• Overview, Irritation Alert!

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

in the blind spot

Tag Archives: existence

Absolute Incompleteness

Featured

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agency, care-drama, consciousness, effort, embodiment, eternal recurrence, existence, freedom, spirituality, time

Fragment 173, word count: 202.

Tags: spirituality, time, agency, care-drama, existence, eternal recurrence, effort, embodiment, consciousness, freedom.

Spirituality has nothing to do with inherent guilt or fear and love of a higher power or supreme Being which is removed from the desperate care-drama and agency of living an always incomplete existence. Spirituality has everything to do with awareness of the passage of time because the personal drama of caring depends on ephemerality to extend, shape, and renew itself, opening its ongoing by intentionally inventing acts based on expectations and suppositions learned and abstracted from a career of caring and effortful engagement with the world around. Any moment of consciousness is loaded with abstractions that frame and locate an immediate effort. We have to disconnect understanding time from cosmic loops and circles, the apparent paths of stars and planets that have been observed and identified from eras immemorial by people watching the sky. Theirs was a vision of completeness in eternal recurrence. Instead, time is the asymmetrical continuity of context that consciousness supposes in orienting its desperately creative plunge into freedom that is its enduring incompleteness and the incompleteness of the world. The intentional ongoing of individually embodied consciousness constitutes spiritual (subjective) reality, and spiritual reality connects irremovably to absolute reality. The personal exists as absolutely as the cosmic.

Embedded link:

Fragment 169, October 25, 2020, Wildcard Time-World Idealism (word count: 1,230)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

The Only Reality

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

actuality, caring, drama, existence, reality, spirituality

Fragment 154, word count: 201.

The only reality we can possibly experience is reality as experienced, and such reality must always be partly formed by being experienced, which is to say, by being brought into the drama which is the life of some personality. Spiritual existence, the living of personalities, is inherently dramatic, a personal drama which would be no part of brute actuality. Spirituality is the caring dimension of any experience, and it is caring which shapes experience into the drama of its life.

The strictly here and now would be where the brute actuality of nature would exist, completely bereft of spirituality and of the drama which is the life of spirituality. If you try to “be here now” you find that here and now are defined by there and then: by ideas, non-actualities. To strive to “be-here-now” is life-negating, life-denying, life-rejecting, in the same way as reverence for eternity is. To seek the spiritual nothingness of the “eternal now” is to give up your voice, which exists only through time, as well as to give up creative free agency, which requires time to impose ideas, which is to say, personality, onto the ever emerging shape of things.

Please see Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

De-Culturing

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Political Power, Why thinking?

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

colonization, culture, Descartes, existence, hive mind, philosophy, skepticism, Socrates, war

Fragment 153, word count: 458.

The process of maturing into the activities of an adult member of society requires becoming increasingly cultured in a range of skills and knowledge. People go to schools and universities to acquire more and more culture in specific areas, and certain social factions claim superiority and authority because of especially cultured practices and attitudes. There is a single exception to the pursuit of more and higher culture: philosophy. Students in philosophy do acquire arcane culture in the history of ideas, linguistics, and logic, for example. However, the exceptional thing is that, since (“My wisdom is knowing I know nothing.”) Socrates, philosophy is also a matter of undertaking the difficult task of discovering how to be innocently original, how to de-culture, to become sensitive to the influences of culture on assumptions and patterns of thinking and to recognize the random arbitrariness of much cultural content. The method of systematic doubt and questioning described by Descartes is another familiar example, and his is just a particular presentation of a wider application of skepticism in philosophical thinking. This work is a serious de-culturing process, the same one required to negate the effects of colonization, which is hostile cultural influence asserting the superiority of one culturally constructed hive mind over others. There is extreme danger in cultural constructs that can be characterized as collective identity, human hive minds. Hive minds make war, and no anti-war effort will be effective without dealing with that reality. Philosophy is precisely a personal disengagement from hive mind influences, a mental operation for arranging to experience from the innocence of personal questioning and discovery. Regrettably, this has not prevented numerous philosophers from embracing and advocating for their chosen hive minds, partly because it has been difficult to recognize these collective identities as the dangerous cultural constructs they are rather than as parts of nature or inevitable projections of psychology. There is more to culture than hive mind construction and neither culture nor individual meaning and purpose requires hive mind constructs.

