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Tag Archives: idealism

What are Ideas?

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

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caring, essentialism, existence, idealism, living, metaphysics, personality

Fragment 183, Word count: 375.

Various answers to the question “What are ideas?” mostly have in common that ideas exemplify a distinct immaterial face of existence. Idealism encompasses answers to that question which emphasize the foundational or primordial status of such immaterial existence. Essentialist idealism presents ideas as primordial templates for the categories of all things that exist, absolutely independent of any living consciousness, excepting possibly a unique eternal divine consciousness. These ideas are prior to the rest of existence in some profound sense and supposedly cause the rest of existence. As exemplified by Platonic idealism, there is a certain sense of metaphysics presented by essentialist idealism: a primordial reality that is profoundly different, in its immutable immateriality, from the world of ordinary appearances, a reality of predetermined forever templates for the forms that any physical existence must take.

A non-essentialist idealism presents a very different sense of metaphysics: ideas are ephemeral features which shape the frame-work of orientation that guides the future-ward tilt or bearing of some living individual. Ideas exist only in the intentional agency of living individuals. Instead of standing as eternally enduring categories and structures, the special genius of ideality is its fluid subsistence by leaping ceaselessly into losses and novel opportunities expressing personal dramas of caring; plunging, partly falling, into an ever-just-opening non-existence, evaluating the uncertain prospects for improvisations of personal dramas within a mix of expected and unexpected circumstances and expressive impulses. There is no question here of ideas existing separately from the living of particular sentient and intentional agents. Even as such, ideas cannot be left out of a description of fundamental existence, of what there is, since they present an undeniable complication to neat conceptions of reality as fixed, atomized, and final. As necessarily temporal and immaterial (even though organized as embodied), ideas are anomalous existences, inseparable from the subjectivity of personal experiences. Ideality is still metaphysical but its meta-physicality is in its living spontaneity and creative agency, in its sentient-intentionality at the raw ever-becoming edge of existence. Human existence is living: experience-derived anticipation as context and inspiration for important intentions and aspirations. It is an actively reaching incompleteness or openness to existence at its core: discontinuous, multiple, monadic, locally limited, ephemeral.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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aristocracy, creativity, culture, drama, dystopia, Edmund Husserl, empathy, idealism, nature, phenomenology, Plato, politics, Romanticism, sensibility, time

Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Self-Thinking Idea

15 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Brahman, fatalism, freedom, History, idealism, politics, Vedanta

Fragment 164, word count: 553.

In the tradition of humanity’s search for understanding there are two general directions of questioning: the public world of actuality, and the individually private experience of I-deality. The predominant orientation of classical Indian philosophy, Vedanta*, for example, was a questioning of the experiencing subject, the self, I-deality. Much more development and mastery has been achieved overall in the direction of material actuality.

Vedanta is an Idealism

Classical Indian philosophy pondered the elusive existence of the self engaged in experience. The concept “Brahman” is closely equivalent to the concept “ideality”. Very similar mistakes about ideality were made in both ancient Greek and Indian conceptions. The ancients seemed to move immediately from immateriality to indestructibility, perfect permanence, specifically contrasting ideality with actuality by conceiving ideality as eternal, fundamentally unchanging and, as such, the ultimate source of quasi-illusory ephemeral things such as objects and phenomena.

The reason there was only murky and questionable development from the classical turn inward is the typical mistake of equating immateriality with eternal endurance, and, based on that, the promotion of turning inward as an escape from ephemeral emotions inherent in dramatic efforts for pleasurable habitation in the world. The cultural context which influenced this conceptualization of ideality was a (mistaken) tradition of fatalism, an assumption that the social and political hierarchy was a permanent and unalterable part of life, part of an ugliness to actuality that motivates a search for ultimate escape. On that assumption there is no point in examining ideality for implications for political agency.

