support the (ready-to-detonate) capitalist incentive and reward system: consumption as identity-defining trophy. Science explains this system as the inevitable working of animal nature, and Christianity explains it as the inscrutable Divine plan in action. Notwithstanding their differences, both sides developed metaphysics on the model of a law-giver, divine law on one side, natural law on the other, and laws always apply top-down (unalterably) to things understood as unalterable building blocks of reality, all tidy and settled in a hierarchical chain of Being extending down into economic and political structure, social roles and relationships, and even into gender and race categories. It is a vision of existence as rigidly pre-structured and is the ideological matrix of the right-wing politics of winner-take-all inequality.

Both bastions of metaphysics are able to embrace the capitalist incentive and reward system because each misconstrues something crucial about the reality it holds dearest. Religious institutions attach themselves to the overriding reality of creative teleological interventions, the power of spirituality for spontaneously expressive novelty, so much so that they project spiritual teleology outward as the great cosmic parent hidden inside all existence, literally deifying it and proclaiming it the origin of everything. By doing that they reduce individual human-scale spirituality to ignorance, vanity, and misery. On the other side, science attaches itself to knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as unalterably definite. Science focuses so much on material objectivity that it disappears human experience into mere mechanism. Each of these entrenched metaphysical doctrines so drastically discounts the importance of the other that actual human spirituality is distorted grotesquely by both. Dystopia follows from the denigration of individual-scale human spirituality from which certain factions gain power and benefits. Setting aside the grotesque exclusivity of the sides in this culture war, we are left with ordinary human scale experience which absolutely depends on both novel teleological creativity at the level of individual persons, and with the stability and clear discernibility of some material objectivity. We have no direct experience of deliberative interventions at a cosmic level, but we have no end of experience of them in our everyday social interactions.

Getting beyond the all-destroying capitalist incentive and reward imperative to consume requires getting beyond the outrageous denigration of individual-level spirituality in metaphysical culture. It demands nothing more than a dualistic synthesis of the opposing metaphysical visions in a new configuration: recognition of random occurrence at the cosmic level and of creative novelty, foresight, learning, and personal expression, which is to say, spontaneous spirituality, at the level of the individual person. Removing the genius of agency in our scenario from some top-down imposer of laws, and relocating it instead to ground level where everyone breaths and talks and carries on living day to day, provides a profound equality of persons. The fact is that a standard practice of creativity as personal expression is the most gratifying and self-affirming of experiences. This is the ultimate grounding for democracy because every individual brings an inherent personal fountain of gratification that bypasses the competitive market economics of trade and barter. This is a metaphysics more congruent with a leftist politics of universal dignity, equality, and mutual support. The left has always been weakened by the lack of a strong and special metaphysical foundation, and so the authentic culture war between left and right politics has not yet even really started.

Context:

Fragment 180, August 28, 2021, Existence and New Reality (word count: 505)

Fragment 173, January 30, 2021, Absolute Incompleteness (word count: 202)

Fragment 171, December 9, 2020, Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia (word count: 779)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Nietzsche Autonomous

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Fragment 186, word count: 340.

tags: empathy, embodiment, culture, individuality, voice, Nietzsche, Plato, Kant.

Nietzsche’s thinking did not have a lot in common with Plato’s. In fact, Nietzsche had the thought that overcoming Plato’s way of conceiving reality was the most important thing that western civilization could accomplish to improve itself. The thing Nietzsche didn’t like about Platonism was its heavenly focus, obsession with a remote world that could be thought but not lived with the richness of embodiment, a world of eternal perfection which put worldly normality in a dismissing and frightening light. However, there is a point of contact between Nietzsche and Plato.

