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Creative Existence

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Fragment 191, word count: 371.

tags: time, metaphysics, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, ideas, eternity, spirit, subjectivity,  drama.

There is nothing to say about eternity. There is nothing interesting about it. There is no life to eternity. Both Plato and Hegel asserted that things experienced can have different degrees of reality, and that a fully real world would be fixed, final, and eternally unchanging, so completely objective. There could be no subjectivity intervening in the state of things of that world by interpreting, curating, evaluating, and reshaping things according to projected dramas of a personal genius because that would make things unfinished and always at the point of being something new. Time is blatant unreality in that view. The world that is engaged and reshaped by subjectivity is never even remotely real in the Platonic sense, and Plato took that to mean that, for philosophy, it is a distraction, dismissible trivia. Nevertheless, even though Hegel conceived a cosmos that moves dialectically toward perfectly real eternal ideality, the perfection of eternity is not Hegel’s focus. Instead, his focus is the intentional and desperate enactment of the approach to final reality. This drama in time distinguishes Hegel’s fundamental reality from Plato’s. Hegel seems to play out an intuition that, as the primordial opening for creativity, time is the core of the spirit he wants to clarify, a kind of Aristotelian spirit in cosmic nature. It is an intuition that future-projecting teleological drama is the distinctive nature of spiritual existence. For Aristotle, every particular object holds within it an idea of itself, the spirit of itself, just as every individual person does, a self-asserting idea extending beyond what is instantaneously present, beyond the sensory appearance, the perceivable attributes, an idea with future-facing formative force! Such an Aristotelian interiority to outwardly atomic objects integrates each one with a continuity of loss and ever-opening novelty that goes far beyond it, integrating it with, placing it within, an all-encompassing radically unfinished reality. In presenting this conception of ideas as one with time, Aristotle was also already departing from his teacher Plato whose Ideal Forms were strictly eternal and timeless. Maybe Aristotle wasn’t meaning to shift the conception of reality, but he was tacitly recognizing that the drama of spiritual existence in time matters in a way that eternity never can.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence and New Reality

28 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity

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Fragment 180, word count: 505.

Tags: actuality, creation, learning, supposing, intending, time, ideas, Plato, eternity.

There are only two explanations for there being something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and supposing intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. This second explanation is a variant of materialist determinism. Neither of these two conceptions should be ignored, because ordinary experience combines both, and they stand in a special relation to one another. The cascading instability of actuality has only an exclusively single-state instantaneous existence, but that existence is an instability, a particular wave shape just arrived from a completed arc of other individually exclusive shapes utterly vanished and gone, and yet still bursting at the incomplete bursting edge of existence toward another arc of merely possible shapes and more or less probable shapes. Within that bursting-forth, instantly vanishing, vast cascading unstable actuality, we fragile monads of sentience endure by continuously aggregating a personal orientation from since-vanished shapes that we noticed and learned because they matter to our dramas of survival and attachment. Vanished and possible arcs of the nature-wave have current existence only as ideality in the ever-refreshing orientation of particular sentient intentional monads living an embodied life within actuality. With our orientation and our effective embodiment and our dramatic vectors of care we create intentional interventions, novelties, spur-of-the-moment new reality. Monadic sensibility/ intentionality is always on the point of arriving from playing out dramas within a learned shape of circumstances, still continuing to burst forth into hopes, quests, possibilities, and probabilities, with intent to continue a specifically personal mark. Momentary and always re-shaping features of actuality are personalized in the curation of every particularly embodied sensibility/ intentionality. The dramatic poise of a monad is entirely distinct from deterministic actuality through its just-created directionality.

The only straightforward way of conceiving a sentient intentional monad oriented for an intervention with intent to create new reality requires the monad to be already oriented within some state of actuality. This disqualifies any impulse to project intentional intervention universally as the original matrix of all existence. It leaves us with the inexplicable random cascading instability as a pre-condition for intentional acts by any sentient intentional monad, such as ourselves.

In cultures under the influence of Plato, ideality (spirituality) is identified with immortality and eternally stable and unchanging existence, but that is exactly not the experiential presence of ideality, which is always bearing into and enlarging into the incompleteness of ephemeral suppositions, pushing into ideas as the world falls. Aliveness, the living of life, living personhood, is inextricable from the ceaseless opening and passing of event-full time, and every living person is a co-creator of that opening of new reality.

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Fragment 177, May 31, 2021, The World that Matters (word count: 450)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Did Science Make Philosophy Obsolete?