Idealism is any conception of reality which includes ideality as fundamental and special. Only ideality (spirituality, intelligence, humanity/ personality) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objective actuality, and, as such, a clear transcendence of nature. Ideality is points and arcs of freedom. Ideality creates freedom by conceiving a future which is not completely predetermined, a future with some predictability along with various possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Novelty and originality are possible because ideality is not limited to any predetermined nature or future. The fundamental quality of I-deality is time, a dramatic temporal flight to futurity as an opening. The questioning push directing a gaze upon the world is an ever developing orientation in flight: directionality, bearing, questioning, self-directed re-orientation, always incomplete.

The most striking historical contrast to cultural communities embracing unalterable permanence in their social hierarchy of wealth and power is the formative spirit of European protestantism, a spirit in accord with a kind of idealism that creates a novel future.

As soon as individual persons universally are recognized as the only supra-actual forces creating novelty out of the drama of what matters to them, then the political situation stands in a new light. Politics is no longer about arranging a proper hierarchy among different kinds and qualities of people (as in Plato, for example), some fulfilled by leading and others fulfilled by being led. Instead, rights and dignity derive from human existence as living ideality in which an orientation and bearing of questioning is central. Individuals create the greatest benefits when they are enabled to take a substantial measure of participation and control in conceiving the ongoing evolution of their society and culture.

Note

* Classical Indian Philosophy, Volume 5 of: A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps, written by Peter Adamson and Jonardon Ganeri, published by Oxford University Press (2020), ISBN 978-0-19-885176-9. (See Chapter 19, pp. 129-134.)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Arc of the Monad

09 Thursday Jan 2020

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

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agency, consciousness, creativity, deity, Enlightenment, Fichte, History, human nature, idealism, ideas, Kant, knowledge, Leibniz, politics, questioning, science

Fragment 158, word count: 803.

This is the story of a crucial modern rethinking of human nature. The monad is a conception of the organization of ordinary human consciousness presented by Leibniz in 1714. There is no hardware in Leibniz’ vision of the world formed of monads, only individual instances of ordinary consciousness having coherent experiences composed of images and other impressions of a world that does not exist in any other way. In this conception, the world is the setting of some vast number of these subjects having experiences. This world of monads is entirely a world of ideas, a strictly idealist world. In Leibniz’ vision the monads, even though not anchored to a concrete material world, were not self sufficient because the entire content of their consciousness was supplied by an omnipotent deity who had pre-determined everything, every event and change in exact detail, at the moment of creation. Although the monads are “windowless” with no personal agency in constructing knowledge of anything, experiences are coordinated among the monads by the deity to simulate a coherent unity of shared surroundings, in which they seem to engage with one another. Later in the century (1781), Kant’s idealism was a development and modification of this legacy from Leibniz. It focused on understanding instances of ordinary consciousness, but introduced two structural changes. Kant removed the deity as the single supplier of experiences and added hardware in the form of the external “thing in itself”, a surrounding objective world which was not reducible to ideas. Kant’s monads had something like windows onto the external hardware, but their transparency was far from perfect. The “thing in itself” could never be known directly, but Kant was convinced that it must exist as an influence on, and partial source of, the coherent impressions and images that are the content of experience. Following Kant closely (1795), Fichte also engaged with this legacy of ordinary consciousness idealism. His innovation was to remove Kant’s “thing in itself”, the hardware, from the conception of reality, and he didn’t bring back the deity. So, by the end of the eighteenth century with Fichte, the deity was gone along with the hardware (the thing in itself) leaving only truly self-subsisting monadic subjectivities each structured as a distinct “I”. In Fichte’s work these subjectivities are independent sources of suppositions. Each “I” posits, creating the ideas of itself and its entire world from its own interiority. Fichte’s vision effectively eliminates the fundamental distinction in Christendom and creationist monotheism generally between human and divine personality. This is not a declaration of the death of God, but instead a reconceptualization of the place of creative transcendence in human experience.

