Tag Archives: Enlightenment

The Birth of the Left

22 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Fragment 148, word count: 628.

As long as the ubiquitous metaphysics in the European cultural system was creationist monotheism, there was a blanket sanctification for the rights and privileges (ultimately sovereignty) of the strongest, since they are evidently favoured by deity and typically partnered with priestly institutions dedicated to studying and proclaiming divine messages. However, that blanket sanctification was disrupted beginning as early as the later fourteenth century, gradually building toward the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789-99. Over those four centuries there was a convergence between two distinct philosophical streams in the developing culture of western Christendom, one stream focused on the nature and movement of objects and the other on the status and dignity of the subjective personality of individual humans relative to divine personality. The object-focused stream was mechanistic materialism (anti-Aristotelian) inspired by Lucretius (ancient Roman Epicurean materialist rediscovered in the Renaissance) via Spinoza (1632-1677). Such scientific materialism was used to undercut claims of the divine right of kings, aristocracy, and Church to dominate society, but it also re-conceived human nature as being inclined to rationality, with the inherent ability to reason mathematically and logically, to question, recognize relevant evidence, investigate and judge reality. In other words, it recognized humans as competent to acquire scientific knowledge of the natural world. This was a profound upgrade in human dignity compared with the Christian teaching of hopeless inherent sinfulness since the Fall from Grace. There was a serious effort in this philosophical stream to make human rationality consistent with a mechanistic universe. (Materialism always stumbles over an awkwardness to accommodate conscious ideality, intelligence.) The other stream was also a major upgrade to general human dignity. It was a stream of thinking about human spirituality, expressed in an early form in the remarkable work of John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), concerning the individual self-sufficiency to read and understand the Biblical word of God. This developed as the spirit of Protestantism, ascribing to individuals the inherent nobility to engage with deity directly, without interceding saints or priestly sacraments empowered by the institutional Church, along with the innate power to take a mental leap to faith (Luther), which is to posit conceptions of reality. Both of these streams of thought had philosophical force, and their combined history accounts for why the political left-wing is the party of philosophy: because the convergence of these streams of philosophical thinking came to conceive human nature as having the inherent dignity of rationality and creative self-possession, in the spirit of protestantism but also extending beyond religion into secular politics. Even the protestant stream contains an implicit politics: with God exercising sovereignty directly within every individual’s intelligence, there is no justification for any military commander-in-chief to exercise sovereignty as a local expression of divine will.

Democracy is an expression of the political left-wing, an assertion (against the age-old dominance of the strongest) of the rights to political self-determination of the most numerous class of people who must sell labour for wages to survive because they possess little or nothing. It is leftist to derive inherent and inalienable rights from mere sentient existence, from the inherent dignity of life prior to any possession of property. Based on this philosophical convergence, developed over a long troubled history, there is no metaphysical justification for any claim that a collective can own anyone, or that anyone can own anyone, even on the grounds of being the strongest. No one has a metaphysical obligation or duty to submit to or be subject to the commands of a collective or individual, no matter how gifted. There is no metaphysical commanding height. The crucial freedom is the freedom to disbelieve the bogus metaphysics that sustains the dystopia: that rights belong to the strongest.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Getting Past the Political Right-Wing

04 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 135, Word Count: 585.

Given the mass military and industrial mobilization against Nazism and Fascism in the multinational war of 1939-45, it is bizarre and mystifying to witness the popular reemergence of those movements within the same Euro-American societies which previously mounted all-out resistance based on cultural influences from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is a mistake to define the historical Enlightenment as mainly the development of science and mathematical rationality. It is more accurate to think of Enlightenment as a reconceptualization of the human individual as a profound autonomy, freedom, and dignity, based on a universal innate rationality of personality. The broad sense of rationality involved had more to do with a cultural trend of increasing literacy and the unlimited ability to learn which came with it than it did with mathematics. The post-war complacency of both the political donor class and the intellectual class of these societies is to blame for our ongoing vulnerability to the superior-beings clubs, violently exclusive racial, religious, and trophy-collecting supremacists, because those social classes had the opportunity and yet failed to advance political thinking beyond ideas from feudal Christendom: a bleak conception of human personality (as improved by authoritative supervision, and largely controllable by incentives and rewards, fear of violence, and emotionally triggering messages); a starkly contrasting idea of divine personality as judge and tester of men, the model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful; nature as ordered and determined by the divine personality or by rigid regularities (iron laws of economics) with the same effect; earthly trophies interpreted as markers of standing in the divine order of merit; a resulting divine right of the strongest to impose sovereignty over the lives and property of the weaker; and the nation or sovereign state as the local representative of divine sovereignty, a personified collective in conflict with others for standing and wealth. This conservative ideology is always the gateway to varieties of Nazism and Fascism, to the violence of superior-beings clubs, patriarchal colonizers of individuals for the purpose of human-on-human macro-parasitism. Home-grown patriarchy is no better than a colonizing foreign patriarchy. This being the state of political thinking, the idea of a clash of civilizations is valueless because civilizations are all still patriarchal, imperialist. Clashing with one another is what they were made for and the ones that were altered to some extent by Enlightenment ideas soon stifled further advances. The Enlightenment conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices expressing the old conception of reality.

Remaining within or breaking free of that conservative metaphysics comes down to a conception of personality. If we find it absurd that personality takes two starkly different and unequal forms, human and divine, and find instead that it has ever only had the form we are familiar with in embodied persons, recognizing in the ideality of that form the effective transcendence of creative freedom which had been artificially alienated by the old mythical bifurcation, suddenly the conception of human personality is not bleak, and the whole foundation of conservatism evaporates. There is no judge or tester of men, no divine order of merit, no supernatural model of sovereignty, no divine pre-determination of anything, and no merited rights of the strongest. Realty as engaged by any personality has two fundamental constituents: the actuality of nature and ideality or ideas; and ideality, the special being of personality, often overrides what may seem to be dictates of nature.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

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

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Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

