Tag Archives: ethics

Dreaming Boys

28 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Gender culture, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 156, word count: 179.

The idea of an emotionless super-intelligence has fascinated certain male culture pods throughout history. Rationalist philosophers and theologians from all three Abrahamic religious cultures, for example, developed in medieval and early modern times conceptions of God as an emotionless super-intelligence, the ultimate rationality, who must be trusted to conduct the world infallibly, unhampered by the limitations and weaknesses of human judgments. Since the acts and pronouncements of that intelligence are based on complete omniscience, utterly beyond human abilities, the resulting voice and hand of God are beyond the constraints of ethics and morality as conceived by humans. It is now computer engineers and mathematicians, urged on by investors, corporate executives, strategic and military planners, and authoritarian politicians who dream of an emotionless super-intelligence whose access to vast oceans of data make it completely unimpeachable by ethics and morality in providing them with unlimited power and wealth. The dreaming boys strive to fashion a mightier person than the girls make in the usual way, but the dream of a master has become the dream of a slave.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy is Possible

11 Thursday Jul 2019

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

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Fragment 150, word count: 428.

Philosophy as an interior act and process of self-directed reorientation is possible because of a personally interior fountain of spirituality: questions, intents, evaluations, abstractions and ideas which give structure and movement to experience. Ideas are always and only features of an individual person’s orientation and temporal bearing in the world, but everyone’s ideas are influenced and often imposed by an ambient culture. Every individual is colonized by the culture into which he or she is born. Agents of cultural communities strive to particularize, distinguish, and glorify their collective by stipulating key communal ideas to form a human sort of hive mind. The posture of philosophical questioning arises from recognizing that lived reality is mutable because ideas make up much of the structure of that reality, and that generally accepted cultural stipulations are often just superstitions and toxic misconceptions. Philosophy as an interior act and process is a personal assertion of spiritual individuality by moving beyond cultural stipulations. This builds from features of experience that would be just as they are without a person having learned to be part of a nation, a religious community, an ethnic group, a linguistic community, a socio-economic class, race, or gender; encountering the way personality lives beyond and beneath any cultural qualifiers and categories such as linguistic ethnicity, skin colour, body size and shape, age, giftedness, education, social status, or nationality. Here in Socratic innocence is a spiritual fountain positing non-actualities in the shape of time, anticipating the ever decreasing remoteness of multiple possibilities, variously probable occurrences presenting opportunities for acts of agency to improvise an embodied life in the world. In positing time as it does, personality creates teleology, freedom, and itself as active and effective ideality. Freedom is the power to posit. Rocks and rivers don’t posit anything, but only fall.

Certainly there is the brute actuality of rocks and rivers, but there are also active occurrences of supra-actuality, separate embodied points and arcs of intervention  imposing locally invented novelty onto the shape of the fall lines of actuality. Any politics conceived for a strong nurture of freedom must recognize this spontaneous creativity, novelty, and indeterminacy within brute actuality, a conception of transcendence at the level of the embodied individual. Philosophy as the interior act and process of a particular supra-actuality calls up the perspective of sentient being simply as such, of teleological being, living personality in the most general sense. In removing itself spiritually from culturally structured collectives, in finding the way to be most alone, this interior act must embrace the most universal empathy.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The World that Doesn’t Matter

19 Monday Feb 2018

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

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Posting 124, word count: 750.

Without the engagement of living subjectivity the world has no meaning. It can’t be beautiful or ugly, happy or sad, good or evil. There are no ethical issues in such a world. It is a world without tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce. Whatever happens in such a world does not matter. Only the teleological consciousness of future-bound subjectivity confers meaning on anything: sensitivity, conscious intent, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity and construction, for freedom; and doing so with a directionality or bearing of intent that is an interpretive construct of no-longer. The idea of freedom is a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which relevant novelty can be projected deliberately. Since time to come and a no-longer which situates relevance are entirely ideas rather than existing actualities, we are here encountering the subjective ideality of time, orientation, and spiritual bearing. It’s this creative freedom of ideality which is transcendent, and it qualifies subjectivity as the essential subject matter of an old branch of thinking known as metaphysics, long since gone out of style in our era of empirical science. Subjectivity, fountain of meaning, is one of the two metaphysical modes, the other being objectivity. Objectivity is the world imagined without ideality, the world that doesn’t matter.

