Tag Archives: empiricism

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.

The Most Important Event in History

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 140, word count: 1,077.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived as a living Being, personified. The innermost reality of all existence was sensed as an expressive voice, creative personality, willful teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the essence of creation. However, that conception of teleological personality was structured weirdly, as bimodal, with a divine version and a strictly subordinate human version. There was a recognized sameness of transcendence between human and divine personality since both produce coherent utterances and acts expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, unlike inanimate nature. This bimodal personality informs the religious view of the purpose and meaning of life and existence. (In Aristotle’s minority opinion there is yet another version of teleology, final cause, a minimalist bundle of impulses in every individual object, not so dissimilar from his stripped down conception of divine personality in celestial spheres. Aristotle’s instances of final cause are so minimal that they seem almost mechanical, lacking spontaneity. Remarkably, those object essences were incorporated into the Christian conception of nature through the work of Thomas Aquinas.) The point is: for by far most of human cultural history the foundational and clearest kind of existence conceived was the living of vectors of ideality, the teleological vectors of caring we call personalities, known primarily in everyone’s personal experience of caring and of familiar interactions with other beings who express caring. Caring is an ideality at the heart of the transcendence of personality. Things matter to personalities as caring beings. The conditions of our living within a variable world are important to us. Without caring personalities nothing has any importance, nothing matters.

So, considering the question “What should we make of the existence of personality (teleology)?”; we note that what religion makes of it is the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but most truly at home at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, part of a weird denigration of human personality by comparison, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of a cosmic master situated as divine judge and tester of all, a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over everything less powerful. That patriarchal conception of teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical top-down societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic teleology to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

The scientific Enlightenment pitched a new idea of fundamental reality, arguably the most important event in history, ridding humankind from oppressive superstitious dread and leaping beyond previous physical limitations through a deeper engagement with nature. It did this by abandoning personification in a transition to an inertial/ entropic conception of events, nothing less than the complete elimination of teleology from the thought of reality. What science makes of teleology, then, is nothing, proposing to interpret all apparent instances of teleology as mechanical structures, pre-set responses triggered by random stimuli. Note that this amounted to an even worse denigration of individual human personality than the weird bimodal religious conception. Materialist science claims the elimination of metaphysics since any idea of transcendence is excluded. However, science presents its ultimate mystery of space/ time/ mass/ energy, Nature, as a distinctly sovereign transcendence, omnipotent and predestining events forever in an extreme version of Calvinism. The novelty is that the scientific mystery is a dead thing, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in the absence of teleological persons, absolutely doesn’t matter. As such, the scientific revolution was the cultural expression of a metaphysical speculation which unfortunately served exactly the same sanctifying function for existing patriarchal political structures as the weird idea of divine personality.

Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics

An attack, widely considered persuasive, on the idea of personalities as coherent and fundamental realities is David Hume’s empiricist survey of his experience. Like the self for which Hume (no stranger to Calvinism) searched his subjectivity in vain, language competence is also nowhere to be discovered in the “bundle of impressions” that Hume identified. Introspection of the kind described by Hume reveals nothing like a sophisticated linguistic competence, elaborated over a long period of social interactions, but such competence is certainly and crucially present in the whole framework of adult orientation from which any individual makes sense of immediate sensations which arrive and pass as Hume described. Hume was skeptical of the continuity (and so the existence) of a subject, a personality, but linguistic competence does not flit in and out of an individual’s subjectivity like an atomic impression of red. It endures and is built upon, learned and reinvented over a lengthy and complex experience involving the creative arc of developmental continuity of an enduring personality making and integrating insights. Linguistic competence is also very personal, expressing a reading history, for example, as well as regional peculiarities of dialect. (Individual voices exist independently of language and always apply pressure on language-culture to suit their particular ideas of expression, clearly accomplished in the case of William Shakespeare.) Linguistic competence is a complex elaboration of an individual’s orientation in a life in the world, importantly different from a bundle of sensory atoms or impressionistic imprints.