22 Thursday Nov 2018

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Posting 137, Word Count: 501.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived universally as personified, as a living Being. As such, intelligent teleology was thought to be the innermost reality of everything, of existence. That is religion, near enough. Remarkably, the eventful objective world was thought to be never-truly-real, a fleeting, deceptive, dreamlike, and unknowable shimmer, where everything soon becomes something else, always on the point of being different. Time itself was thought to be the genius of failure-to-be-real, and reality, properly identified, was conceived as eternal sameness, the One of Parmenides, a living, conscious, willing, and ideal, sameness. Metaphysics was the effort to identify features of that living ideality which could never change, subsisting without time, and so the stuff of absolute knowledge. In that effort, the transcendence of living intelligence, of personality, was conceived, for example, as logos, a rigidly structured willing that was eternally constant. However, such a removal of ideality from the eventful intervention of personality into actuality is a gross confusion and contradiction of ordinary experience. It completely misses the transcendence of ideality in its bearing toward newness, in the creative will to freedom in that intervention. Ideality is always experience for some personality, and personality is a kind of existence which must actively develop its identity by creating an oriented bearing into the non-actual next moment of embodied life in the world, a newness and incompleteness that can occur only as ideality, never something definite, always bearing into newness in the willing of freedom, and so within time as a technique of living existence. Since time requires some sort of presence of the non-actualities which are no-longer and not-yet, and the only presence other than actuality is ideality, and since ideality is always experience for some teleological personality, then time is a thing of personality and not of actuality.

Eternity is the world that doesn’t matter. Eternity is not transcendent or ultimate reality, and has no merit as the focus of metaphysics. The focus of metaphysics is transcendence, and the transcendent wonder is willful agency, teleology, which is ideality imposing novelty on nature by conceiving and imposing time. Since nature just falls, true becoming isn’t imposed on experience by material nature, but is imposed on material nature by personality in its willful agency.

Thinking of teleology in the narrow sense of goal-oriented movement, purposive action, or future-directed force, is too simple a representation of personality, the self-thinking idea. Of course, personality strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation and of teleology, but there is more. There is an effortful bearing into indefinite futurity within a broad learned and learning orientation involving both not-yet and no-longer, strict ideality making what sense we can of a largely indefinable situation, curious, caring, questioning. Personality is teleology, which must be ideality, the time-scape ideality of aspiration, expectation, intention, and desperate desire.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Ethics in the Philosophy Project

26 Friday Jan 2018

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

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Posting 122, word count: 1,483.

The historical thinking project of philosophy was the cultivation of an alignment between a personal spirituality (orientation, bearing, poise, or condition of mind) and the world at large in its most profound being, thought as a transcendence which confers meaning on the world. This relational duality of focus was fundamental, and defines the philosophical origin of ethics. Ancient Greek philosophers were so impressed by mathematical abstractions such as numbers and geometrical axioms that they conceived a transcendence of universal and timeless “truths”, eternal necessities which would be the source of absolute knowledge. They elevated the dignity of such abstractions very far above particular objects and common subjectivity, placing them at a commanding height atop a hierarchy clearly modelled on the patriarchal and military society of their time. Timeless abstractions at the top of the hierarchy set up an opposition with the ordinary landscape of changeable material objects at the bottom. In stark contrast to the supposedly incorruptible immateriality (and so eternity) of ideal abstractions, the material particulars of common experience were considered unstable, ephemeral, in an endless state of either growth or decay, always transforming into something else, and so useless as a source of knowledge. Philosophers were obsessed with rising above the turmoil of ephemerality in which crowds of the poorest and least educated humans construct eventful lives, and so time itself was relegated to the category of unreality, illusion, metaphysical nothingness, as distinct from ideal Being. Plato’s Ideal Forms illustrate the importance of eternity in ancient thinking. In that classical metaphysical scenario, certain features of concrete objects were cherry-picked and bundled with features of mental abstractions to construct what seemed the best of worlds, a world that would be transcendent over common things as a patriarchal ruler is transcendent over his people. Concrete objects supplied distinctness of image and outline, of form and quality, and abstraction supplied ideal universality and immateriality conceived as a transcendent purity of being, beyond corruption or extinction, a refined and magical state invoking the mysterious existence of ghosts and divinity, radiant with the glamour and mystique of power, status, and authority.

Since the mental efforts of an individual do not change the world at large in its most profound being, the mental effort of philosophy was to decide on and achieve the personal bearing that best expresses the most profound being of a person in relation to the world. Issues and questions of spiritual bearing were the elements of ethics: the best way to live. For a long time in the ancient world, the personal condition to be achieved was conceived as imperturbability. The charge is sometimes made against ethics in ancient philosophy that it is an expression of the self-absorption of the thinking person, apparently concerned only with personal happiness. However, context is crucial here. Stoics and Epicureans, for example, each in their way, considered events in the world to be predetermined by eternal necessities: Stoics by Logos (everything happens for a Logos), Epicureans by atoms falling in the void. The Epicurean conception of a “swerve” which enables human freedom is pretty much limited to an interior mental freedom, like the Stoic freedom to assent to fate, or not. In relation to an almost completely predetermined world, the diligently thoughtful poise to cultivate was identified as a kind of spiritual invulnerability.