We are completely familiar with subjectivity at the level of our personal locality. Anyone’s personal subjectivity looms large in the shape of how what-there-is matters. We care about what happens, certain situations and outcomes matter to us. We also experience the intelligence of people and animals around us in how they care and direct themselves in a world that matters to them. This is reasonably straightforward but everyone’s personal orientation is also situated in, and influenced by, a historical, cultural, and political context. There has been a history of projecting conscious intent beyond the kind of embodied persons familiar to us, outward to the cosmic far horizons. Such a conception is a personification of the cosmos on the large scale, a strictly incoherent idea but one that sets up a habit of trivializing the local sensitivity and conscious intent that we live with and recognize in the people we engage in conversation. However, it doesn’t take any special kind of subjectivity to confer meaning on the world. The presence of any and every one of the ordinary sensitive and teleological people we live among confers meaning on the entire cosmos. In fact, there is no way for any subjectivity to be special or extraordinary in a way that sanctifies what matters to it as what “really” matters. When anything matters to any subjectivity, then it matters in a way that is as absolute as it gets.

The legacy of cultural fixations on patriarchal hierarchy and its projection into the cosmos at large has left us assuming that, even though the cosmos is not personified on the grand scale, there must be some especially transcendent consciousness from-on-high, maybe the mysterious genius of great men or the sum of wisdom from heroic ancestors, which sanctifies the culture of values expressed in the structure of wealth and power. However, no such special consciousness exists, and none is required for meaning in individual or collective life. The transcendence of ordinary subjectivity is the only transcendence there is.

Since meaning is always and only conferred on events and situations by sensitive and caring teleology, it is not collectives, not culturally engineered “hive minds” or discourses, that merit a privileged role in defining what really matters. Such things are not instances of subjectivity. Nothing matters to a discourse, an artifact, or a text. Discourses don’t care or think, and neither caring nor thinking is confined within discourses.

Culturally supplied frameworks of orientation always include ideas that are meant to anchor the meaning of individual and collective life in relation to the ever-looming large scale of things, the global or cosmic scale, and the only way that any meaning can be anchored is in relation to some conception of subjective ideality. Everyone feels the looming of the largest scale, and so fashions some metaphysical frame of reference in an idea of the relationship between the transcendent fountain of meaning that is subjectivity over against meaningless objectivity. In spite of the historical tendency to universalize patriarchal hierarchy, metaphysics doesn’t need any special subjectivity or ideality. The subjectivity and ideality of ordinary experience is perfectly effective at making a world that matters.

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.

Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Nature, Transcendence

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Gnosticism is somewhat difficult to pin down. Roughly, it is a construct of ideas about what is supernatural and the relationship of humans to the supernatural. It seems to have been developed mostly in the first few centuries A.D., with an important concentration of activity in the Greek/ Egyptian city of Alexandria when that city was an international centre of scholarship, research, organized curiosity, and invention of ideas. From the point of view of the orientation being developed in these blog postings, call it Blind-Spot philosophy, Gnosticism is a metaphor or allegory (not entirely successful) for important realities of the human condition, and so possibly a helpful reference in sketching an overview of the Blind-Spot positions. There are gnostic elements in, and a gnostic structure or flavour to, Blind-Spot philosophy. For one thing, there is a fundamental dualism in Gnosticism, the dualism of spirit vs material nature, since, on that view, the whole drama of human life flows from each human spirit being catastrophically imprisoned in matter or nature. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is also a fundamental dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, or intelligence (freedom) vs brute actuality (unfreedom). What is conceived in Gnosticism as spirit has some congruence with what in Blind-Spot philosophy is called the interiority of an intelligence. The idea or fable of disembodied spirit(s) can be plausibly interpreted as an allegory for the experience of the interiority of personal intelligence.

The primary task of early Gnosticism was escape from demonic control, especially control by the demons of stars, dictators of astral or astrological fate. Some specialized knowledge (gnosis) was necessary to enable that escape, knowledge of the supernatural origins of the human imprisonment, and of the structure and history of the supernatural world, leading to discovery of how to be fully human by the memory of being divine. The shape of power in that view is emphatically and quite literally top-down: the demons in the starry sky have overwhelming power. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the idea of disembodied intelligences, including demonic ones. However, as the star-demons represent a dominant evil, an imposing of control and subordination on people where there should be freedom and equality, there is a congruent dominant evil in Blind-Spot philosophy. In Blind-Spot philosophy the dominant evil is not supernatural but is instead cultural and historically rooted. Specifically, the dominant evil is a cultural stream of human macro-parasitism, a cultural, political, and economic faction which successfully maintains and evolves a culture (Aryan or patriarchal masculinity) of macro-parasitic control over masses of other humans, where there should be freedom and equality.