General acceptance of the scientific metaphysics did not eliminate dystopian patriarchal societies devoted to war, but merely put stronger energies, more massively destructive weapons, into the hands of their controlling minorities. Those factions gained new entitlement as instruments of omnipotent nature, above reproach since morality and empathy do not apply to people as mechanistic structures. The root problem in both metaphysical speculations considered here, religion and science, is the perverse denigration of ordinary human personality. As untidy as it might be, the only hope for release from the straight jacket of superstitious dread and the straight jacket of nihilism in the face of all-predetermining Nature is a recognition of two coexisting mysteries: brute uncaring nature and, within it, a vast multitude of localized individually caring personalities of the ordinary kind, transcendent vectors of ideality, creative fountains of novel teleological ideas for their future in the world.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

A Pitch for Horizontal Idealism

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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topics: spirituality, embodiment, knowledge, freedom, orientation, time, caring, self-possession, culture, European imperialism, genocide, politics, realism, idealism, empiricism, rationalism, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Roy Bhaskar, Immanuel Kant

 

Imperialist Culture and Self-Possession

If you are trying to replace one culture with another, then you are engaged in a culture war or possibly even cultural genocide, as attempted, for example, by the Canadian program of residential schools for children of indigenous communities, which, for more than a century, institutionalized a fierce effort to replace First Nations culture with imperialist European culture. (The December 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified the residential schools, officially, as a program of cultural genocide.) However, if, as an individual, you develop the mental skill of moving beyond the influence of all cultures (because they all carry forms of imperialism), the skill of moving into the self-possession of elemental embodiment and spirituality, then that is philosophical or spiritual self-possession. Unmediated acquaintance with embodied spirituality is not an ideology, but it certainly displaces whatever ideology was imposed by ambient culture as its sanctioned orientation within certain pillars of reality: conceptions of nature, transcendence, community, and individual subjectivity. Self-possession is the issue because communities such as sovereign nations, religions, schools, sport teams, and families regularly claim rights of possession over individuals, including the right to define a person’s identity and value; to enforce obedience, reverence, and a suspension of distrust; and even the right to decide an individual’s life and death. In that way communities express a human-on-human macro-parasite culture which sanctifies the pre-conditioning of individuals to accept exploitation. Imperialism is always macro-parasitism. The cultural genocide perpetrated by European imperialism (not just in Canada) is an especially obvious expression of such culture. There is in capitalism, offspring of European global imperialism, an intrinsically oppressively macro-parasitism and a continuous stream of propaganda to justify itself. Ideological pillars of reality are crucial parts of the pre-conditioning by which macro-parasite culture is preserved. Social conformity requirements in every community limit the opportunities for individual creativity just as much as laws of nature do. The counter-movement of spiritual self-possession first re-orients the sense of subjectivity as a personally transcendent interiority, and in doing that transforms an individual’s sense of community and of nature too, especially time. The embodied spirituality discoverable by re-orienting to innocent personal experience is not the guilt-ridden permanent child-nature declared by culture-bound Christianity and other religions, for example. There is no inherent subordination.

It Isn’t a Question of Knowledge

The personal movement outside culture, into the elemental self-possession of embodied spirituality, is not about knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ is a concept most comfortable in the company of realists, and is normally conceived as a perfect imprint, projection, or constructed model of objective reality, of nature. The idea “knowledge” assumes a rigidity and finality of objects (on the model of Platonic Ideas!), including social and political arrangements, because only a rigidly structured world could be known definitively. Such realism is a denial of the contribution of spiritual freedom and creativity in the world, a dismissal of individual (Stoic) interiority. Realism is an assertion that spirituality, the creative construction by an intelligence of its own teleological orientation, can be excluded from a description of reality without distorting the representation of reality. (For example, Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism declares that ontology is independent of epistemology.) There is an affinity between philosophical realism and empiricism because empiricists, still expressing the influence of anti-individualism in historical British Calvinism, intend to minimize the creative contributions of spirituality in the personal construction of orientation, and consequently they take “sense data” to be a direct representation or imprint of rigidly real objects. There is a corresponding affinity between rationalism and idealism, because idealism privileges effective spirituality, as rationalism does. Somewhat ironically, the most influential rationalists were materialists, exploring materialism as a politically bottom-up metaphysics in the context of their crucial recognition that conceptions of reality are political to the core. Rationalism has a tradition of expressing a primary interest in freedom, which is unavoidably political. That includes a tradition of being anti-authoritarian, in contrast to the technically non-political conservatism of empiricism.