The current idea of the political left-wing features struggles by organized labour for greater benefits within investor-supremacist capitalism, raising working class consciousness about structural inequalities in wealth and power. Historically, that view of the meaning of the left developed from the Hegelian/ Marxist idea of economic determinism, the idea that social classes defined by economic conditions are the units of a pre-determined progression of human societies along a course of dialectical historical stages. The idea that there is a natural large-scale structure to change in human societies was profoundly appealing in the middle of the nineteenth century because disruption of traditional social hierarchy had become alarming, in a process that began soon after the launch of overseas European imperialism in the sixteenth century, with wealth looted from other peoples pouring into Europe to financial speculators and commercial and military opportunists. Previously, tradition and custom in Old Regime Europe, the fabric of its rural-agrarian system of wealth and power, kept popular patterns of thinking quite rigidly in thrall to monarchy, aristocracy, and Church. Notwithstanding the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, eighteenth century Europe was still a largely Christian institution, pervaded by patriarchal Christian control at all levels. Disruption of the old hierarchies of wealth, work, and circumstances of living resulted in struggles over power, and broke apart the “order” that had been sacred to the patriarchs of the Old Regime. In the shattering world of new money-wealth, lost attachment to land and locality, and desperate uncertainty for masses of people dependent on industrial employment, the old system of belief and ways of thinking lost contact with reality, and people generally needed new markers by which to reorient. There was a widespread sense that individuals were caught up in forces that were far beyond their powers to control or understand. The forces at play were in fact the competitive greed and racism of the leading factions of European society, expressing the macro-parasitism inherent in their patriarchal culture. Marx’s claim that there were scientific laws of historical change gave hope to a segment of Europe’s intelligentsia, the educated heirs of the Enlightenment era, who saw this claim as a message they might use to reorient the proletarian masses being treated on their native ground in the bestial and dehumanizing ways developed to maximize profits to investors from overseas imperialism and commercial exploitation. In Europe this was still novel and startling, engineered by newly powerful social factions, beyond any custom or tradition that might blend it into an appearance of natural order.

The idea of a predetermined pattern of social and cultural change, arcing inevitably toward justice, has lost all plausibility, especially since the collapse of Marxist regimes in eastern Europe, leaving a fatal ideological void for the most popular conception of a political left-wing. However, the collapse of that idea does not undermine entirely the force of left-wing politics because there was a previous and original “left” movement before the grandiose Hegelian metaphysics took hold. That original leftist movement was the party of philosophy itself rather than the party of organized labour. Specifically, it was the party of a secular philosophy of cultural Enlightenment, and it represented what had become known as the Republic of Letters, independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities created a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in Latin, the international language of eduction, marking an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of ideality. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period. Philosophy was then, and not for the first time, the innovative force against ossified patterns of thinking, and as such it placed primary emphasis on the individual’s power of rationality, a message often difficult to sustain in the context of the vicious campaigns of race and class assault and propaganda that constituted European imperialism.

The Enlightenment

The core innovation of the Enlightenment was not so much an assertion of individualism as it was a secular concept of human nature which changed the meaning of the individual. In the still dominant Christian view, human nature had an absolute need of external sovereign supervision due to the inherent taint of original sin, declared inescapable by Church father Augustine of Hippo. Christianity reinforced Augustine’s idea with Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, both visions of top-down cosmic hierarchy, perfect models for supporting the Church in exercising the sovereignty it asserted to be necessary and beneficent. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment countered patriarchal Christian ideology with two innovations (which eventually proved to be heading in incompatible directions). One replaced the cosmic hierarchy from Aristotle and Plato with an approach that flattened the basic cosmic structure, namely monistic materialism inspired by the metaphysics of Spinoza. More important, the left was the political party of philosophy because it brandished a secular view of human nature emphasizing innate rationality and excluding any inherent flaws and taints, and as such, a human nature not inherently dependent on any sovereign supervision. That was the crucial point, and it put the Enlightenment left in opposition to basic patriarchal cultural mythology, in which the strongest have the (divine/ natural) right of unlimited sovereignty, an assumption still discernible in the idea of ‘meritocracy’, and one that was asserted enthusiastically at the time to justify the most brutal imperialism. This stream of Enlightenment was already and always an anti-imperialist force, the foundation of claims for individual human dignity and rights, equality, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. In a world of people with no need of sovereign supervision, the patriarchal assertion of sovereign rights is naked human-on-human macro-parasitism, vicious and criminal.

European imperialism had given patriarchal dominance-culture unprecedented power both economic and cultural, especially in the hands of new commercial factions. The materialist side of Enlightenment was not a problem for them and in fact was a helpful frame of reference. Mechanistic materialism was making impressive advances in understanding objective nature and delivering new machines for the benefit of large scale industry and commerce. Under the banner ‘science’, claiming to represent strict mathematical rationality, it was acquiring ever-increasing prestige, at the same time realigning with patriarchal assumptions of natural hierarchies, and giving up any claim to flatten the fundamental structure of nature at large. This was the side of Enlightenment that rode the triumphant wave of imperialist wealth and power, but there remained a stubborn minority report: the basis of the political left.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature drew on a history of development that included the campaigns for universal literacy from the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384), as well as the Lutheran emphasis on a personally interior relationship with divinity in a free act of faith. From that history, Enlightenment human nature was an inherent richness of individual interiority: curious, creative, empathic and sociable, and a rational learner and eager user of language (spoken, written, printed) in engagement with others, deriving fulfillment from mutual support and engagement with others. Cultures are crucial to individual human development, but cultures are bottom-up systems, as illustrated by ever-mutating language, not a gift from on-high, nor dependent on colonial masters or any other sovereign power. In the later part of the eighteenth century, within the milieux of Enlightenment culture which was already a force against imperialism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant worked out a sort of phenomenology of spirit (interiority) in which human individuals are understood as inherently self-legislating, and so, again, not dependent on outside sovereignty. This idea was the unacknowledged pinnacle of long centuries of cultural development in Europe, a minority report presenting an alternative vision for post-Christian society. It means that the decisive theme of western history, what makes the Euro-American cultural system interesting, is the contest playing out there over the legitimacy of sovereignty.