Just as any assertion of scientific knowledge must implicitly assert, as well as exemplify, a human nature competent to discover and understand scientific truths about nature, so any philosophical assertion must claim a human force of orientation competent, at the level of the embodied individual, to perform abstract reconceptualization of experience itself, of human existence itself, a general human competence to be free of hive mind influences. Being a person is bigger than being a citizen or member of any collective or cultural community. This is largely because of bogus ideas in cultures that bind collectives into hive minds. It is everybody’s duty as a person to enlarge the restrictive cultures, to make room for individuals to express the original creativity of innocent humanity.

There is more on hive mind here:

Fragment 106, May 10, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (1)

Fragment 107, May 18, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3)

Fragment 132, August 15, 2018, Life after Hive-Mind

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Drama of Existence: Between Human and Divine

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

divinity, embodiment, existence, freedom, History, matter, metaphysics, personality, religion

Fragment 146, word count: 520.

Christianity and other antique religions dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama that is spirituality, which is to say, the life of personalities. This was a metaphysical orientation that identified personalities, living teleological forces of will, of ideality, as the primordial occurrence of existence. Existence was a matter of subjects and their relationships, involving objects merely secondarily. Although in the Abrahamic religions the drama involved a very great difference between divine and human personality, there are other narratives from historical cultures placing human personalities much closer to the divine, even as active helpers in Creation. These narratives imagine a catastrophe, perhaps rebellion (rebel angels) followed by exile or retreat into the created material world, now turned into a prison under the control of demons who appear as stars and stellar constellations; or human personalities fell in love with the world-in-time they had created and ecstatically entered it, forgetting themselves and by that forgetting were made unable to get out again. However, there are also stories of alchemy in which the turning of base metal into gold is a symbol and a message to humans about human personality learning to re-join the company of divine personality. There are stories of a path across the nested astral spheres, past the demons, a path connecting human and divine personalities that can be taken downward into matter or upward and out. Such was the ultimate drama of existence which marginalized concrete matter, conceiving it as a kind of illusion, perhaps created specifically to confuse and alienate humans from their true and original ideality, perhaps on account of some distant transgression. Although the great drama of existence in the Abrahamic religions has a similar overall shape, involving an initial state of alienation of human ideality from divine and then an eventual joining accomplished by arduous trials and/or divine grace, the stories from other traditions express more directly a sense of an inherent transcendence of human existence as ideality (spirituality), a transcendence that has been made obscure and elusive by the profound difference and difficulty between human ideality and material embodiment. This is plausibly the message of the stories, more important than the speculative particulars. The heart of the drama, the human urgency to discover the transcendent freedom of ideality, can be most plausibly interpreted as a vestigial recognition that the idea of divinity itself is merely a means to highlight the primordial transcendence in ordinary embodied living.

Preoccupation with this sense of transcendence and its difficult relation to material embodiment got stuck long ago in rigid orthodoxies which criminalized any further searching for the truth of it. Those orthodoxies had to be disputed and marginalized for humans to pay attention to the details of the natural world in a systematic and scientific way. However, for by far most of human existence it was taken as obvious that teleologically free wills constituted primordial existence. Science dismissed that creative teleological freedom of personality as merely illusion, just as antique religions dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama, the life of idealities.

Please see also:

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism, (word count: 1,869) URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7b

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest, (word count: 2,321) URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7f

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

From a Hill in the Labyrinth of Ideas

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

culture, divinity, existence, History, ideas, metaphysics, nature, nihilism, personality, reality, science

Posting 134, Word Count: 442

A profound cultural change, which came from the rise to dominance of the scientific way of conceiving things, was a shift in the general presence of the world to people, a shift from having intelligent consciousness (personality) as the crucial presence of the world to having inanimate, inertial, objective matter or nature as the crucial presence of the world. In feudal Christendom, personality was indisputably the crucial presence, but in two starkly different versions and placements, displaying in fact a grotesque bifurcation. That conception of personality included the stark contrast between divine personality and human personalty, but the whole meaning and drama of existence centred on personality, specifically the relationship and interactions between the divine personality and human personalities as both individuals and collectives. Concrete nature was merely a trivial backdrop, a platform or staging for the drama. Both the divine and human were clearly instances of personality since only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. Human personalities do that all the time and, supposedly, so did the divine personality. This teleology of creation is a crucial identifier of personality along with curiosity, caring, questioning, accumulating orientation, and an expressive voice or agency.