Knowledge, Orientation, and Personal Incompleteness (Freedom)

The importance of philosophy as a spiritual quest is eliminated when the goal and object is knowledge. Since pragmatism, the aspiration and accomplishment of philosophical thinking is not limited by ideas of knowledge, and in this blog the emphasis is on self-directed re-orientation, on cultivating a personal orientation more supportive and empowering of freedom and self-creation. The point is to occupy the living incompleteness and newness that is spirituality, the personal bearing into an indeterminate and non-actual futurity. This is urgent as the only way to move decisively beyond the power of human macro-parasites and their pre-conditioning of individuals to be defined and exploited as belongings and creatures of hierarchical collectives. It is the only way to be rid of toxic misconceptions embedded in culture, and, consequently, the way to relate to other individual spiritualities on the basis of empathy and mutual recognition instead of through arbitrary and artificial rules, judgments, and ideals mysteriously cloud-sourced from on-high.

Knowledge is impersonal, but orientation and its spiritual quest is the most personal questioning. Orientation is unavoidably dual, unavoidably subjective. As soon as an individual recognizes personal spirituality, orientation becomes more important than knowledge, because ever-mutating orientation is the being of spiritual interiority. Theory of knowledge, epistemology, used to be the centrepiece of modern philosophy because knowledge (lately science) was pitched as humanity’s great prize, even sometimes as a special achievement of philosophical thinking (from Plato’s Ideal Forms as the objects of true knowledge). Knowledge nuggets were conceived as timeless and eternal jewels to be hoarded and guarded by hierarchies of robed and hooded initiates, trophies of conquest over the mysteries of life and nature’s darkness. In modernity, knowledge is capital, a commodity, intellectual property to be hoarded and branded, licensed and marketed to the highest bidder. It is controlled and controlling.

Horizontal Idealism, with Homage to Kantian Idealism

Religions are not the only cultural constructs with a primary focus on spirituality, because idealist metaphysics has, all along, described versions of spirituality. Idealism privileges effective spirituality, although that could easily be missed from an exclusive consideration of Platonic or Hegelian idealism, which seek the perspective of eternity. The problem is that in the ideal world of eternity there are no free agents, only objects with complete-destiny-included. Nothing is happening or being created in the perspective of eternity, and so the spirituality presented, typically presented as elevated and divine, is impoverished and effectively dead. On a richer and more living vision of spirituality, suggested in the work of Immanuel Kant, for example, spirituality is recognized as effective at the level of the individual person in ordinary life. Ever-mutating orientation is the being of spiritual interiority in that perspective. The “horizontal” in “horizontal idealism” is a recognition that there is no essential connection joining spirituality to divinity or deity, nor between spirituality and religion of any kind. It is also a recognition that no spirituality is all-encompassing. Individual eruptions of spirituality, such as yours now engaged with these words, are really separate, all at the same level, and must construct interconnection with others (which truly can enlarge the power of spirituality) using powers of embodiment. In that way, transcendence occurs as a scattered multitude of distinct individuals, each personally entangled in the duality of physics and spirituality, but with an orientation conditioned from early life by socialization into some cultural system of reality. The way to encounter transcendence is to look out horizontally to other embodied spiritual beings as into a mirror.

Spirituality: Time is a Structure of Caring

Every moment of life is the encounter of personal spirituality with manifest actuality via the particularities of embodiment. The descent from culturally imposed conceptions of reality into the elements of personal experience is mainly about acquaintance with a spirituality that is inseparable from particular embodiment. In our elemental embodiment we have the personal individuality of shape and placement, and we have arcs of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which model nature as a cost-shape of effortful mobility and mobilization and shaping of other objects. With embodiment we also have ingestion, gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, usually in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities. In contrast to embodiment, spirituality is elusive as only a sense of newness and incompleteness in the form of an openness and a directionality of flight into that openness. The experience of world-openness itself is a creative non-actuality, a construct and projection of cost-shape experiences carrying an increasingly remote past that does not actually exist.

This openness of being alive, as we humans are alive, is exactly our spirituality. A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity, including a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring, an expression of spirituality. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle memory and kinaesthetic-metabolic memory) in a construction of expectation and directionality. Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of sociability and empathy.

Idealist metaphysics is more or less always about the incongruence between spirituality and embodiment, or, in other words, between the supra-actuality of spiritual transcendence and apparent actuality. The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of embodiment in nature, transcending its own particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes an ever-constructing incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.