Kant’s philosophical work was arguably the best expression of Enlightenment ever produced, a considered advance beyond Spinoza’s materialist monism. There was room in Kant’s vision for both objective empirical science and for an individual interiority that was truly transcendent in its creative freedom. The problem was that, in the context of the mesmerizing frenzy of race and class violence in the era of high European imperialism, nobody was ready to digest the idea of human subjectivity free of an inherent dependency on sovereign power. In spite of that, the enriched conception of human nature had deep historical and cultural roots in this increasingly literate society, flourishing in the Republic of Letters and embryonically in Protestantism, far too embedded to be dismissed. This made a deeply divided cultural landscape that included patriarchal Christianity with its long-established ideology of sovereign power; newly triumphant money-wealth culture, heir apparent to patriarchal macro-parasitic top-dog-ism; scientific materialism as the servant of money-wealth culture; and a vision, contested by all those other cultural forces, of individual interiority as the fountain of creative freedom. The other cultural streams have strong and separate reasons for fearing and loathing the radical Enlightenment idea of the individual. Science can’t abide the existence of creative freedom as a transcendence beyond its laws of determinism; and even the new patriarchal hierarchies can’t abide the prospect of loosing their controlling grip on the work and consumption of the masses, a grip they conceive as power. Those forces have done their best to suppress the radical Enlightenment insight, and have had considerable success working cooperatively.

The Marxist conception of the political left is surely dying, but that is not a decisive loss for a politics of the left, and should be a benefit. Marx’s dialectical materialism and its laws of history show how materialism quickly goes to strict determinism, unfreedom, and the disappearance of transcendence into meaninglessness. In addition, the introduction of Marxist ideas in the nineteenth century revived, in a new form, the pre-Enlightenment assumption that collectives are the primary independent human entities exercising legitimate rights over individuals, traditionally by means of monarchy, aristocracy, and the hierarchy of the Church, but also by means of police, military service, civic pageantry, censorship, and mass propaganda. Marxist party leaders took over that fundamental idea of authoritarian sovereignty, and in doing so decisively deflected leftist development away from its original trajectory. Some philosophy consistent with the radical Enlightenment insight, a secular vision of rich individual interiority, transcendent in its creative freedom and as such the basis for community, cultural development, and fulfilling human interconnection, must be the perennial core of any politics of the left, its taproot as the party of philosophy.

Recommended

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, Edited and with an Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, Translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0-226-80530-1.

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, written by Jonathan Israel, published by Princeton University Press (2014), ISBN: 978-0-691-16971-2.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Problems with the Science Story

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Freedom, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 120, word count: 1,352

The story of science is an inspiring history about how, over a recent and well documented time period, humanity’s leading teams of theorists and researchers came to understand reality when they used the objective empiricism of scientific method to overcome superstitious belief in witchcraft and magic. Oddly, it is still considered proper and morally commendable to participate in a community of religious faith asserting the reality of angels, demons, miracles, and a cosmic moral judge decreeing rewards and brutal punishments after death. However, for the most part, events, that were once considered to be deliberately framed messages to humans from a supernatural universe of disembodied but personified (caring) entities with effective powers in our world, have been re-conceived in science as moments in merely concrete cause-effect sequences that can be understood and controlled by human intervention. The story science tells of itself suggests that this recent accomplishment of understanding reality has come to encompass everything including politics, social systems, and individual behaviour and experience, all of which are now claimed as substantially understood (and controllable by intervention) by experts in behavioural science, social and political science, psychology, and economics.

The scientific claim of understanding reality is used to legitimize all the economic, legal, military, and political institutions and practices of modern states, on the suggestion that educated individuals active in professions, business management, and government, all carry and act from this precious understanding, acquired as the core of higher education. Since key institutions of every nation license, regulate, and sponsor scientific research and have the resources to benefit from the most advanced discoveries, the impression is created that such institutions are themselves manifestations of the most profound understanding of reality, justified by humanity’s deepest knowledge.

However, there are two fatal problems with this story. Science claims to encompass the whole of reality, but it has no way of comprehending individual spirituality, the personal consciousness of creative freedom in time. Science can’t conceptualize intelligence as a particular, and each intelligence is a special particular, with a transcendent uniqueness in its teleology. All objective particulars fall completely under general laws, but the individual conception of time makes each intelligence a special particular, with temporal creativity giving each one a personally particular and transcendent indeterminacy. The ever-elaborating and always incomplete teleology of each individual creates a uniquely individual indeterminacy. So, while science is comfortable dealing with people as physical particulars and as statistical sets it fails completely in recognizing people as spiritual particulars, and that invalidates the universality and finality of all claims from behavioural science, social and political science, psychology, and economics. A better attempt at accumulating a store of wisdom about humanity as such would work to understand how to improve and empower individual creative freedom and self-possession.

The objective empiricism of science has an inescapable weakness, namely an obsessively blinkered gaze outward and a resulting inability to engage spirituality, the force of individual subjectivity. The scientific conceptual system does not prove the non-existence of creative individual spirituality, but rather begins with a constitutional refusal to conceive it. Scientific discourse rules out all claims about spirituality. On the scientific view, there is no such thing as transcendence, no transcendent spirituality, no individual spiritual interiority free of strict objective determinism. Science needs to measure, model, map, and visualize things without ever being able to question the questioning from which such operations fountain, because questioning is an act of subjective interiority, of spirituality. The gaze of science is strictly outward upon measurable objects, and the tool of mathematical measurement disqualifies science from any awareness or identification of the spirituality of subjective interiority.

There can’t be a current debate on metaphysics (transcendence) because scientific materialism is universally assumed in the intellectual community. However, the influence of Abrahamic monotheism is still so strong culturally and politically that there is also a taboo against thinking about metaphysics because such thinking immediately comes into conflict with the ideological monopoly granted to entrenched religion by a kind of gentlemen’s agreement. This cultural accommodation is managed by a mental dissociation in which the most highly educated individuals assume both the truth of scientific materialism and the agency of angels and demons without allowing their thinking in one system to touch the other. You couldn’t make this up. The comfortable coexistence of scientific materialism and antique monotheism demonstrates the scientific inability to remain coherent when attempting to confront spirituality within its externalizing conceptual universe.