Nietzsche judged that individuals are normally conditioned uncritically into a cultish herd mind, a collective set of values and judgments. He presented personal creativity as the elevating human power, a power that can be the portal out of human herd banality and into a particularizing individuality of spirit. On Nietzsche’s view, the distinctness and individuality of the felt human body, awash with personally specific sickness, pain, and fatigue, kinetic power and sexual arousal, are made spiritual by being taken up by creative impulses which construct expressions in a unique voice. Nietzsche’s conception of this process of self-created individuality, separating from cult minds which are always ambient for social beings, is reminiscent of Plato’s metaphor of the cave. In Plato’s cave narrative we are shown a map of where philosophical curiosity, cultivated as a personal mission, leads in relation to immersion in the collective orientation of some cultural community at a given moment. From an initial placement within culturally stipulated forms of experience and dramas, the person devoted to philosophical thinking begins a process of questioning the assumptions, categories, and values of this moment of culture, and in doing so is relocated to individuality. Between Plato and Nietzsche, historically, Kant had already taken a crucial step further. In his balletically formalized way, he observed that people consistently exercising inherent rationality don’t need any external sovereign to proclaim laws because inherent rationality coupled with universal empathy, applied to all sentient beings, enables them to be self legislating in all situations.

Embedded links:

Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Fragment 157, December 11, 2019, Philosophy in the Dystopian Context (word count: 552)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Metaphysics is You

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Fragment 185, word count: 505.

tags: philosophy, metaphysics, dystopia, embodiment, personality, reality, politics, culture, nature, freedom, Plato.

Rarely does an individual have much control over the evolutionary momentum of multigenerational cultural entities such as religions, sovereign states, cities, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a well contextualized sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink, as we transform through the life cycle of a human animal. This combines with generational amnesia, the personal-level, deeply experienced knowledge lost with the mortality of each generation, and also with the new-generation’s  innocence and its inclination to have a joyful life in a joyful world. Biologically, our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for some unthinkable duration. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. It is not surprising then that, socially, accommodations are made for whatever activities and systems of relationship are practiced at our moment of intervention, even if they have a dystopian core, because often enough that seems to make it easier to find some joy in being alive. This makes a certain sort of philosophical work almost impossible.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of a fixed and eternal structure of existence, are always canonized in dystopia to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. For example, the commanding heights of Plato’s conception of metaphysical reality, typical of dystopia, exist somewhere on the invisible far side of objects, a substrate behind the impersonally given world of objective things. They are meant to make sense of how the never-ceasing fluidity of familiar things can be connected to a stability profound enough to count as essential reality. On that view, the situation may be tragic, but it is nature and you can’t change nature. Things are what they must be, manifesting an existential bedrock of categories and laws. Although canonical, this is only wild speculation.

There is an opposing metaphysics of primordial existence, a conception that denies any categorical commanding heights. In the most straightforward way, you are the metaphysics in your world, the living ideality here on the near side of phenomena. All forms of ideality occur in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. Ideality is always personality, the creative transcendence of ordinary, individual-level, temporal agency living a creativity that transcends nature and makes what sense it will of the physical or divine givens of nature. There may be a system of stark givens, but it has no intrinsic purposes, doesn’t matter to itself and cannot care, and that system has no immutable grip on the conceptions of us agents of temporal ideality. Social systems derived from this metaphysical source can be perfectly free of any influences from the patterns of organization in brute actuality.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Loneliest Un-Loneliness

08 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Nature, Political Power, Why thinking?

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Fragment 181, word count: 913.

tags: human hive-mind, embodiment, attachment, war, philosophy, un-loneliness, culture, imitation, originality, freedom

The most urgent issue for philosophy is the relationship between individual persons and collective identities of the kind described here previously as hive-minds which make war with each other. This urgency can be illustrated by reference to the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians, in which the crucial divide between the Asian cultural system and the Euro-American cultural system is eastern collectivism (extended-extended patriarchal family values) as opposed to the legacy of individualism from the European metaphysical upheavals: Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Revolution of 1789-99. Obviously, western societies are also still largely organized as patriarchal hive-minds. Human hive-minds, collective identities, are the important and dangerous structures behind war, colonization, imperialism, and national exceptionalism expressing the conviction that strength and power merit the privilege of dominance and special rights. Hive-mind collective identity is distinctly not universal but instead an imprint of the point of view of some self-proclaiming superior beings club, an ‘us against the unworthy’ ideology. However, the metaphysical contests of western history have had some effect, and citizens of the resulting modernity are somewhat less rooted in an unquestionable patriarchally defended essentialism with its vision of rigid permanence in the structures and cycles of everything!