In an ultimately predetermined world, change, and so time, is an illusion, a triviality when put against the perspective of eternity, which was thought of as what the consciousness of gods (or the providential Logos) would be. Philosophical thinking (love of wisdom) was a way to live a human life most like the life of gods by achieving that ethical poise at the core of the project. Seen in that light, an ethical life was cultivation of a personal alignment with transcendence as it was conceived in that era. The framework for transcendence was the inferior reality of change and time, as experienced in ordinary events and activities, and the ultimate reality of the perspective of eternity. Within that conception of the philosophical thinking project, metaphysics, understood as the identification of transcendence, was the indispensable guide for ethics. The personal aspiration to achieve imperturbability followed from what was identified as transcendent, namely eternity, or in other words, ethics emerged directly from metaphysics.

We people of modernity no longer find eternity convincing as a transcendence that confers meaning on the world. Except for Epicureans (whose transcendence was arguably individual rationality), the ancients thought that the high eternal abstractions were alive, sensitive and teleological in some important sense, mothership senior intelligences. For Aristotle, it was nested heavenly spheres in motion around the Earth that were such intelligences. It was specifically the aliveness of those remote intelligences that seemed to confer meaning on the world and the lives of individuals. It gave the remote transcendence creative purpose and power, and aligning a personal bearing with that transcendence expressed the sense of a kinship or commonality between the spirituality of the individual and a sovereign aliveness. The gradual accumulation of a more scientific view of the world has made those ways of thinking seem bizarre. Since we no longer accept the idea of a cosmos that is personified as a whole or on a grand scale, it strikes us that in the perspective of eternity there is just nothing but frozen rigidity, nothing happening, no life and so no fountain of meaning. However, just as in the ancient conceptual systems, it still is life which confers meaning on the world: sensitivity, consciousness, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity, for inventive construction, for freedom. It’s the creative freedom of intelligence that is transcendent, now as then. There is no freedom in eternity because there is no time in eternity, and so the ancient idea of a sovereign aliveness at the far cosmic horizons, the consciousness of gods, doesn’t make sense. The idea of freedom arises from a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which novelty can be projected deliberately. Since we no longer accept the plausibility of disembodied consciousness and caring, what confers meaning on the world now is the agency and creative freedom of ordinary embodied individuals.

Identification of transcendence has been largely banished from respectability by scientific materialism, but ethics makes no sense without freedom, and freedom is transcendent in relation to an inertial and entropic nature. Ethics is a framework of orientation for free agents acting through time. If we have not been convinced that identification of transcendence is illegitimate, or that transcendence is properly identified in a patriarchal father God or some other personification of the cosmos at large, nor yet in the eternal Being that some have conceived at the far horizons of things, then we might find life yet in the conception of philosophy as an alignment of personal bearing, way of life, with a more modest transcendence. The obvious approach is to change the direction of the gaze, and so to stop gazing outward for transcendence. The focus instead is on looking itself, not on what is seen but on seeing. There is no consciousness, looking or seeing, without a transcendent personal spirituality, a specific questioning representing the interpretive sum of a personal no-longer, poised as a context through which to read what the body senses in making what is not-yet. Seeing is the application of such context, a context-mediated moment of interpretation. Time in which there is past and future is clearly spiritual, pure ideality, because past and future are perfectly non-actual. Only consciousness in its temporal, teleological flight, is transcendent, and occurs plausibly only at the level of the embodied individual.

Ethics will always be an alignment of personal action with transcendence as it is currently understood. With transcendence conceived as non-capricious, non-personal eternal necessities, ethics calls for an act of will to love your fate, cultivating personal imperturbability, sometimes understood as complete selflessness. With transcendence as the will of a capricious and all powerful deity, then the point of orientation is commands of the patriarchal deity, and ethical action is obeying the god’s list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. If we recognize that transcendence is the freedom created by the spiritual projection of time in the form of futurity and a personal questioning applied as context to the sensible world, there isn’t any cosmically senior intelligence for our personal spirituality to align with, no sovereign transcendence. Ethical agency then requires aligning with a world in which transcendence takes the form of multiple embodied individuals scattered horizontally in local clusters over the face of the planet. If an ethical life is alignment with the transcendence of intelligent aliveness, then it would be aligning my freedom with the freedom of everyone around me, mutual respect for and empathy with all the other sensitive and teleological beings here within nature.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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tags: Platonism, idealism, spirituality, metaphysics, mathematics, PHI, beauty, eternity, hierarchy, embodiment, time, freedom, Christianity, knowledge, Sartre, existentialism, individuality