The reason why science has to ignore and live with antique beliefs about angels and demons is because of the second problem with the science story. Science is funded and owned by the patriarchal hive minds which make wars and by global corporations spinning money for investors by whatever means possible. Science was appropriated early on by the sovereign hive minds which are the end users of armed forces (the arms race, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, the ICBM, Napalm, Agent Orange) in association with captains of industry (global climate change; Bhopal, India), and those culture pods adore the bonding effects that antique religions have on people generally, the way orientation to a commanding height binds individuals to a hive mind. This military-industrial patriarchy has very strong motives to discourage and minimize streams of the history of ideas that deal with spirituality outside traditional monotheism and which, in doing so, disrupt orientation to a commanding height.

Although sovereign hive minds and corporate hive minds are not entirely compatible with one another, they each value the benefits of their symbiosis. Since both are expressions of the hyper-masculine ethos of patriarchy, celebrating competition, strength, champion heroes, and trophy properties, they have much in common. Corporations certainly support war and preparing for war because so much profit is involved, but corporations operate essentially as independent fiefdoms, like military-estate families in medieval times, in a modern version of global feudalism in which many resource-and-culture-based systems of power are ready and able to act as a law unto themselves without meaningful homage to the laws of any outside sovereignty. Money as capital is not permanently attached to any nation and as much as possible seeks out secret tax havens where the rule of law is light and lax. The people who operate in that world of corporate feudalism (even as investors) are also unattached emotionally to any sovereign state, and will go where money flows. There is a living romanticism in the libertarian masculinity at the core of the corporate hive mind, a thrilling story of dominance and exceptionalism. Sovereign states which openly declare themselves as such are a different kind of hive mind, with a territorial definition, drawing on a selectively edited history of their territory to craft a compelling story for the inhabitants to attached to emotionally. In the culture of global capitalism, by contrast, there is a shared story of the triumphant great man in a vicious dog-eat-dog world, and, ironically, an elaborate social and cultural support system for the people who immerse themselves in this story and win their way in. The support system is crucial because trophy property always demands the protection of organized violence, either as the armed forces of a sovereign state or as private armed security forces, currently proliferating.

The Politics of Knowledge

Given these two problems with science, any claim that science is politically impartial, neutral, or disinterested is absurd. The politics of knowledge is hardly complicated. Any science funded by such forces will specifically rule out any understanding of reality which might question the legitimacy of currently dominant institutions. The military-industrial patriarchy, the power structure which pays for scientific work, is threatened by any information that explores spirituality outside traditional monotheism because it is the only historical stream of thinking able to disrupt orientation to a commanding height. It has done so already, spectacularly, in the radical Enlightenment. The purpose of science is not to understand reality, but to strengthen the patriarchal systems of power and wealth already operating, or give a competitive edge to a particular power centre by producing new power for the paymasters. Here comes artificial intelligence.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics (3): Crisis of the Left

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 117, word count: 1199

Metaphysics is the ultimate weakness of the political left-wing. Right-wing politics is the promotion of patriarchy, and the main pillar of patriarchy is the widespread personal orientation (superego) formed around bogyman metaphysics, assumptions of cosmic moral ledger-keeping in preparation for a final reckoning, a cosmic plan. Any conception such as karma that includes the idea of a cosmic reckoning, or any other reward and punishment after death, is personification of nature on the grand scale (bogyman metaphysics), entrenching an idealized paradigm of patriarchy as a top-down personal orientation. Platonic Ideal Forms and any other metaphysics ascribing primacy to some conception of eternal Being or a Great Chain of Being are also examples of top-down metaphysics. It is the top-down orientation which confers meaning on imperialistic war. Right-wingers have elaborate social and biological theories (Hobbes, Darwin) cementing conflict, trophies, and centralized monopolies of violence as crucial forces of civilization and society. Such theories are expressions of top-down metaphysical assumptions, and the metaphysics is the ultimate support of right-wing political power. Right-wing thinking operates in an overall conception in which the objective world consists of certain specific, determinate, and eternal structures (great chain of being) and categories (atomic facts) which pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual. In that right-wing world everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. The right-wing orientation is a looking outward for transcendence or for an equivalent for transcendence in material determinism, categorically given and absolute in the Great Chain of Being. Top-down metaphysics is entirely bogus but unfortunately is the universal cultural default, entrenched by history and tradition. Such is the dystopia in which the prospects and strategies for autonomous thinking as an individual must be devised. The good news is that, since the personal superego is the patriarchy, then disrupting the patriarchy is an accomplishment of thinking, an intellectual and cultural enterprise. More good news is that there has been since ancient times a cultural stream of philosophical thinking, a minority report, that resisted and disputed the dominant orientation.

Historical Roots of the Political Left

The main roots of the political left, expressed for example in socialism, are in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically in the radical branch of the Enlightenment which asserted universal human rationality, a transcendent power at the level of the individual, and developed that claim into a profound rejection of social and economic inequality as most evident in such institutions as monarchy, aristocracy, and religious hierarchies. The other looming presence in the ideology of the left, Marxist theory, was merely a footnote to and a distortion of Enlightenment ideas, and Enlightenment ideology itself was a particular formulation of the cultural stream of philosophical thinking that disputed the dominant orientation since antiquity. Marxist theory attempted to change the foundation of egalitarianism from universal human rationality (at the level of the individual) to the predetermined working out of economic laws governing class struggle in history: dialectical materialism. It was a variant of Hegelian (top-down) metaphysics, driven by the cosmic Final Cause, and a tragic dead end innovation. The collapse of communism in The Soviet Union and eastern Europe exposed the absurdity of using materialism as a bottom-up foundation for such Enlightenment ideas as innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy. Although materialism can claim to be an alternative to top-down orientations, and was promoted as such by the radical branch of Enlightenment, it cannot avoid determinism and so becomes a justification for anything that exists. The idea of economic determinism is still an institutionalized assumption in the science of economics. Karl Marx’s ideas of dialectical materialism and laws of history demonstrate how materialism settles into strict fatalism, unfreedom, and the impossibility of transcendence (the creation of unforeseeable alternatives and possibilities). The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just the way it has always been. The collapse of Marxism was not the collapse of the long historical development of egalitarianism as implicit in Enlightenment ideas, because the same egalitarianism was vestigial in ancient humanist philosophy and in Renaissance humanism and in a continuous stream of cultural developments in western cultural history. The pressure of egalitarianism has lasted so long against apparently crushing forces because it expresses the fundamental reality of transcendence at the level of the individual, implicit in the idea of universal human rationality. The collapse of Marxism merely discredits materialist and top-down metaphysics (as in economic theory) as a base for the political left.