To be human is to relish engagement with other intelligences, and culture is always created to aid that engagement. Personality is inherently a creator and imitator of culture. As a deliberate intentional act, imitation is a declaration of intelligence to another presumed intelligence, a declaration of sensitivity, perception, memory, and caring, within a declaration of recognizing or supposing perception, memory, and caring embodied separately and paying attention. Imitation is a crucial declaration of pattern recognition and an invitation and promise of a conversational future, imitations with surprising innovations.

Absorption in an ambient culture is so crucial for people that the understanding of basic reality in any individual’s encounter with the world is almost completely mediated and structured by culturally transmitted religions, stories and ceremonies of national patriotism, and the ethos of some specific and exclusive stratum of social status and esteem: socially normal expectations about styles of consumption, work, and family relations, of gender expressions and attractiveness, social manners, niche cultures of decoration, costume, dwellings, celebrations, topics of conversation, and markers of success. The human world is a patchwork of such cultural niches (up to and including civilizations) all addicted to certainty about themselves as the best possible expression of divine will and of nature, the bedrock of categories and laws that determines things to be just as they are. Each collective’s cultural expression supports it feeling superior to others no matter what appearances and comparisons may suggest, stridently unwilling to accept reality checks, dangerously threatened by reality checks. As superior beings clubs, these culture pods are determined to remain as they are and to keep everybody under the spell of their dramas. However, cultural ideas that self-aggrandize, and externalize a supposedly less worthy subset of humanity, are arbitrary stipulations based on superstitious fears and magical wishes. In this context thinking philosophically can be a serious business that depends on a personal separation from the cultural currency of suppositions. The stakes are high here for individuals, and in this cultural context philosophy can be a reality check where a reality check is needed desperately.

Notwithstanding reveries of utopias and primordial states of nature, philosophers have not often questioned the stratification of society and political power as they found them. They mostly laboured to ‘justify the ways of God (or nature) to man’ on the essentialist assumption that food-chains of power, wealth, and social esteem (essentially master/ slave social organization in superstitious hive-mind formations) are unalterable basic reality. It is assumed that it must always be this way because nature is strictly pre-determined to vary within a narrow range, fated to swing through ever-recurring cycles. However, there have been various intuitions of monadic personal agency, in which the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is recognized and treated as inherently greater in depth and scope than the imprinted cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. This can be illustrated by a consideration of language. Language is a public transit system. Experience for any individual goes vastly beyond the territory marked out by language, just as geography goes vastly beyond the streetcar tracks. When poets or philosophers make efforts to communicate experience that is not included in the current transit system they have no choice but to bend and stretch and sculpt new parts of language to draw attention to previously private regions. The individuality of spontaneously questioning sensibility grounded in embodiment is enough to permit individuals an exit from-hive mind collective identities.

The lesson of philosophy in its long and complex history is that individuals, as defined by embodiment, have the power to conceptualize creatively and originally the world that can be abstracted within the rich spiritual context that digests what is given externally. Philosophical statements have been an individual’s declaration of independence as a conceiver of living a life, and, as such, a challenge to the collective orientation of hive-minds. Philosophy is a person’s description of encountering the world after discounting the cultural currency of suppositions previously supplied by an ambient society, when, in their loneliest un-loneliness, they encounter the universality of innocent experience: intentionality, sentience, caring, within an eventful given world. In this innocence no one is a member of any collective subset of the interconnectedness of personal beings.

Embedded links

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 158, January 9, 2020, The Arc of the Monad (word count: 803)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

tags: existence, metaphysics, time, creativity, freedom, caring, drama, agency, empathy, science, religion, politics, patriarchy, civilization, malaise.