These are conceptions of idealism in which ideality is always personality, in which all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of some personality, structured as an elaborate “I”, the subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s life in the world. In the case of Leibniz, one of those personalities was unique by being divine. This idealism (conception of ideality) is special in the history of philosophy as a sharp contrast to more familiar kinds such as Platonic or Hegelian idealism in which the primary ideas are remote, impersonal, and cosmically scaled drivers of nature and history. Monadic idealism is much more compatible with the spirit of science than is creationist monotheism which includes disembodied angels and demons, and it makes sense of the claim that human nature is inclined and competent to conceive questions that enable discoveries and scientific knowledge, which mechanistic science itself fails to explain. (It isn’t enough to stipulate that knowledge comes from experience without accounting for questions.) Monadic idealism did not permanently imprint popular or intellectual culture because it is politically problematic: it does not denigrate human nature sufficiently to support existing political and other hierarchical institutions of social control. Any aspiration for cultural, social, and political change must be founded on idealism of some non-Platonic and non-Hegelian kind, and so such idealism will be feared and loathed by forces of conservatism.

This developmental arc of the conception of monadic ideality marks out the tendency of post-reformation Lutheran-stream Protestant idealism to retain a sense of transcendence (the creative freedom of ideality) but increasingly to relocate the occurrence of transcendence from a remote central deity to ordinary individual human personalities. The influence of Martin Luther (1483-1546) is behind the whole stream, with his conception of spiritually capable and independent individuals like himself, Bible readers, doubters and questioners, takers of mental leaps. The monadic idealism that emerged from Luther’s influence plays a crucial part in the spirit of protestantism that decisively shaped Euro-American Enlightenment along with the spirit of science, each protesting against authority. Modern people expect to be treated as Kant/Fichte-style monads without grasping the concept.

Note: The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Max Stirner (1806-56), Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Free-Agent Idealism

16 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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free-agency, History, idealism, ideas, Plato, politics, Republic, transcendence

Fragment 149, word count: 635

Plato made philosophers the kings of his ideal republic because he asserted an essential relationship between politics (community leadership, the proclamation and application of laws) and knowledge of a transcendent force creating fundamental reality. For Plato, there is a structure to reality that includes a crucial transcendence feature, immaterial Ideal Forms. Philosophers are specialists in transcendence, uniquely attentive to the transcendence feature of reality. On Plato’s understanding, philosophical insight into transcendence is the guiding treasure of any society because an ultimately sustainable political system must actualize an alignment between human lives, the structure of their relationships, and the transcendence that is crucial in creating reality. As specialists in transcendence, philosophers uniquely are in a position to conceive and communicate appropriate political arrangements, according to Plato’s Republic.

Plato’s idealism made transcendence politically conservative by removing ideas from ordinary personalities, in whom we are first acquainted with ideas: intentions, caring, curiosity, anticipation, aspiration, evaluation, and orientation, for example. Plato separated category ideas from the life of particular personalities and spun a very influential cosmic conception from that separation, but it was a serious violation of the ordinary experience of ideas. As far as our ordinary experience is concerned, all varieties of ideality occur together in the arcs of spontaneity and creativity familiar as embodied personalities. With Platonic idealism, although the Ideal Forms create reality in some sense, there is no profound spontaneity or freedom. Nature and everything within it is nothing more than copies of copies of the immaterial Forms. Although some serious instability and unreliability enter those copies the more removed they are from the originals, there is a core to everything, a structure of categorical types, that must be eternally as it is predestined to be. When idealism is construed as Plato conceived it, there is a rigid eternal pattern that everything follows necessarily, but idealism can and should be conceived otherwise.

Idealism asserts the importance of a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual and still indispensable in any comprehensive conception of reality. As an affirmation of ideality as supra-actuality, it is latently explosive politically as an assertion of something more important than (and with power over and within) whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world. Such supra-actuality is a conception of transcendence, and any strong idea of freedom (as points and arcs of spontaneous creativity, novelty, and indeterminacy) requires such a conception. Supra-actuality could be eternally stable as in Platonic idealism, or, far more plausibly, it could be free agency in time. In articulating the importance of this non-actuality, any free-agent idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with conceptions of idealism. (Consider the historical consequences of Hegel’s idealism.)