Metaphysics for the Political Left

Although in the early twenty-first century the political left is faltering badly for lack of an articulated metaphysics, it already has an informal conceptual framework, a thinking orientation, which implies its metaphysics. Left-wing thinking operates in a conception of the world in which individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures. In that context, individual subjectivities have a mission that goes beyond struggling for survival and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, a mission, instead, to conceive and make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is an essential part of that mission. On the left-wing view, then, individual subjectivity is transcendent in relation to the merely inertial and entropic world. If metaphysics is the identification of transcendence, then the political left is already committed to a metaphysics. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human.

The salvation of the left does not lie in abandoning transcendence in a rush to the metaphysical bottom of materialism, nor in a backward-looking reverence for antique conceptions of top-down cosmic providence, but instead in a reconceptualizing of transcendence that builds on the Enlightenment recognition of individual rationality. The great mistake in metaphysics has been to gaze outward, especially toward far horizons, squinting to make out messages in the haze. The focus of metaphysics has to be the looking itself, not what is seen but the seeing. Consciousness, and only consciousness, is transcendent, and consciousness occurs only at the level of the individual, and not as a passive receptivity but instead in the application of personal context in a moment of interpretive sensitivity, a context-projecting moment of interpretation. There is no looking or seeing without an encounter of personally specific context with novel sensitivity, a personally spiritual act.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Canadian Values

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative

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Posting 105

Tags: politics, history, Greco-European philosophy, spirituality, Enlightenment, literacy, Christendom, Islam, monotheism, property rights, conservatism

There certainly was a long history of conflict and animosity between European Christendom and the ‘empire’ of Islam. That history of conflict included the Christian crusades beginning in the eleventh century, as well as both the Islamic Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the “reconquest” of Spain by Christian armies in the fifteenth century. Christendom’s fear of being encircled by Islam at that time inspired its push westward across the Atlantic, and so in part, inspired its subsequent global imperialism. However, since then, an historical singularity has occurred, and almost incredibly, the western cultural system has moved beyond its Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, so that the twenty-first century situation is nothing like a replay of the pre-modern “clash of civilizations”.

It is simply not true, for example, that gender equality is a Judeo-Christian value. Neither Jewish nor Christian culture treats women as equal to men, and that is a glaring dystopian feature of the patriarchal legacy of father-god monotheism. Democracy isn’t a Judeo-Christian idea either, but rather an idea from ancient Greece, long before the Christian era and independent of ancient Judaic influence. The Greek idea of democracy was associated with a concept of political equality with strict limitations but with potential for expansion. That potential had to wait a long time as a weak minority report within Christendom, in remnants of a Stoic, humanist influence, sometimes buried in monastic libraries. It was given some significant boosts in a number of subsequent European cultural developments: the movement for universal literacy in vernacular languages from around the time of Wycliffe (1380’s), violently resisted by the Church; again, in the context of the Renaissance fascination with ancient Greco-Roman paganism came the launch of the printing press in the fifteenth century; and once again in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on mass literacy, and the subsequent development of the Republic of Letters outside the reach of institutions. It was dissident philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment who built on all that deep groundwork and used philosophical ideas of innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy to launch a world-changing critique of their Christian society, until then dominated by dynastic monarchies in alliance with hierarchies of Christian clergy and military aristocracy already well along in looting the world in their brutal imperialism. So, the Enlightenment did not appear out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue, but was another step in an enduring dance entangling cultural legacies with the emerging experience of new generations of humans. The values of modern urban democracies (often still aspirational) should be described as radical Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. The Enlightenment assertion of equality, based on the universal dignity merited by inherent rationality (related to linguistic competence and literacy), was in dramatic opposition to the prevailing Christian norms based on the dark myth of inherent evil, original sin. Given this history, the cultural conflict we are living through now features remnants of the monotheist religions of the Middle East, all adorations of patriarchal inequality, on one side, against more recent developments of an individualistic humanism from ancient Greek philosophy on the other. This isn’t just a clash between Greco-Roman vs Judaic cultural legacies. This goes deeper. The ancient Greek rationalist philosophers found the portal beyond culture into elemental spirituality, which turned out to be individual as defined by the individual human body, so these different ideas cannot dovetail into a symbiotic coexistence. They are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to one another, founding the unbridgeable cultural divide between conservative and progressive political forces.

Conservatism and Property

Proponents of political conservatism, heirs of patriarchal monotheism, claim to champion individualism, but in conservative ideology, property rights take the place of individual human rights. Ownership of property, frequently including people made into property by being entirely deprived of rights, was the crucial marker of value and status in the hierarchical social order of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. Individuals with the most property have the most rights in the patriarchal worldview, and distribution of the world’s property was mostly completed long ago, establishing “facts on the ground” that conservatives strive to preserve. Property possession brings with it not only an obsession with guns and protection by violence, but also the “us against them” package of emotional triggers. The conservative claim to individualism comes down to placing supreme value on ownership of property, which has an inherent male bias from the long history of patriarchal dominance. Property rights are so dominant in conservative ideology that the holding of legal title to property by corporations confers on them the status of individual persons. This whole property rights focus creates an entirely bogus individualism because holding possession of property is absolutely dependant on a vast organizational support of laws, courts, lawyers, and weaponized enforcement. Conservatism is mainly about preventing or at least minimizing redistribution of property (wealth) by sovereign institutions. Sovereign institutions are otherwise very dear to the hearts of property hoarders because such institutions have the armed power to protect and defend property possession. However, there is a vulnerability in that sovereign power because if it falls under certain influences and ideas of justice, it also has the innate potential to enforce the redistribution of property. When sovereign governments come under the influence of people and ideologies in favour of material equality, then the forces of conservatism push for the limitation of sovereign power.