Ideal Forms, Ideas, are at the core of Platonic metaphysics. The Ideal Forms are archetypal objects and structures: immaterial, profoundly static, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so, easily associated with (the interiority of) some divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the association of eternally static Ideal Forms with transcendent (immaterial) spirituality or intelligence is far removed from the capricious personality of ordinary subjectivity, and yet that association is there, as discussed below. The Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of the metaphysical world-structure, a hierarchy of descent from a divine One-ness-of-all-beings at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of embodied human experience. Each increment of that descent from divine One-ness is a kind of imperfect self-portrait created by the stage immediately higher, a self re-creation that is progressively reduced in perfection, distorted at each step by the loss of some stability and accuracy, so that, where we live at the bottom, reality is unrecognizable, represented by utter illusions, flickering shadows of sketchy models of reality (the Cave parable in Republic). That structure of descent taken altogether is the primal hierarchy, as each successive stage down is defined as completely dependent on the power of the stage above, and the structure as a whole is eternally unchanging, as are the archetypes of objects and the divine One-ness at the top.

This may seem a slightly cartoonish presentation of Platonism, tilting to the NeoPlatonic or even Orphic end of Platonic visions of reality, but it has the virtue of presenting in a brief and straightforward way the features of Platonism which are enduringly influential and most problematic: absolute sanctification of what remains eternally unchanged, assertion of the sovereign power of that eternal Being in determining a rigidly top-down hierarchy, and finally, disparagement of ordinary human embodiment. This conception of reality, ruled by the sacred eternal (stasis, stillness, immutability), stands as a core counter-force to any philosophy of freedom, regardless of the rationalist features in Platonism.

Mathematical Idealism

Plato’s type of top-down grand scale metaphysical idealism emerges from a mathematical inspiration. Mathematics has been one of the most powerful inspirations for philosophy, and especially for metaphysical idealism and rationalism. Philosophy has attracted a lot of mathematicians who admire changeless abstractions, and their opinions have had decisive influence: Pythagoras, Al-Kindi, Descartes, Leibniz, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell. Mathematics suggests a set of perfect and eternally stable objects: geometrical forms, numbers (the number PHI)*, functions, and operators, which are recognized in a multitude of different structures and situations, in a way that suggests their existence separate from, prior to, and far more permanent than, any particular instance. Mathematics shares that quality with experiences of beauty. Beauty has a force of impression that suggests an invisible higher world where beautiful forms exists forever in radiant glory. The normal world is a place of continual change, of brief novelty and passing away rather than eternity, but beauty (often associated with works of art) seems to raise an object above the ephemeral material stratum and giving it the look of eternity, perhaps because it is especially memorable and inspires a wish that it last forever just as it is. Also, there are direct overlaps of math and beauty in the mathematics of musical harmony, for example, and the mathematics of architectural beauty, and of course in what was called the music of the spheres. Language as an impersonal structure of rules has also inspired speculation about this mathematical mode of being. Objects of mathematical knowledge and the forms of beauty seem to have a pristine, crystalline existence that is immaterial, revealing some mode of being beyond the laws and forces of material existence. In philosophical thinking, mathematics, logical forms, linguistic forms, and instances of beauty have all been interpreted as glimpses of transcendence and immateriality. (* For an introduction to PHI, see Chapter 20 of The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.)

Christian Platonism

The dominance of the hierarchical force of Platonism was sanctified and made legally mandatory by Christianity as it became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 324, because the previously developed and widely familiar language of Greek philosophy had been used to construct the Christian message. The process continued after the Romans abandoned their western provinces, and Christian institutions had to re-launch within the ruins, a patchwork of rural baronial turf holdings, eventually becoming powerful enough to re-claim the old imperial domain as western Christendom from around 800. (The deeply Christianized trunk of the Roman Empire continued uninterrupted in the eastern provinces, where Greek culture, including Platonic ideas, had been dominant for centuries.) In that second coming of organized Christianity to the west, the crucial interpretation of doctrine by Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo, was a Christianized version of NeoPlatonic metaphysics. Having thus established from ancient times its dominance in the European system of cultural reality, Platonism has been the most important metaphysical vision by far, and the inescapable form of idealism. Before Christian Platonism and NeoPlatonism, there was pre-Platonic Orphic metaphysics with a similar vision of divine cosmic hierarchy. The conceptual system of reality embraced by medieval alchemists had the same sources: ancient Greek Orphic mythology and the philosophical work of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Nineteenth century Romantics still mused on a variant of the same vision.