The difference made by recognizing a bit of metaphysics, specifically a certain conception of ideality, is a much needed and long overdue disruption of two canonical but failing universal explanations: religious personification of nature and the materialist fatalism of science. Thinking of ideality as embodied (discontinuous and discretely located) points and arcs of creative intentionality* opens a way to recognize human-scale freedom and creativity as real without wildly speculative and implausible personifications. Human reality is a beach where a personal interiority of ever-reshaping dramas made of caring and ideas (expectations and hopes, questions, aspirations, and intentions) gush out in deliberate activity and wash actuality. Features of brute actuality can be shaped into culture by these actions. Culture in this sense is any product of intentional craft, any effective application of purposive ideality to the merely natural material of actuality: the carved wood, the ploughed field. Freedom is real in this tumbling co-existence of gushing creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of existence (both ideality and actuality) as witnessed in the endless passage of time. Any serious conception of freedom requires enduring points of ideality actively living, forming actuality, at the incomplete edge of existence, continuously actualizing a stream of spontaneously invented intentions within a personally learned and learning context of expectations. Knowledge is always an elaboration, specification, and development of personally created dramas of caring.

Since the European codification of mathematical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after nearly a millennium of theocratic Christendom, the most innovating civilizations have been stuck with a dysfunctional codependence of scientific materialism and immaterial angels and demons. Both religion and science have ongoing appeal, science from rapidly developing commercial applications, especially communication and data processing technology (innovations in entertainment with advertising), vaccines of course; and religion from a most primitive reflex to personify the world, which is to suppose that purposive intentionality creates everything. But the binocular culture which perceives with the materialist lens in one eye and the world-personifying lens in the other is spectacularly unsuccessful delivering peace and justice in its political and governance arrangements, and no wonder. Science and religion have in common a fundamental legitimation of patriarchal hierarchy as core social organization. To be clear, this is top-down human-on-human macro parasitism, various forms of the master/ slave relationship. Religious personification asserts that such organization is the eternal divine plan (divinity is the primordial master), and scientific fatalism that such a food chain is made inevitable by immutable forces of nature. These are both conceptions of existence as profoundly complete, without any possibility for the creation of real novelty. In that context governance is a matter of imposing on everyone an orientation up the hierarchy for a sense of direction derived from an overarching culturally stipulated drama.

Culture in this sense is the complex system of imitative, repetitive, and normative human activity that expresses and sustains a collective’s sense of unity and identity. This is the sense in which culture, in the context of patriarchal parasitism, imposes a hive-mind on its participants. This has produced and maintained dystopian political regimes poisoned by the history of war culture abetted by religions that demand irrational credulity and fervent expressions of reverence and supplication upward, situating deity at the apex of human hierarchy. Outsourcing the determination of reality to a God, impersonal Platonic Ideas, or even just nature denigrates human ideality by alienating the creative work of conceptualization actually required and accomplished by individuals orienting ourselves in the world. It represents human interiority as a passive recipient of a pre-completed world, including the social and political world, and has the effect of cementing individuals into a mass mythology of inadequacy and dependence. Science further denigrates personal interiority by reducing it to biologically pre-determined lusts and reactions to external stimuli, and religion denigrates it as an engine of error and misery, completely hopeless without the controlling intervention of some more perfect and powerful personification.

Individual ideality, however, is profoundly more active and creative than religion or science can recognize. The primordial act of self-creation by every ideality is the supposition of time. Ideality is the non-actuality which supposes. Every ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating time-wave, living in and through a constant flight through time. A time-wave is a dramatically-propelled progressive change of suppositions. One vector of this flight consists of things slipping by and falling away, and the other vector is a dramatic personal leap into a supposed future. Time is a personal dimension of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality in which, oriented with knowledge, expectations, and questions abstracted from a supposed ephemeral past, an intelligence creates specific intentions to project itself with a degree of creative freedom into an ever-newly-opening not-yet or future. This being-in-time distinguishes ideality from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the opening of freedom-from-nature at the edge of existence and as such the transcendence that spiritual interiority brings to the beach of reality. With an appropriate sense of this interiority the personal importance of competitions and appearances falls away. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles, personal hero story) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant conceptual system.

The political difference made by recognizing persons universally as metaphysical engines of spontaneous creativity, exploiting a precarious position at the edge of existence by improvising a desperately caring drama of sensitivity and personal expression, is a flattening of the political landscape. There is no justification here for master/ slave social organization. There is no general disrespect or denigration of humanity/ personality inherent in this conception. The political imperative changes from imposing control via belligerent us-against-them hive minds to cultivating and encouraging autonomous creativity and person-to-person interconnections shaped by empathy.