Andrew Coyne, for example (in the National Post, November 6, 2015), has claimed that the essence of conservatism is the limitation of power, but such a claim is true only in the context of cultural pressures for enhancing material equality. The reality is that property rights are so central to conservatism that on that view the institutions of sovereignty must be restrained when exposed to democracy, because broadly based electorates might not be unreservedly dedicated to protecting property rights. In this context, the conservative rhetoric of limiting the power of elites is also misleading. Conservatives have no problems with lethal military elites (special forces), with sporting elites glorifying masculinity, investor elites symbolizing success, religious elites policing conformity, or elites of heroic patriots as universal role models. The rhetoric against “elites” is mainly resistance to the rationally based individualism accomplished by education, and as such a form of nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by religious supervision, fervent nationalism, and patriarchal family culture. The adulation of pretty much all elites is core conservatism, called “celebrating excellence” or “appreciating exceptional success”. It is practically the state religion of the U.S.A., although actualized in such a way as not to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of wealth and power. Conservative adulation of excellence and exceptional success excludes only those founded on advanced literacy and education, and that is a crucial lens for seeing into the heart of conservatism. Intellectual achievement is the portal to the spirituality beneath Enlightenment individualism, emphasizing spiritual qualities and competencies inherent in every individual, independent of possession of trophy properties, and as such tending toward a universal sociability in conflict with the “us against them” essentials of conservatism.

The current mass displacements of people from wars visited upon mainly Muslim countries by the Euro-American military/ political system is providing a pretext for anti-Enlightenment movements in the west to launch campaigns invoking the pre-modern “clash of civilizations” based on false claims that western culture is still Judeo-Christian and as such threatened by Muslim migration. This historical falsehood is presumably intended to resuscitate the appearance of relevance in outmoded Judeo-Christian beliefs, and inspire a resurgence of loyalty to the Christian legacy of authoritarian patriarchal society, fervent patriotism as a surrogate religion, communal adulation of warlike masculine virtues such as strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action, restoring females as property, and reverting to attitudes that are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Such is conservatism. However, in the modern urban community such values are all widely and deeply contested by the legacies of Greek and European philosophical Enlightenment. The philosophic revolution, the rising prestige and urban spread of the kind of secular spiritual autonomy modelled in ancient philosophical thinking, is still advancing. Although the commanding heights, the institutions which structure the society, are all bastions of patriarchal culture, and we still live within that nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. Very slowly the historical singularity of Enlightenment individualism, and the kind of freedom and equality it carries, is dissolving the cultures inclined to be anti-Enlightenment. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to dissolve the legacy cultures of any immigrant proponents of patriarchy. An irony of the current anti-Muslim campaign by conservative groups is that they share many core values with this culture they purport to oppose, because both are remnants of the patriarchal monotheist religions of the Middle East. Conservative groups are despising their own mirror image.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

What’s Spiritual about Thinking?

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Posting 100

Tags: philosophy, humanism, spirituality, transcendence, thinking, time metaphysics, social pragmatism, religion, science, equality, enlightenment

An Unheralded Rivalry

There is a long history of rivalry between alternative conceptions of human spirituality, which may come as a surprise to anyone who takes for granted that religion owns the patents on spirituality. From ancient times philosophy was an alternative discourse of spirituality that tended toward emphasizing the primacy of the embodied individual, the thinker of questions. Humanist rationalism was (and can be) a guide to transcendent spirituality in startling contrast to religious conceptions. Perhaps especially as conceived by Epicureans, it was a personal, and so bottom-up spirituality, recognizing spirituality as an individual power.

In this age of science, spirituality is an elephant in the room. Most scientists as individuals have to put up with a certain discourse of spirituality because it is deeply entangled with conceptions of respectability, of morality and conventional respect for law and the social order, involving a degree of peer pressure to practice some antique religion as a personal declaration of social orthodoxy, of pragmatic support for the social contract. Spirituality is supposed to be the heart of the antique religions, but any discourse of spirituality is strictly incompatible with science. (There are large cash prizes on offer for people who help reduce this awkwardness by making plausible suggestions for reconciling science and religion.) Personal spirituality is identified as a sense of wonder and connection with the awesome scale of the cosmos, somehow connected to moral debt, guilt, and moral sentiment, and is commonly thought of as a portal to acquaintance with higher reality, deity, the awesomely sacred, first and divine things, at least to the extent that such acquaintance is possible for us flawed and meagre humans. Perhaps it is surprising that the discourse of spirituality can be separated from its entanglement with grand scale divinity, morality, law, and social order, without disappearing, but it can be, even though for both science and the great antique religions, such a metaphysics is inconceivable.

What is Thinking?

The fundamental question of the relevant philosophy here is “What is thinking?” from an intuition that personal thinking operations are the whole reality of spirituality. Such philosophy is an exploration of the spirituality of thinking, both in getting from moment to moment in life and in questioning assumptions that pave the familiar thought-paths of socially pragmatic life and expectation. The most ordinary orientation or bearing from this moment to the next is a thinking operation. It is a spiritual creation of freedom through the personal construction of a temporal path into a mutable future of possibilities and increasingly remote probabilities that have no actual existence as such. Past and future do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. They exist only, but emphatically, within the orientation of individual persons. There is an ongoing accumulation of complexity in a person’s bearing or vector of orientation, as curiosity, questioning, and inspiration engage and grapple with nature, culture, and other intelligences. There is always the inward quest to sustain a life, holding and modifying a bearing of flight in building that life. Re-orienting toward the next moment is done, therefore, with reference to the whole past of an embodied life, which does not exist in the actuality of nature, and so with reference to much more than outward markers.

The way-of-being of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself (evading thingness), to project self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and creative freedom. What time as a personal past and future shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of the spiritual is precisely the same as the immateriality of time in lessons learned, aspirations, and anticipations. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with, intervening in, brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images or symbols somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

So what is Spiritual about Thinking? Is it Transcendent enough?

The essential identity of everyone as an individual is an active process of creative orientation, a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality, as just described, intervening continuously in brute actuality as a particular embodiment. The non-actuality of the particular temporal depth in which any individual is oriented, what has often been called inwardness or interiority, grounds the meaning of spirituality here, but there is much more. The crucial spiritual reality is the freedom-within-an-unfinished-world which is created by that play of non-actuality, and the personally fulfilling creative power it manifests. So, these features, non-actuality, creative power creating a life, freedom, and mutability within an otherwise determined and determinate nature, cash out as transcendent spirituality. Even though this spirituality is separated from entanglements with grand scale divinity, and divinely dictated morality, law, guilt, and social order, the transcendence does not disappear.