When the points and arcs of spontaneous creativity, of transcendent supra-actuality creating freedom, are not separated from the ordinary living of individual personalities, in whom we are well acquainted with ideas, then idealism implies a political situation which is completely different from Plato’s rigid hierarchy. With free-agent idealism everybody should qualify as a philosopher king. To align with ordinary embodied personalities as transcendence features fundamental in reality is to recognize every single person, every sentient being, every being who has a voice and breathes, as a creative agent, uttering a personal expression which cannot be completely pre-ordained or predicted. Such a conception implies protections, resources, and freedoms for individuals, and limits on what any power might legitimately claim from them. Plato certainly misconstrued ideas, but what he got right was that insight into transcendence is crucial for conceiving a sustainable politics.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History

04 Thursday Apr 2019

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

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creation, culture, freedom, History, human nature, idealism, ideas, metaphysics, monotheism, nihilism, original sin, personality, politics, reason, science, sovereignty

Fragment 145, Word count: 2,189.

In eighteenth century Europe there was an epochal change in the culturally dominant conception of reality, a change from the dominance of religion to the dominance of science. This is familiar cultural history but poorly understood because, so far in our epoch, science has kept up a barrage of triumphal self-glorification. The story science tells of itself is that over a recent and well documented period humanity’s leading teams of theorists and researchers finally came to understand reality when they used the objective empiricism of scientific method to overcome superstitious assumptions. Events, that were once considered deliberately framed messages to humans from a supernatural world of disembodied but personified (caring) entities (such as angels and demons) with effective powers in our world, were re-conceived in science as concrete cause-effect sequences that can be measured, mapped, predicted, and controlled by human intervention. With establishment of science, the global culture of intellectual inquiry is now proud and happy to have finished its task, content with a post-heroic and workmanlike mopping up of loose ends, filling in little gaps, and working out technological applications of scientific knowledge. Any re-conceptualization of fundamental reality is unimaginable. There is an intellectual certainty and a narrowing of focus that comes with faith in the unlimited explaining power of mathematical science, universally prized. This finally relegates philosophy to the status of museum piece, bringing forth a heartfelt sigh of collective relief from the community of scholars.

There is, of course, an unmentionable giraffe in this picture. The stunning oddity is the ongoing pervasiveness and cultural authority of both religion and science, in spite of their stark incompatibility. This simultaneous acceptance of two mutually exclusive principles of authoritative explanation should not be possible, but is certainly the case and apparently a comfortably stable cultural structure. As fundamental systems for explaining what is real, both science and religion are philosophical claims, metaphysical claims, one affirming and the other denying the effective existence of ideality.

Creationist Monotheism

Before science became a coherent matrix of explanation, the previously dominant metaphysics in Europe was creationist monotheism, exemplified in the three Abrahamic religions. Creationist monotheism is a dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (divine intelligence) who created the objective material world (in itself measurable, mappable, definite, and predictable) in a unique episode of exuberant caprice. Humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created in the likeness of that creator, similar to divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality, even though humans are materially embodied within the material world. This peculiar existence which has no appearance as such, the existence of ideality, is inseparable from what is familiar as personality, but the story of divine creation presents us with two very distinct categories of personality: embodied human personality and disembodied divine personality. This bi-modality was fundamental to the entire worldview of feudal Christendom, for example, explaining all existence as the will of a disembodied spirit-force, which, being pure ideality, bridged existence and non-existence in its very being. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention and agency, bearing-into-futurity teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and is the essence of creation. There is no conception of creation that does not begin in teleological ideality. The idea of divine creation, like any idea of creation, falls completely within the description of personalities as vectors of ideality. What is decisive is that ideality is always personality, that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of some teleological personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, sensitivity, knowledge, and the preconception of intentions. Any claim placing ideality as crucial in reality is an idealism. With idealism something is recognized as a living being, personified, with a creative agency-calculating gaze into an open futurity, open with various possibilities anticipated from an inventiveness inherent to itself. So, idealism encompasses freedom, spontaneous creation, and unpredictable novelty, and insists on these as crucial features of reality.