The often lamented malaise of civilization is the result of extreme cultural denigration of humanity/ personality combined with a romantic overestimation of the explanatory power of mathematical science. These have killed off innovative thinking involving metaphysics, but only a certain metaphysical reconceptualization can amend the currently toxic cultural legacy.

Note

* ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of pre-conceiving future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Christianity taught, and European Christendom accepted for centuries, that the human spiritual drama, our unique opportunity for ethical elevation by coming to know and align with the transcendent deity, is the purpose of all existence. Humans were thought to be the primary achievement of the all-creating God. Born as an exile into an initial state of disgrace within the lusts, pains, and thrills of a mortal body, each human is capable of recognizing its existence as more authentically one of transcendent spirituality and changing its way of life to express that spirituality. The worldly society of Christendom, controlled at all levels by the hierarchy and laws of the Roman Church in partnership with the secular military aristocracy, was accepted as the means by which individuals were guided to the spiritual life, a state of grace whose reward was blissful immortality. In the sixteenth century, within a broad advance of science, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered and revealed that the human home planet was not the centre of God’s cosmos, suggesting a more marginal status for human being. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin presented findings suggesting that humans are indistinguishable from animals, just naked apes, driven by instinctive drives and passions beyond individual control, with no qualitative specialness placing us in a uniquely elevated category. For much of the educated stratum of nineteenth century Europe, this apparent loss of human standing in the great scheme of things was a revelation of nihilism, a catastrophic loss of purpose and value. This was the context in which Nietzsche conceived his mission of thinking.

With God removed from the human situation, the Christian drama of existence faded out and with it the sense of meaning and purpose derived from that drama. Reflecting on human history soon reveals that no eventual outcome of biological evolution can give value and meaning to human existence, since it is unknowable, nor can the historical progress of human civilization do it since that reveals no verifiable arc toward a fulfillment. In the absence of these large structures as navigational guides the problem of meaning and purpose becomes entirely the individual’s problem and actually defines, on Nietzsche’s view, the monadic singularity of the human individual, the loneliest loneliness. As it happens, however, the fundamental nature or quality of individual spirit, the will to power, contains within itself a dramatic dynamic capable of achieving happiness, and so defeating nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the universal ethical and existential imperative for every individual is self-perfection, though that achievement is possible only for strong domineering spirits. Only the strongest spirits are capable of the happiness of self-perfection because only the strongest are capable of self-domination or self-overcoming by sublimating the instinctive animal impulses (Dionysian) into products of a dominant personal rationality (Apollonian), imposing a unifying form and style on all expressions of that sublimated energy. This Dionysian – Apollonian dialectic is the intrinsic dynamic of the will to power, the fundamental living force. Culture that is elevating to behold and appropriate is created from the sublimation of bestial impulses and instincts. Even though those impulses and instincts originate in and always declare the body, without them there is no energy to be sublimated into high art and culture. Strong and passionate impulses require an even stronger force of rationality to impose form and style on them. Artists and philosophers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, are typically the people who discipline themselves to sublimate their great passions into creative activities. Nietzsche calls such spirits ubermensch, higher men, the only people of value in his estimation because in the ecstasy of their original creation they uniquely manifest authentic individuality. Specimens of higher men are rare and occur unpredictably in various times, societies, races, and ethnic groups, and it seems that for Nietzsche they are “The Elect”, forever predetermined for blessedness. The rest of us are a herd of doomed beasts of no interest or value, sometimes spiritualized to some extent by encountering the achievements of the higher ones.

There are striking similarities between Nietzsche’s conception of the drama and tragedy of existence and the previously dominant one from Christendom. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. Separation of people into The Elect and the damned is one similarity. Both dramas involve a tension or dialectic between animal embodiment and some version of a transcendent spirituality which exerts itself against animality and offers a happier and more authentically meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s version, however, the impulses of the body are never left behind but always remain the source of life’s energy. In addition, Nietzsche’s spiritualizing, sublimating, force is militant rationality, giver of expressive form, stability, and style, replacing the poor Christian spirit of meek obedient submission, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, and altruism.