As an illustration of how Platonic metaphysics applied in practice, the medieval theory of social order identified three functional groups which combined in a sort of human pyramid. Those higher in the pyramid controlled and supervised (often owned) those below, by divine design. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and lowest stratum. Baronial fighters formed the next level up and were much fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land and natural resources, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce the effectiveness of that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed the highest point of the pyramid. This is a clear application of Plato’s Republic. The medieval agricultural peasants were Plato’s appetite driven workers. The military baronage were Plato’s spirited fighters. The priestly clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. Orientation to that kind of social hierarchy is still familiar.

The nature and meaning of knowledge was also conceived in terms of Platonism. The official Christian doctrine on knowledge was NeoPlatonic via Augustine: God wills a special illumination within human minds which enables those minds to recognize instances of Ideal Forms. So, knowledge is enabled by a special act of illumination by God in the revelation of something like a universal form, an uncovering of the universal character of what is sensed at a particular time and place. The ultimate object of knowledge is an eternal permanence, the Ideal Form. There was speculation that God created the world by uttering the names of the Ideal Forms, bring them into being, and making language intrinsic to knowledge and to the structure of reality.

On those foundations, Platonic metaphysics looms as a central conceptual pillar in the reality construct of Euro-American culture, foundational even now in the orientation of modern people. It isn’t often recognized as such, but Platonism is there in a mathematical eternity to the conception of the world as a rigidly furnished bundle of things waiting to be discovered. Although the more mystical features might seem alien to modern people, Platonism reveals its ongoing presence as a privileging of stability and fixed structures in the general notion of, and the cultural value projected onto, abstract knowledge as a human accomplishment, a privileging of the perspective of eternity. In addition, not all of the mystical features are alien. For example, Platonism is our source of an assumption that an invisible power is the source of the world we inhabit, that there are super-sensible origins, sources, and explanations for objects and situations we deal with, and so, on that supernatural basis, that creative power, agency, greatness, authority, and legitimacy flow from above and beyond us, from high abstractions. This orientation inspires and provides legitimacy for a striving after hierarchical centralization, for imperialism, in social, economic, and political arrangements. This is how imperialism became, through cultural assimilation, the basic and largely unconscious shape of expectation and aspiration even in modernity.

Separating Spirituality from Embodiment

Platonic metaphysics was an attempt to understand transcendence, and, as such, it is the inescapable idealism, a model of the incongruity between spirituality and embodiment. In Platonism, the transcendence of human spirituality is defined as a mental grasp on what is eternal, based on a sensed affinity or essential sameness of ordinary human intellect or mentality with the immateriality of eternal Being. At the same time, it is an attempt to explain transcendence by appeal to something (eternity) outside normal experience, because normal experience is so emphatically embodied, and bodies never stop changing, and all their changes soon bring them to the end of their brief existence, to death. According to Plato, the body is a tomb, and what Plato wanted from transcendent spirituality was a decisive exit from the tomb. (For Augustine also, the body is the problem.) That is the context of the Platonic attempt to understand transcendence by appeal to eternity. The Platonic hierarchy is a way of constructing both an elaborate separation and a slippery connection between pure spirituality at the top and material body at the bottom, presenting individuals with a picture of the consequences of choosing to concentrate their energies in one direction or the other.

Platonic Heaven, the Immaterial Stratum

The mathematical inspiration of Platonic metaphysics can obscure the fact that even this idealism is a model of spirituality. Ideal Forms are spiritual objects, forms in a divine, higher order, mind, or projections from such a mind. The very concept of immateriality is always some abstraction from the non-actuality of subjective orientation, of a person’s directionality in teleological time, and so essentially an abstraction from the immateriality of time itself. Any removal from tangible materiality is some kind of invocation, projection, or allegory of the non-actuality of subjective interiority. (The only current existence of past and future is as a non-actuality, interior to individual spiritualities as a force of bearing or directionality.) The mathematical perspective of eternity suppresses the temporality of spirituality and so creates the (false) impression of a kind of static spirituality, a simple and pure consciousness or being, and then goes on to assert that such a mythical being is somehow more elevated than, and superior to, ordinary spirituality which is the ongoing construction of futurity, of temporality. The appeal to eternity is a way of editing spirituality (time) out of reality without recognizing what was done, by imagining ordinary objects with the spiritual quality of immateriality, which is only encountered experientially in the always-new and always-incomplete openness of personal spirituality. The perspective of eternity sucks temporality out of ultimate reality, and so sucks out the life. In the ideal world of mathematical abstractions there are no free agents, only objects with complete-destiny-included. It is a world where everything is already finished, with all changes both external and internal to objects simultaneously present in the transcendent object-set. Nothing is happening or being created in the perspective of eternity, and so the spirituality presented, typically presented as transcendent and divine, is really impoverished and effectively dead, fully furnished and complete. There is no exit from mortality here.