In the creationist monotheistic version of dualism (Creator and created) the divine principle of creation, and so ideality, is primary and dominant, making it strictly idealist even though not often declared as such. This was the culturally dominant sense of reality prior to the advent of science, and what science meant to accomplish was the annihilation of all forms and vestiges of idealism. Since idealism affirms spontaneous creation, freedom, and unpredictable novelty, it seems, from the scientific perspective, like an easy slide to angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, because, in its essential creativity and freedom, ideality itself is essentially transcendent, something like magical in comparison to lumpen entropic dust and rocks. The tendency of science is not merely to demote ideality from its once dominant place (as divinity) in reality, but to eliminate it from reality completely. However, without some strong conception of idealism encompassing freedom, spontaneous creation, reason, and unpredictable novelty, the totality of existence is merely falling in precisely the way it must, and none of it matters in the least. That is the utter nihilism of science. It invites us to accept a grim stoicism but without the providential Logos that softened the ancient version. Not many people can seriously accept the nihilism of science because we have vivid personal lives of ideality and easy interconnectedness with other personalities making expressive utterances within lives of reasons and willful agency.

There are obviously many problems with creationist monotheism as a culturally dominant idealism. The grading of personalities into divine and human categories clearly proved to be toxic. With an omnipotent will creating the totality of existence, everything, again, is exactly as it must be, this time by divine plan in which the future is eventually to reveal some overriding goodness and reason. Divine personality was conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and tester of men, and as such a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Nature had to be the actualized will of divine personality. Earthly trophies (property) were divinely awarded markers of merit, proclaiming a divine right of the strongest to impose sovereign ownership upon the lives and property of the weaker. The sovereign state, ruled by the strongest as personal property, was the local representative of divine sovereignty, a personified collective entity always being tested in conflicts with others for property and standing. What jumps out in this version of idealism is that so little was made of what human personality has in common with divine personality: the fundamental existence of living ideality. Rather than interpreting that commonality as a decisive transcendence in human existence, emphasis was placed instead on selected features of human embodiment, a fleshy animal embodiment, mortal carrier of decay, as the main determinant of human nature. (Science later built on this enthusiastically.) Human ideality was interpreted as the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. This sensed sameness, made miserable by the needs and indignities of material living, in the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of embodied personality, part of a twisted effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to a divine-like existence of individual creative freedom, on the hope that embodied denigration would atone for the claim to divinity and so qualify the individual for an eternal afterlife of pure disembodied ideality. This is the root superstition that makes creationist monotheism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human to human relations, sanctifying pervasive human macro-parasitism.

This brings us back to the weird co-existence of religion and science, strictly incompatible systems of explaining what is real. The reason these two co-exist is that they must, since neither is truly viable by itself. Science gives us a fatal nihilism and religion gives us a fatally warped recognition of the transcendence of ideality, a recognition so warped that it readily slides into fantasies of angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, and justifications for unspeakable cruelty. However, each provides a crucial counter-balance for the other. Science provides enough of a check on superstitious fears and wishes to secure a practical grounding in actuality, incidentally generating technology that channels enormous energy and sometimes provides great conveniences. Religion provides a crucial focus on ideality as essential reality, a reality in which an eventual future is expected to reveal some overriding goodness and reason to life and nature as a whole. Reason doesn’t exist outside ideality. Reason and ideality are one. Without the existence of ideality nothing matters in the least because there is no reason for anything, no sense of harm or benefit, bad or good, no sense of anything at all. There is gravity but no gravitas. It is only the existence of ideality, that is, personalities, sensitive, caring, and future-creating vectors of ideality, which bestows an importance derived from reasons on the world of things or on anything. The only strength of the religious outlook, the reason for its cultural survival, is its recognition of the transcendence of ideality, although it projects a grandiosity that warps perception of the place of transcendent ideality in reality. Of course, the idea of divinity is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It must always have been the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of divine transcendence (at far cosmic horizons) since there is no other direct experience of ideality.