Recognizing the broad dominance of evil, injustice, and oppression within a supernaturally top-down perspective, gnostics thought there had to be two gods, a greater and a lesser, the greater one good, the lesser one evil or at least prone to catastrophic mistakes. Gnosticism is, therefore, often construed as a religion (in one form, a version of Christianity) or a religious philosophy since it has much to claim concerning supernatural divinities. By contrast, Blind-Spot philosophy is nothing like religion since it has nothing to say about supernatural divinities, except that the idea of disembodied intelligences, personalities, or ideas is not rational, neither locally nor cosmically. Blind-Spot philosophy does have a claim about transcendence, but not in the form of omnipotent or all-encompassing divinities who shower gifts or miseries down upon humans from on-high. That would be the supernatural top-down perspective. In Blind-Spot philosophy, intelligences are all embodied and individually creators of freedom, which means we are individually transcendent with respect to the brute determinism of nature or strict actuality.

As discussed in recent postings (Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New, and The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One) there are certain circumstances of human life which make it very tempting and easy to imagine a profoundly top-down shape or structure to reality. It has been traditional for cultured humans to be trapped mentally within such top-down visions. Gnostics were early promoters of a version of that idea known as The Great Chain of Being, a prime example of top-down metaphysics. That was the context in which the gnostic views of time, freedom, and subjective identity were conceived, an extremity of top-down thinking. That perspective is rejected and opposed by Blind-Spot philosophy, which recognizes embodied intelligences as individually or autonomously creative, and as such presents a strictly bottom-up perspective, yet still recognizing transcendence in human experience. Gnosticism was and is a kind of obsession with transcendence of a supernatural kind. The idea of supernatural transcendence is an allegory for the reality of the freedom of individual intelligences.

Both Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy recognize a dominant evil which perpetrates a profound distortion of reality on a mass scale, creating a ‘hidden or secret reality’ which is normally unidentified because of (cultural) distortions arranged and maintained by the dominant evil. In both, the core secret to be discovered and revealed is about the power and freedom of the individual self or subjectivity (the blind spot). Both claim that in ordinary circumstances we function in a condition of relative disability, imprisonment, or slavery through accepting misrepresentations of reality, including alienation from our personal subjectivity. The main aspiration is direct self-acquaintance, based on recognizing a difference between the crippling concept of individual subjectivity promoted by top-down culture as compared with the self of immediate and innocent acquaintance. The supernatural imprisonment or slavery of human beings depicted in Gnosticism is an allegorical identification of the imprisonment of individuals within cultural traditions which legitimize and sanctify a perpetual macro-parasitism. In both Blind-Spot philosophy and Gnosticism, philosophy is conceived and practiced as a way of evading and resisting the dominant evil, first identifying the dominant evil and then re-positioning the self beyond the control of the dominant evil. In both, it is self-recognition which enables personal liberation, achieved by an act of taking possession of personal innocence, always available (gnostic “remembering”). However, there are at least important differences of emphasis in how knowledge is conceived in these two orientations. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is more emphasis on attending to a thinking process, self-directed reorientation, than on any special knowledge (although a knowledge of human history is relevant). Practical acquaintance with the innocent creator of interior non-actualities is basic. In Gnosticism, secret and arcane knowledge of the divine origin of human spirit, passed in person from master to worthy disciple, is the key to liberation and personal freedom. However, the disciple still has to use the knowledge to “remember” innocent or primeval life, to reawakening an innocent intelligence.

There are two conflicting ethical tendencies within Gnosticism. The dominant one is elitism, special entitlement, or exceptionalism, in which those initiated into the sacred knowledge are the exceptions. People who accept the reality of The Great Chain of Being have a difficult time avoiding a supernaturally ordained hierarchy within the human collective. Fables of “the higher Being” make everyone accustomed to various forms authoritarian control, and to lack readiness to question authority in general. Gnostic dependence on secret troves of sacred knowledge makes initiates accept subordination to authorities claiming to guard the knowledge. Elitism also tends to condemn the majority of people as beyond help or unworthy of anything better than existing injustices, even sometimes declaring that misery somehow benefits the victims. However, there is a vestige of an opposing tendency arising from the gnostic conviction that all people have a divine or supernatural origin. That would tend to inspire a universality of respectful, loving, and nurturing treatment of others. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects exeptionalism and subordination, and bases ethics on the insight which must follow from authentic self-acquaintance, that all intelligences are individually transcendent creators of freedom within the unfreedom of brute actuality and the crippling dominance of macro-parasitic culture, and that, as such, all intelligences merit respect and nurture.