Freedom and Time

Metaphysics as an account of spiritual transcendence does not have to seek the perspective of eternity. Freedom is the essential issue of metaphysics, and recoiling from mortality to an imaginary eternity is exactly the wrong way to understand transcendence, spirituality, and freedom. It isn’t a grasp on eternity that makes us transcendently free, but instead our continual and discretionary re-construction of our force of bearing into an indeterminable future. It is exactly our engagement with time, our projecting and imposing teleological time onto nature, which is our freedom, and that force of engagement is inseparable from personal embodiment. Plato’s whole package of eternity, hierarchy, and disparagement of embodiment was wrongheaded and self-defeating.

Sartre’s existentialist description of individual personhood as “existence before essence”, or, to go one better, existence without essence, is a pretty good definition of personal spirituality. Time is the clearest case of existence without essence. Existential non-appearance applies to personal orientation, but that non-appearance is a gusher of creativity. The only way something can exist without essence is by being something other than an actuality, by being an ever reconstructing (re-inventing) bearing out of a no-longer-actual past and into a not-yet-actual future.

The transcendence of spirituality is not found in timeless eternity, but in its creating the non-actuality of time, and by doing so evading the brute and final particularity of actuality, of nature. Far from being a mere illusion or simply trivial in a description of ultimate reality, temporality (change, continual re-orientation) is the most fundamental spiritual reality. Spirituality or transcendence is exactly an attenuation of the particularity of actuality, a flight into increasingly remote possibilities and probabilities: living in time. The point of life is transcendence, but not an imaginary transcendence of lifeless, uncreative, eternity, but instead the transcendence of existence without essence. The point of life is life itself, the flight that is spirituality.

Platonism is not the necessary form of idealism. Any recognition that spirituality as such has to be included in the survey of reality is some kind of idealism. In Platonism, a conception of transcendent spirituality that depends on and follows from disparagement and rejection of normal human embodiment inspires a rigidly top-down hierarchical orientation because the source or matrix of spirituality is removed from individuals and placed in a remote central unity above everything. That limits the conception of freedom to an escape into the stasis and non-agency of the elevated spiritual unity. However, that purported freedom is complete unfreedom. The perspective of particular embodiment is exactly the condition of effective freedom in teleological agency. The force of a spiritual bearing that holds and projects the transcendent non-actualities of time and creativity just disappears without the perspective of embodiment. There is no hidden oneness of all spirituality, because embodiment defines and grounds the plurality and essential separateness, and the spirituality, of human individuals. The individual embodiment of a multitude of separate instances of spirituality, every one granted an essential place in our survey of reality, results in an idealism with a new horizontal configuration. Without privileging the eternal, transcendence reverts to the level of individual embodied spirituality, where the freedom of time and non-actuality are constructed. That completely eliminates the primal metaphysical hierarchy. Without eternity as the source and origin, the anchor of hierarchy disappears. Spirituality is a horizontal multiplicity: any spirituality is, by embodiment, a peculiarly separated individual among a multitude of others. We build interconnections, but we have to connect via our specific embodiment.

Selected Sources and References

The Republic of Plato, translated, with notes, an interpretive essay, and an introduction by Allan Bloom, published by BasicBooks, a subsidiary of Perseus Books, L.L.C., (second edition, 1991), ISBN 0-465-06934-7.

Aristotle and Other Platonists, written by Lloyd P. Gerson, published by Cornell University Press (2005), ISBN-10: 0801441641, ISBN-13: 978-0801441646. (Especially see Chapter One: What is Platonism?, pp. 24-46; and p. 32 for observations on “bottom-up” materialist atomism.)

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Ewald Osers, published by Harvard University Press (1991), ISBN-10: 0674792769, ISBN-13: 978-0674792760. (Especially see Chapter Sixteen: The Great No, pp. 223-237, and specifically p. 224 for Plato: the body is a tomb.)

What Is Ancient Philosophy?, written by Pierre Hadot, translated by Michael Chase, published by Belknap Press; (2002), ISBN: 0674007336.

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036. (Especially see Chapter Seven: Plato, Orphics, and Jains, pp. 197-204.)