Scientific Nihilism

By contrast, the scientific conception of the world completely excludes personality (teleology, abstraction, ideality, intelligent consciousness) from fundamental reality in rejecting the possibility of transcendent freedom. Personality gets placed on a list of phenomena to be completely explained as an illusion at some future time. This creates a deformed lopsidedness to the conceptual system of reality in modernity, which is something like an inverse of the lopsidedness of the Christian conception of the world. Science dismisses the creative freedom of personality as merely illusion, just as Christianity dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama of personality. Of course the grotesque bifurcation of personality into human and divine was another layer of lopsidedness in the pre-scientific conceptual system of reality, which removed the transcendence of personality from ordinary embodied individuals and projected it into a metaphysical monstrosity: disembodied personality as divinity. Just because personality is ideality, that is, immaterial, does not make it more perfect when disembodied! With the modern lopsidedness, science actually needs the continuing culture of personality from feudal Christendom because without it, with only scientific principles of explanation, nothing matters, since it is only to personality that anything matters. With only inanimate nature, we reach a complete nihilism, but people generally know better than to accept that. So, the lopsidedness of the scientific conception of reality prolongs the lingering of outmoded metaphysics and political ideology from feudal Christendom.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

How Aristotle Placed Personality

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, caring, Descartes, existence, Franz Brentano, ideality, Leibniz, Martin Luther, metaphysics, personality, Plato, reality, Sartre, teleology, time, willing

Posting 130, Word Count: 1,368.

If we think of Aristotle as depicted in the fresco The School of Athens (by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, painted between 1509 and 1511 in the Vatican, Apostolic Palace, and now widely reproduced) we have to say that his hand gesturing downward toward the familiar world is not a denial of metaphysics, not an assertion of scientific materialism as understood now. The gesture would have to mean that metaphysical reality is located, is at home, in ordinary objects and bodies, not only in the bodies we observe in the sky; and perhaps it might mean also that the distant skyward heights are not the Platonic heaven of free-floating (unanchored in things themselves) immaterial prototypes of the image-things that furnish and fashion our experience.

For Aristotle, the visible motions of skyward phenomena revealed nested layers of heavenly spheres in motion around the Earth, each sphere moving from a purposive will internal to itself, bearing into eternal futurity, and so alive, sensitive and teleological, a mothership senior intelligence, a being of ideality and personality. It was specifically this agency from an interiority of willing, the living ideality of personality placed at the top of the cosmic structure, that seemed to confer meaning on the world and the lives of individuals. Personality placed in that way seemed to give the skyward spheres transcendent purpose and creative power so that aligning a human individual’s bearing with them expressed the sense of a kinship or commonality between the purposive ideality of the individual and that of a sovereign aliveness.

Plato famously claimed to separate ideality from personality, but it can’t really be done. In Plato, Ideas retain a creativity that can only be understood as a borrowing from the creative will of personality, a purposive push or bearing, but in Plato’s work, with ideas presented under the aspect of eternity, there is a removal of all other vestiges of personality. That removal was meant to deify ideality by moving it from temporality to eternity. However, metaphysically, personality and ideality are inseparable. As soon as bits of ideality (such as immateriality or creativity) are separated off from personality of the ordinary embodied sort then the conception of reality gets weird and twisted, assembled from mismatched shards like the monster of a certain Dr. Frankenstein. Many people prefer such a conception of the world.

The Two Principles of Reality

The two fundamental principles of reality are the principle of falling, inertial and entropic nature; and the principle of creative teleology or purpose, creating shapes within actuality through personal agency, enacting intentions from the ideality of a particularly conceived future. These principles are sometimes called objectivity and subjectivity. Subjectivity is personality. In the crucial sense these principles are precise opposites of each other. The principle of falling is a single vast continuity in some sense. The principle of purposive agency is a multiplicity of separately localized (embodied) individuals. There is no freedom in the principle of falling but ideality has freedom and creativity. Purpose is inconceivable as anything other than ideality because futurity, where purposes have their places, is categorically not an actuality. Purpose is temporal and temporality is necessarily a quality of ideality since it reaches beyond brute actuality. Purpose is willing, a movement of personality. Purposive bearing requires ideality, and ideality is always personality.