The conceptualization of time is also crucial to both, but the attitude to time, or the orientation toward time, is completely opposite in Blind-Spot philosophy as compared to Gnosticism. The gnostic obsession with eternity is absent from Blind-Spot philosophy, replaced by the love of freedom within time and only conceivable within time as a transcendent creation of individual intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the quest for eternity, infinity, or Being. In Blind-Spot philosophy the transcendence of individual intelligences is not achieved by recognizing a unity or identity with an omnipotent, universal, and eternal deity on-high, or with eternal Being, but instead is achieved in individually creating personal freedom by the use of the non-actualities of interior subjectivity, so creating freedom-in-time in the process of living a particular life.

Rebel Angels

The gnostic myth of the catastrophic rupture of human spirits from their primeval union with divinity and the fall of human spirits into the iron embrace of nature and time, is recognition of a self-alienation within conventional styles of living, a sense of being misrepresented, misevaluated, and diminished by the personal identities offered by the ambient culture and economy. The gnostic myth of the Fall from Grace is an allegory for the loss of recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of every individual. The sense of being punished for some primal fault or crime is misidentification of self as blameworthy because it revolts against the determinism of nature by spinning freedom in an unfree world: the rebellion of the angels. Escaping, transcending, the iron embrace of material nature is exactly what intelligences already do in the ordinary world by constructing the conditions of personal freedom, constructing teleological time from discretionary interior non-actualities.

The differences between Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy have consequences concerning social, economic, and political situations. There was a sense in Gnosticism that the world within time is irredeemably bad, justifying pessimism such that it would be pointless to invest any effort into improving the common predicaments of human life. Such quests as that for eternal Being or for the remote god beyond the hierarchy of astral demons, always provide an excuse to leave institutional injustices as they are. In Gnosticism the only hope of improvement is available to small groups of initiates, and that hope is of escape into the supernatural through arcane knowledge of invisible things and rigorous personal detachment from material nature. This is similar to systems of reality which identify salvation or resolutions of injustice only in an afterlife. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects both of those otherworldly fables. This world at hand, and only this, is the one in which the transcendence of intelligences gets to express itself. Catastrophe is not the same thing as tragedy. Tragedy is final but catastrophe can be overcome. It is true that the current state of human life generally is catastrophic, but that does not make it tragic. There is no fatal flaw in fundamental human nature, no universal taint from an original sin. Autonomous freedom is not a crime against anything. Being free is a crime only when it is exercised and practiced by reducing, restricting, or denying the freedom of other intelligences.

Some Sources

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Frances A. Yates (1899-1981), University Of Chicago Press (first published 1964. Midway reprint 1979. Paperback edition 1991), ISBN-10: 0226950077, ISBN-13: 978-0226950075.

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, written by (Dame) Frances Amelia Yates, Published by: Ark Paperbacks, an imprint of Routledge & Kegan Paul plc (1983) (first published 1979), ISBN 0-7448-0001-3.

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.

Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, written by Tobias Churton, Published by Ten Speed (2005), ISBN: 1594770352.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Time as an Innocence from which to Judge

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

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Foundational Time, a Place to Stand

Obviously it has been impossible so far to dislodge the rule of cowboy masculinity, crime-family masculinity, but progress might be possible if we confront it with an entirely novel system of orientation in which individual intelligences, only and all individual intelligences, are acknowledged instances of transcendence, specifically the transcendence of creative freedom. This can be done because a place to stand outside gender roles, social/ economic class designations, ethnic placement, and culture in general has been identified. All those roles and designations are cultural tags, all arbitrary artifacts of political and economic systems riddled with injustice and distortions of reality.

Time, however, is foundational, and time is inconceivable without an encounter between individual intelligence and nature. Please see posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, and  posting 60, May 4, 2013, The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror. Time is a construct of creative intelligence encountering the brute actuality of nature. So individual intelligence is foundational in an encounter with brute inertial nature. Certainly there is social and cultural structuring of time, but the original experience of time is not socially constructed. It is a construct of individual intelligence. Therefore, although much of reality is socially constructed, not everything about experience, about reality, is socially constructed. It follows from this, since time and individual intelligence are inseparable, that the individuality and self-identification of individual intelligences are also not entirely constructed socially or intersubjectively. There is a place of innocence from which to judge the influences of culture, indeed to judge the reality of social constructs. This contradicts the understanding of human subjectivity and of culture based on the Freudian model, which is still profoundly influential.