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New

12 Sunday Apr 2015

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The Politics of Eternity

There is a tradition in metaphysical philosophy of defining transcendence or ultimate reality by a special relationship to time. Specifically, the transcendent or metaphysical is supposed to be what is eternal, with a special mode of being which is outside of time. That tradition expresses the assumption that there is something deficient and derivative about change, about becoming, things that are ephemeral, things that eventually transform into something different, and about time itself. It was thought that temporary presences, continually passing away and being replaced by other temporary presences (including the world-within-time), could not be real as such, but must be a kind of illusion explainable as effects, creations, expressions, or distortions of some other mode of Being which is eternally the same and so perfectly real. Supposedly, only the perfectly real could be the ultimate ground or cause of the transitory things of ordinary experience. For ancient philosophers, identifying the eternal metaphysical source of changing appearances would be knowledge properly so-called, since only eternal objects can be objects of genuine knowledge or reliable references of names, which they thought necessary to make language meaningful. (Behind that is an idea of discovering the ultimate unity of language, thought, and objective reality.) Possibly it was the shock and fear of death approaching, of personal not-being, that inspired this fascination with eternity. Possibly it seemed that achieving knowledge of eternal Being would overcome the apparent inevitability of death and so achieve a kind of immortality.

However, that ancient philosophical reverence for eternity is peculiar, perverse, and self-defeating. If anything is well and truly dead it is eternity. Eternity is not immortality. The kind of life that is definitive of human individuals is impossible without change and becoming. Living intelligence is devoted to an evasion of finality or completeness, an evasion of being finished and forever the same. The crucial point, though, is that this assumption of the superiority and priority of eternity or Being immediately sets up a top-down structure of reality and places ordinary life and experience in a disadvantaged or deficient position. It projects a parent-child hierarchy onto the cosmos at large, with a senior layer in control of a junior layer. It denigrates the life of human intelligence and especially the life of individual intelligence which is so clearly ever-changing when flourishing, and flourishing only ephemerally. That conception of a hierarchical structuring of reality at the largest scale has social and political consequences, because there are cultural factions of humans who mimic the structure in that fable of metaphysics and use an association with symbols of eternity such as monumental architecture, art, and institutional scale and stability to support their claims of superiority to, authority over, and ownership of the lives of ordinary individuals.

The top-down structure of reality codified in the metaphysics of eternity is still current and foundational in conceptions of modern science. Although things move and grow and die and decay in the objective world, scientists proceed with the identification of eternal natural laws, mathematical patterns, or underlying elements that do not change, eternal foundations within the objective world through which change is reducible to permanent formulae. So the objective world, to which in science anything and everything reduces, can be made, finally, to reveal the truths of eternity. If the individual life of intelligence is to be rescued from that ancient philosophical perversion, then it should be the freedom of a life in time rather than eternity which is recognized as transcendent. When freedom, instead of eternity, is identified as transcendent, then the conceptualization of reality as a whole becomes dramatically different and presents us with a bottom-up structure.

There are many culturally ingrained suggestions that we are not competent to confront profound issues, that we should accept authorized teachings, a recognized creed, a formula, given us by authorities of our culture, but those suggestions reveal only a culture constructed to be disempowering. Authoritative declarations of individual incompetence are just reprints of Christendom’s fable of original sin. One form of warning away from questions of transcendence is something like: transcendence is so remote from common experience that it can’t be encountered and critiqued by people in general. However, it turns out that common experience is full of the transcendence constituted by teleological time, which is not remote in the least. In a re-conceptualized bottom-up system of reality, everything that is supernatural, metaphysical, and transcendent gets restored from cosmic objectivity to individual subjectivity, where it was and is actually experienced in the first place. Some find it difficult to let go of parental deity and sovereignty, but recognizing those as bogus does nothing like plunging us into an abyss of meaningless chaos. We can deal with this re-conceptualization of transcendence, along with a thorough re-conceptualization of nature and community. Critical thinking is strongest when applied to a whole system of reality, starting with the most revered and supernatural features, and weakest when applied piecemeal to individual claims and assertions.

Time, Transcendence, and Brute Actuality

Individual freedom is what is transcendent in bottom-up metaphysics, and freedom is exactly the opposite of eternity, it is having time, as intelligence does and the voice of intelligence does, and as nature does not. All physical things are strict actualities, and in nature this instant of brute actuality specifically and categorically excludes the existence of all other instants. Time reveals very little about nature but a great deal about intelligence. Time, as experienced in ordinary life with plans and expectations (teleology) and an increasingly complicated and remote past, is a personal construct of non-actualities. All expectations and intentions are non-actualities which encounter actuality at some point (are always pointed or aimed at doing so) and in doing so accumulate an increasingly rich and enduring orientation-past structured of non-actualities. Memories are points or positions of re-orientation. Time is an illusion but not a delusion. Rather, it is a magnificent non-actuality constructed and deployed in acts of an intelligence (builder and deployer of non-actualities) to be free in the world, to live and keep personal particularity indefinite, incomplete, or open. Any intelligence needs non-actualities (interior to its orientation) to survive as a living being in the world. Non-actualities are meta-physical, which is to say, they are not part of determinate nature. A crucial point is that there is no justification for exteriorizing what is meta-physical, for alienating what is non-actual from the interior orientation of individual intelligences.