Elemental Embodiment and Spirituality

In our spirituality we have: the subjective non-actualities of anticipation, aspiration, and evaluation, modelling futurity as an openness; a personal force of aspirational directionality, bearing, or ever-rebuilding orientation; the freedom of newness and incompleteness; empathic recognition of separate spiritual beings and a resulting sociability. We have the gusher of questions, curiosity, impulses to mark the environment and construct interconnections with others.

In the sociability of spirituality we have: empathy, recognition of the opportunity to multiply the openness of spirituality by co-operative bonding, community, conversation, the comfort of companionship and sharing.

In our experience of elemental embodiment we have: the personal identity of individual shape and placement; mobility, mobilization and shaping of other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effortful and effective work.

Thinking Off-Grid: Leaving the Metaphysics of Social Pragmatism

What normally stands in the way of discovering this reality of spirituality in personal thinking operations is a certain culturally supplied roadmap of thinking, a trained orientation into social pragmatism, which effectively prevents us from questioning much of anything. Social pragmatism, into which every child is trained in school, is a roadmap of thinking, packaged in a judgment from crypto-metaphysics that you, as an individual, are incapable of thinking critically about the justifications or origins of social authority because you are flawed by unworthy intentions, and also low on nature’s food chain due to inherently limited competence. (“Who do you think you are?”) At the boundary of the socially pragmatic roadmap of thinking is the warning: “Here be Dragons”. The message is that questioning the framework of social authority is pure futility because there is no coherent alternative to arrangements as you find them, so that nothing can come of such thinking but an abyss of nihilism and despair. Part of social pragmatism is the assertion that “the good” is conferred entirely by the social arrangements of the status quo: you merit the amount of goods (including freedom) you win in competitions within the economic system, and so no good can come of thinking critically about the justifications of social and cultural authority. With that context, social pragmatism is not only a roadmap of thinking, but also a restricting conception of thinking itself as pragmatic logic, collecting data for solving the menu of problems intrinsic to the place you occupy on the economic food chain. However, from the initial condition of social pragmatism, there are experiences which occasion the discovery of the creative thinking involved with re-conceptualization, questioning fundamental assumptions, a kind of thinking more often identified as philosophical. A person goes from ordinary thinking within a socially pragmatic framework, designing and executing interventions into social actuality, to questioning the fundamental metaphysics of the framework itself. Somehow a line is crossed, the line formed by assumptions of not being competent to think and of belonging at a certain place on the hierarchical food chain. Somehow the metaphysics of inherent human flaw and inevitable cosmic chain becomes questionable and inoperative. This metaphysics of being flawed and chained is left behind and there is a crossing out into a condition of thinking which is not even supposed to be there, where the metaphysics of flaw and chain is completely absent, but where discovering creative freedom in the personal spirituality of thinking refutes entirely the prediction of nihilism and incoherence. The whole reality of spirituality and metaphysics is in this thinking. There is a fountain of good here, the spontaneous creation from within of curiosity, questioning, and inspiration, the gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others.

Oddly then, the only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of subjective embodiment. The non-particularity of the thinking self is the non-particularity of freedom. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body.

Notes

Thinking as creative re-conceptualization was described in two previous postings:

97, July 19, 2016, What is Thinking?

98, August 17, 2016, Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

Other relevant postings include:

32, May 17, 2012, Subjective Embodiment: Intelligence as a Particular

54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time

Some passages in the present posting were iterated in:

88, December 15, 2015, Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

89, January 9, 2016, Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy

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Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Reality

We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by the awesome vista of the starry night sky as experienced from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to the ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also by our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local parts of the vast environment, and on our bodily contact with its solid structures. Those are important but contingent and incidental circumstances of intelligence, and individuals are quite capable of maturing beyond their influence as complete models of reality. Conceiving the cosmos as the Great Chain of Being (which is always a top-down chain of command) is not a feature of human nature nor necessitated by human nature. It is circumstantial and cultural. What is far more important for a mature orientation within elemental reality is that human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of our individual subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. As long as we are caught in impressions of the Great Chain of Command, we are vulnerable to a certain sort of macro-parasitic fraud. Factions which assert their seniority, divine inspiration, natural, or even merely cultural superiority can take control of vast numbers of subordinated people by claiming to represent the great cosmic chain of command.

The Keystone of Romanticism

The nub of philosophical Romanticism is a clash between ancient and perennial top-down visions of cosmic reality (such as the Christian doctrine of an omnipotent God, or Plato’s ideal forms) and the local experience of individual creative freedom, as evident especially in artists and art. By the time of the early work of Johann Fichte (1762-1814) the line of philosophical thinking about individual freedom that went from ancient humanists (Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic) to Luther and then to Kant should have been profound enough, finally, to support and enlarge the egalitarian forces launched previously in the radial Enlightenment. The recognition of individual freedom should have been ready to subvert and overturn the age-old top-down conceptions which always alienate creative freedom from individuals. Instead, Romanticism actually subverted that line of progress and just revived Medieval fables of exceptionalism, hierarchy, and The Great Chain of Being. The position of Romanticism in the history of ideas reveals that the top-down orientation of all codified and institutional systems of reality has been the crucial barrier to progress, the tragedy of ideas.

From Novalis

Romanticism always includes a conviction that there are forces, or a reality, that is higher than (and very different from) the ordinary everyday work-a-day world, and that the higher ‘something’ is difficult to recognize or to perceive, if not invisible (occult). It includes a declaration of the active presence of a force of spirit (disembodied intelligence). (It can do this either seriously or ironically.) In romanticism lower is fragmented and higher is progressively more unified, all the way up to a total-oneness at the cosmic level. The higher reality is one spirit, free of causation (the magic idealism of Novalis), but not merely random. Events are the caprice of a discretionary intelligence. Dreams, after all, are free of internal causal chains but not free of personal relevance associations.

Can Rationalists Dream?