The Freudian Model

It is commonplace to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of psychology in the Freudian tradition, expressing forces other than individual freedom. In that model the main vectors of force are the Id (representing bestial lusts for pleasure and power, the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model of a three-part soul, but on the Freudian view supposed ultimately to be biological imperatives), and the Superego, (representing authority figures, such as parents, police, priests, from ambient society, internalized by the individual’s exposure to education and socialization). Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the Ego, or personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that Ego image, no reality. The Ego has only the force of Id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of public authority figures. That is all there is to a Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature driven by original sin and constrained only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

The Civilizing Force

Theorists in the Freudian tradition could proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or their origin, and people must socialize by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of a Christian appeal to divine intervention in the appointment of social supervisors, Freudian theory could also use something like Hobbesian social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures. Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity: a war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the cowboy masculine will-to-power agree to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by participating in a social contract by which a monarch, with absolute power over life and death, is instituted to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t think of any way around enforcement). So, from nothing more than cowboy self-interest (ultimately determined biologically), the authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain somewhat the many faces of Id. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science.

Seeing social behaviour, culture, and history as a manifestation of instinctive human nature as envisioned in Freudian theory has the same effect as seeing history as acts of God, namely the effect of making history necessarily as it was in every detail, entirely pre-determined and unquestionable. When history is taken as divine (or natural) utterance, then the facts of history are self-justifying and unimpeachable. For example, on those views, both slave-masters and slaves are equally manifesting the same inherent human nature. All are equally sinners in their nature (the will-to-power has the same force as original sin) and the forces of nature are merely working themselves out. That is why, in Foucault’s analysis of oppressive power, it is impossible to identify either a perpetrator or a victim.

However, with the foundational experience of time revealing that individual intelligences are instances of transcendence in their creative freedom, the Freudian type of model fails completely, and what stands out is the monumentally important fact that intelligence exists uniquely in individual embodied units, individual persons. Seeing history as a manifestation of a large number of human intelligences, intelligences with individual creativity and freedom, reveals history as largely provisional, imperfect attempts at indistinct and creative aspirations, where mistakes were made, and where crimes, with identifiable perpetrators and victims, were committed.

There might seem to be a contradiction between the fact that intelligence comes only and always in the form of individual persons, and any criticism of cowboy masculinity, which claims to be the natural expression and pure realization of individualism, rugged libertarian individualism. However, cowboy masculinity is not and never was independence, but instead is always parasitism, and so not an expression of autonomy-of-intelligence. In spite of the claim to be rugged individuals, the primordial cowboys were never actually independent, but always parasitic on herd animals. In addition, they did not choose to stay with the free open wilderness of desert and steppe, but instead formed confederacies and preyed on the settled communities of farmers and cities, and took possession of them to secure the higher level parasitism that human hosts enabled. That is the historical origin of top-down political forces.

As already mentioned, Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature (a war of all against all) is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity. The carriers of cowboy masculinity resist emotional or empathic (social) interconnections with other people, because they want to be parasitic and to use others as hosts. Decently ethical behaviour arises from empathy, from an ability and a willingness to appreciate and care about the interiority of other people’s experience, and to act from that caring. Morality depends on empathy, is a function of empathy. However, empathic or emotional interconnectedness is exactly what parasites refuse to enter, and so is conspicuously absent from the Hobbesian social contract. That particular unwillingness is the definitive condition of cowboy masculinity and the kind of individualism characteristic of cowboy masculinity.

That intelligence exists only in individual persons is in fact far more compatible with a different kind of expression, especially considering that intelligence is clearly gratified and amplified by identification of and empathic interaction with other intelligences, so much so that the human interconnectedness is the most magnificent creation ever of our multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), even though it still needs a lot of work. The current culture of femininity cultivates and encourages the attaching/ relationship talent of intelligence, the interconnecting talent. However, champions of communitarian or collective power and cultural authority (normally preserving systems of parasitism) need to stop resisting the elemental truth that intelligence exists only and always in individual persons, which makes it necessary to re-conceive the human interconnectedness on the basis of empathic interactions among individuals. That is the entirely novel system of orientation which eliminates the need for anything like the Hobbesian social contract, and finally dislodges the rule of cowboy masculinity.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.