A purposive will includes caring and freedom, aspects of spiritual ideality, which is to say, the subjective consciousness of personality. Rocks and rivers do not care, but merely fall. The World that Doesn’t Matter highlights the incongruity between the presence of subjective ideality and that of objective actuality. These are different modes of existence. The question is: what kind of existence can subjective ideality, purposive consciousness, have that is so not objective actuality? That is a core metaphysical issue, somehow locating (or maybe just denying) ideality. Perhaps the most long-enduring description of ideality has been as a personal interiority, as already mentioned above, but not an interiority that can be specified strictly as a location in space. This idea of spirituality as an interiority goes back (at least) to Aristotelian essences and final causes. Aristotle seems to have thought that everything that exists has, as part of its form, a metaphysical interiority, an essence, in addition to a strictly spacial or material interior. On that view, every object has an essence that contains and drives crucial features of its arc of existence and destiny, changes it has undergone and will undergo, just as the ‘interior’ ideality of an embodied person bears the memory and future intentions of that person. (Compare Leibniz’ monads.) The analogy at work is clear since every person knows from the most immediate experience a personal interiority of non-perceivable intentions and their context of reasons-why from a personal no-longer, all an interior ideality. That is our direct acquaintance with the existence of spiritual ideality.

Part of the reconceptualization of the objective world made by Descartes and others of his historical period involved rejecting the Aristotelian idea that inanimate objects are driven by an essential metaphysical interiority. On the modern view, an object’s changes are caused by strictly external forces. The fact that bodies that breathe and have voices generally display and utter expressions of an individual caring and freedom was crucial in ancient times, and the interiority of ideality was sometimes described specifically as a kind of breath. The breath analogy is unsustainable as an illumination of ideality, but as we discard the idea of bodies having a metaphysical interiority, we have to stop at bodies that breathe and have voices because, as one such body, every one of us has immediate knowledge of our personal interiority of intentions and reasons-why: our subjective ideality or purposive consciousness.

Does this analogy, a special interiority, help with the question of what kind of existence is to be attributed to ideality? In the Aristotelian sense, ‘interiority’ means that ideality is effective in the world, an indispensable part of reality, without being tangible or having an appearance, without being an actuality. The Aristotelian idea of final causes gives us more, invoking the idea of willing, and has much in common with Brentano’s description of intentionality as presented in Brentano’s Gift. It is a reaching, but not merely a reaching toward objects, instead a purposive reaching toward the future of an embodied life-in-the-world in the context of what has already been lived and is actual no more. There is also a tilting or instability in actuality, a continuous falling in the mode of mass, momentum, inertia, and entropy, but the tilting of the willing of ideality is very different from that instability, the tilting of ideality is not a falling but a creative leap (Luther), a flight or bearing. It is tempting to think of ideality as images, but that isn’t sustainable either. Ideas are not images but structural features of a person’s bearing into the future, of a framework of specifically oriented agency.

It is also crucial that ideality, personality, as an aspect of its freedom, exists precisely by evading final particularity, just as time does. (Sartre’s existence before essence.) Ideality has the same mode of existence as time in that sense: an always newness and incompleteness. Caring requires futurity and possibility, the flight of time. Caring is possible and conceivable with the experience of engagement in creating a mutable future world and a life in that world, with freedom and creative power. Living is, first of all, ecstatic caring within the context of freedom. The reality of caring and freedom is self-evident, but neither could be possible on materialist assumptions. They become conceptually possible with the recognition of transcendent ideality at the level of the embodied individual. And it isn’t just the existence of an immediate caring encounter between a person and the surroundings, but also the learned ideological framework that any ideality applies to every moment of that encounter, an ideological framework anchored in history and the history of languages and authorship and inseparably connected to a great historical stew of ideas. Again, that stew of ideas must not be shattered off from the ideality of ordinary embodied personality. It has its existence in the living of people.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • September 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011

Categories

  • Blind spots in thinking
  • Class War
  • Culture
  • disinterestedness
  • Embodiment
  • Equality
  • Freedom
  • Gender culture
  • Hierarchy
  • Leadership
  • Narrative
  • Nature
  • Political Power
  • Strategic thinking
  • Subjectivity
  • Transcendence
  • Uncategorized
  • University
  • Why thinking?

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.