Such was Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. It is philosophically unusual in recasting the Christian drama by eliminate a commanding and controlling deity while still finding a way to divide blessed from damned. That vision clearly doesn’t defeat nihilism for everyone, only for the precious few his message was apparently designed to reach. However, if we discount Nietzsche’s peculiar aristocratic exclusivity, we can appreciate his “Yes” to embodiment as inseparable from the ecstasy of personal creativity, his close attention to the interior experience of creativity and its independence from any conformist herd mind.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.

Zarathustra’s Secret, written by Joachim Kohler, translated from German by Ronald Taylor, Published by Yale University Press (English edition June 2002), ISBN-10: 0300092784, ISBN-13: 978-0300092783.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Dissent by Metaphysics

07 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 172, word count: 680.

tags: spirit, hive-mind, identity, sensibility, culture, self-possession, caring drama, dissent

It is not unusual for some individuals to recognize a personal discordance with mass identities, cemented into uniformity, as they are, by collectively sharing an orientation up toward a commanding height of metaphysics that denigrates human existence among ideas of disembodied demons, deities, and ever recurring cycles and circles of events and personal incarnations. It is widely recognized that shared stories and emotional triggers distributed on popular media, under the control of a few corporate owners responsible to certain investors and advertisers, contribute mightily to a shared sense of reality which is the human equivalent of hive-mind. In the individual’s quarrel with hive-mind dystopian regimes, the individual can’t do much about mechanisms of mass control except to shift focus onto the deepest level of politics: conceptions of creative power, freedom, and self-possession at the level of the individual.

Without recognizing the reality of actual creative agency, the enactment of spur-of-the-moment aspirations or intentions from conception at some moment through subsequent time, the idea of spirit is entirely unnecessary, but with such a recognition the idea is indispensable and profoundly important as a transcendence within reality. Creative agency is a drama of perfecting expectations and inventing intentions for effective self-declaration. To be experienced, reality must come within that caring drama of a personal life in the world. Expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations are states of ideality that occur only in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a personal “I”, a sensibility that is the living experience of some individually embodied personality. As well as coping with the falling away of all particular states of actuality with the passage of time (the ephemeral situation of bodies on planet Earth), the main drama for every spiritual being involves the value experienced from nurturing, caring for, and creating enduring relationships with others, sharing the drama of expectation and self-declaration, mutually reflecting the super-reality of living consciousness, collaborating as pilots of a searching, questioning, gaze.

Only the original drama of caring conceived by each individual confers a shape of relevance and importance on brute uncaring actuality, the envelopment of inertial and entropic nature. The specific caring of every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, certain parts more than others, crucially different for every individual. Every person has the same transcendent creativity in building a life’s drama within its enveloping world. However, there have typically been assertions that certain individual dramas must be disabled in order to enable others to play out more favourably. In that context the individual sensibility or orientation is the matrix of politics, the essential battlefield in the wars of hive minds.

To a considerable extent, our perceptions of things are culturallyimposed on our expectations. Given the fact that ideas (expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations) occur only in the living experience of some embodied personality, the history of ideality is the history of the interplay between cultural influences and personal inventiveness in forming ideas for the arc of orientation and bearing of lives, the mutating expectations that people suppose over generations about nature, culture, themselves, social interconnectedness, and sacred transcendence. The community master narrative over-represents the perspective of the most acquisitive and competitive stratum of the social order, glamourized to reinforce inequalities of wealth and power, often expressed in stories of apparently exceptional persons: kings, princes, aristocrats, military and police officers, the very beautiful or lucky.

Culture is not nature, and not divine intervention, but a human and political interpretation of experience, an expression of what mattered previously in the caring drama of certain people. Everyone’s personal state of orientation is culturally influenced, guided, and enriched, situated at some place in the historical and political evolution of a mutating culture. From recognizing that this culture is not the end but yet another in a string of badly flawed iterations, individuals can use the inherent creative power and freedom of spirit to recognize their self-possession and to own a measure of participation and control in conceiving the ongoing evolution of their society and culture.

Embedded links:

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550.)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Class War, Embodiment, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.