Romanticism was a reaction against a misrepresentation of Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics comment on rationalism as if it were a campaign for a total focus on humdrum practicality, utility, and efficiency in all human affairs. In fact, the radical Enlightenment rationalists were campaigning for rationality as a way to improve dramatically the claim to autonomy and dignity of every individual. Rationality was their shield for every individual against the established and oppressive ideology of a universal taint in human nature itself, original sin, which benefits from authoritarian control. Efficiency and utility are top-down administrative and economic ideas which were quite foreign to radical Enlightenment philosophers, who were riding the coat-tails of the new cultural wave of scientific ideas with the hope of achieving their own social, political, and cultural improvements. Spinoza and his interpreters were rationalists and not romantics, and yet conceived the Enlightenment. Rationalists dreamed of an equal society in which all people would have rights and freedoms in a bottom-up political system operating to improve the lives of all. That is their radicalism. They embraced the scientific metaphysics of materialism as a potentially bottom-up vision of reality in opposition to Christian spiritualism, which was profoundly influenced by Plato’s idealism and which justified authoritarian control as divine command.

Failing to recognize that Enlightenment rationalism’s main intent and effect was to empower and enhance the dignity of individuals universally, romantics saw in rationalism only disenchantment, formalism, the tyranny of brute material actuality and determinism, including “laws of thought”. Searching for reasons to reject such things, romantic philosophers were inspired by the early work of Johann Fichte which places emphasis on the creativity of individual subjectivity, the personal “I”. Fichte created his innovation out of an insistence on making Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Fichte’s entry point into philosophy) consistent by eliminating the idea of an ultimate external reality, an objective “thing-in-itself”. To Fichte’s way of thinking there was no reason, on Kant’s own basic principles, for supposing that there was a thing-in-itself, although the thing-in-itself was apparently crucial for Kant’s overall vision. In the absence of acquaintance with a thing-in-itself the individual subjective “I” must perform a creative act in which it “posits” (conjectures, pretends, considers, day-dreams) its entire world, including itself.

Note on Idealism

Romanticism is an idealism, since the most fundamental character of the cosmos, on this view, is intelligence. Idealism comes from recognition of the interiority of intelligence (discretionary non-actualities), in contrast to materialism, which rejects such interiority, and restricts existence (ontology) exclusively to what is exterior to intelligence, the strict actualities of physics, pre-determined, measurable, nature. So any philosophical idealism is some model of the interiority of intelligence, and a recognition of interiority of intelligences as elemental or non-reducible. Recognizing the interiority of intelligence gives any position an aspect of idealism.

Kant vs Fichte: A Bottom-Up Re-Conceptualization

Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (noumena) retained the old top-down orientation, in spite of his recognition of individual freedom. His main emphasis was on scientific knowledge, on the importance of, and difficulty of, achieving acquaintance with what was external to and vastly more elemental than individual intelligence. However, Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. (The atomic materialism of Democritus is another contender, as suggested above, and so is Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was, of course, Christian, which is an assertion of a top-down supernatural model of reality. More on this later.) The main importance of Fichte’s vision is his unprecedented re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Fichte.

Fichte and Luther: The Personal Power to Posit a Reality

Fichte’s concept of subjective interiority, the personal “I”, in its creative act of “positing” itself and the cosmos, is doing something comparable to Luther’s more Stoic and more strictly personal “leap of faith”. Both are subjective and deliberate acts of creativity going beyond acts which can be guided completely by previously acquired knowledge, direct acquaintance, or rational calculations. Both Fichte’s and Luther’s creative acts are assertions of a particular intelligence, acts of self-declaration, self-definition, or self-creation, with both the intent and effect of projecting the peculiar power and freedom of that intelligence. Both acts are projections outward into nature and culture of inwardness, of the freedom of an intelligence. However, Fichte’s idea of a subjectivity “positing” dreams leaps well beyond the sort of creativity required by Luther’s leap of faith. There is still a leap, an assertion and a projection of the freedom of an intelligence, but in Fichte’s conception the projection has far more shape, content, and self-sufficiency. It is not just Luther’s act of embracing or assenting to reports of a divine plan supposedly revealed to some distant source and passed along. Fichte’s subjectivity is its own transcendent source. The freedom of Fichte’s subjectivity is richer by far than Luther’s at the same time as being rooted solidly in Luther’s vision. That is the basis for claiming that, in spite of problems, early Romanticism represents a philosophical advance in conceiving subjectivity and its creative freedom.

For the “I” to posit a world, as it does according to Fichte, is not to create an actual world (which would be a thing-in-itself) but rather to create a subjective non-actuality, interior to a particular intelligence (with the unbounded malleability or mutability of such interiority). Romantic philosophers recognized the difference between objective actuality (thing-in-itself) and subjective non-actuality, and they recognized that culture is mainly a construct of non-actuality, that is, orientations which are internal to individual subjectivities. However, they could not accept that individual subjective non-actuality is the matrix of real creative freedom. What prevented them from recognizing that truth of freedom was their (romantic) inability to get past the age-old top-down conception of reality. Anything profoundly original had to come from “on-high” somehow. So the problem for romantics was how to reconcile their top-down conception of reality with their subjective idealism. The easiest way out is to universalize and unify subjectivity and posit a single top-down omnipotent subjectivity, thus to conceive everything as a play of ideas in that divine subjectivity, and that is pretty much what romantic philosophers did. Considering this from another perspective, the problem with dismissing the thing-in-itself is that it seems to license dismissal of other-intelligences-in-themselves also. That would leave a single absolute subjectivity as the entirety of existence, and, in fact, that seems to be the way Fichte’s thinking developed. Such an absolute subjectivity or intelligence is a variant of the concept of God.

Romanticism began with an assertion of individual freedom by Fichte, who picked up and developed the radical Enlightenment thread of empowering and enhancing individuals in his early work on the all-positing I. The Fichtean “I” is the reality of freedom. That in itself is congruent with Enlightenment rationalism up to a point, but of course it cannot accept materialism and determinism as conceived by Spinoza and his fans. So, even though the Romantics were reacting against (a misrepresentation of) Enlightenment rationalism, they were also building on the main feature of that rationalism, up to a point.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, published by State University of New York Press (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3272-6.

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.