There are a couple of crucial things that make bottom-up metaphysics distinct from the top-down variety, although what is transcendent is still defined by a special relationship to time. Individual freedom can’t claim to be the cause of nature at large or of everything that exists. Bottom-up reality is a pluralist instead of a monist reality. The bottom (the freedom of individual subjects-in-time) of bottom-up metaphysics is still outside physics because it is not pre-determinable in terms of universal laws or any other universals. The particularity of subjects-in-time is always indefinite because they continuously re-creating themselves merely by continuing to live. However this creative power is not omnipotent, universal, or unitary. Subjectivity is limited, localized, embodied, ephemeral, individual, and plural.

Most systems of reality include a large supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, you have a top-down system. However, attempts to describe naked actuality at large, to go beyond common objects-as-experienced in an effort to describe universal nature or what would exist if there were no embodied intelligences or their cultures, are always based on speculation, wild guesses and imaginings, hopes and fears, blatant and bogus objectification (projection) of subjectivity. As soon as you depart from the immediate presences which are the non-actualities (such as expectations and intentions) constructed and deployed by yourself or some other embodied intelligence, you create a delusional fable by objectifying features that make sense only within the orientation construct of a particular intelligence functioning and carrying on a life in the world. A person does not need to speculate about matters of direct acquaintance.

There is a distinction to be emphasized between the reality of individual intelligences and the “reality” of abstract ideas and categories constructed by intelligences in order to orient ourselves in the world of actuality. Ideas, classes, and categories are all non-actualities which have their being only in the interior orientation of individual intelligences. William of Ockham (Ockham’s razor) was correct that abstractions are all subjective non-actualities. He was on the bottom-up side of a Medieval debate on this issue, the top-down side asserting that “universals” were objective actualities, with a reality prior to and independently of ordinary intelligences. Abstractions are always ideas, which is to say, interior creations of an ordinary embodied intelligence, and, as such, non-actualities. When presented as subsisting independently of ordinary intelligences, such things are being illegitimately objectified, projected or exteriorized, sorted into the wrong category. This applies also to numbers, quantities, measurability, and comparability. Such non-actualities have the character of dreams, but that does not mean they are trivial or frivolous in any sense. They are crucial acts of intelligences constructing their freedom.

Bottom-Up Self-Acquaintance

The goal in contemplating bottom-up metaphysics is acquaintance with personal identity as a particular, autonomous, and spontaneous creator and builder of effective non-actualities, of completely personal states of orientation. Coming to that acquaintance requires a re-conceptualization (partly a de-conceptualization) of the standard modern system of reality, which normally guides what we expect and will accept in perception and experience. You become acquainted with the free creative self by focusing on the distinction between actuality and non-actuality in your own experience, and then the specific importance and role of non-actualities in personal orientation and freedom, all of which is clearly re-thinking an elemental level of personal experience. Although that consciousness is reached by a thinking process, it isn’t the conclusion of an argument. It isn’t a proposition but a direct experience, an encounter, a self-acquaintance of the questioning in your own gaze. Freedom isn’t a proposition but instead is personal orientation, teleological time itself. Of course self-directed reorientation is teleological within the framework of being in a life, crucially indeterminate and impossible without being built laboriously along guidelines of satisfaction to intelligence: sustainability, gratification, playfulness, making an accumulating mark, and interconnectedness with other intelligences.

Transcendent Self-Possession

There is here a special sense of self-directed re-orientation, based on bottom-up self-identification, as opposed to the top-down identities assigned by ambient society, stipulated in terms of cultural, religious, and economic categories from on-high, accompanied by claims of ownership from on-high. Thinking philosophically is acting on the determination never to give away the right to define who you are. As the craft of autonomous self-acquaintance, philosophy is the beginning and foundation of bottom-up political force. Any form of being owned is slavery, by definition and in practice. Since the creative questioning you encounter is essentially free, it can’t be the property of, can’t be owned by, anything, and this bottom-up self-identification is a transcendent self-possession. There isn’t anything deficient about the life-in-time of individual intelligences. Instead, that is exactly where transcendence flourishes.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.