Science carried over from creationist monotheism a denigration of human nature, recognizing only bodies, of course, biologically driven conflicts to select the fittest for dominance, and promising a completely body-determined psychology without the creative freedom of ideality. The nihilism of science is expressed in its eager engagement in development of ever-more lethal and destructive weapons, now bringing humanity to the brink of self-annihilation. Scientific discourse eliminates ideality completely, leaving a nihilism so absolute that it is ridiculously inapplicable to the world of the living, to our world of personalities. We certainly don’t want creationist monotheism to be any more dominant than it is, and we don’t need it. It was only ever a grandiose abstraction from the ordinary ideality of embodied personality. We don’t require a special, absolutely unique and all encompassing ideality to confer on existence a reason for things to matter. Any personality living, caring, and building a life in the world makes the world matter. The ordinary embodied personalities we live among, every single one, make the world matter. This sort of personality is clearly not omnipotent, but instead is a strictly local creativity and freedom instanced separately in vast numbers of embodied individuals. Embodiment is a necessary part of the interventions into brute actuality that constitute individual agency. So we don’t need any eventual revelations of an overriding goodness and reason in the course of existence. We need only an idealism that recognizes transcendent ideality in the ordinary embodied persons we connect with through utterances and acts which express knowledge, caring, reasons, and preconceived intentions.

There are both personal and political consequences from recognizing in every individual the entire transcendence that is ideality. First is a dismissal of legacy metaphysics and the perverse and gloomy denigration of human existence they impose from the cultural background. Politics becomes the test of truth because dystopian societies always rest on false metaphysics. A politics based in the reality of ideality will promote and protect the creative freedom of individuals and not undertake to control it with a frightening superego marshalling a collective hive mind. Hive minds make war. The organization of relationships among people does not have to be a dystopian nightmare created with force and hive mind engineering. We don’t need any “us against them” collective narrative to establish a personal identity, nor competitions to accumulate an avatar of property. Ideality is inherently and uniquely creative and experiences identity and value in expression. The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary personality, has been sensed as such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism have just evaded admitting the full ideality of ordinary subjectivity. Instead of providing a foundation for sovereignty, for the ownership of individuals by collective institutions, the transcendence of individual ideality negates any such ownership or authority. It is a declaration of individual self-possession that incidentally eliminates all versions of cosmic hierarchy such as the Great Chain of Being.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

‘What Matters’ Idealism

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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culture, human nature, idealism, metaphysics, nature, personality, Platonism, Romanticism

Fragment 142, word count: 291.

Metaphysics is part of the orientation within which we operate. Everybody has some metaphysical framework, learned with other culture at an early age. Religion, for example, is metaphysics, since it asserts specific ideas about existence as such. Without thinking about metaphysics you have a culturally imposed perception of everything. Thinking about metaphysics usually begins with wonder at the existence of the world-of-things. However, the world of things doesn’t matter in the least without the existence of some personality such as you, dear reader, engaged in experience of that world, having ideas about it. The existence of things is much easier to measure, map, describe, conceive, and confront than the life of ideas, but without ideality the world of things doesn’t matter. So, metaphysics that matters is an effort to clarify the problematic existence of ideas and ideality. There have been different versions of metaphysical idealism, ideas about the existence of ideas, from Platonism* to Romanticism**. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention, agency, teleological bearing-into-futurity. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the very essence of creation. What is decisive is that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of an embodied personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, for example. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. This is the existence of the teleological vectors of ideality we know as personalities.

Embedded links:

* Fragment 93, April 20, 2016, The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7R)

** Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7E)

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Ockham’s Razor Meets Ideas

31 Thursday Jan 2019

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

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actuality, consciousness, Critical Realism, culture, idealism, ideas, Ockham's Razor, personality, self-thinking idea, teleology

fragment 141, word count: 432.

An advantage of recognizing the effective existence of ordinary embodied personalities as vectors of ideality and caring is that it then becomes unnecessary to violate Ockham’s Razor by positing some metaphysical fable about ideas. To deny ideas is to deny consciousness itself, since consciousness is ideality, the most evident ideality. Ideas certainly have presence in the consciousness, that is, in the orientation and deliberate actions, of particular persons. We know this from personal experience and conversations with fellow beings. With the recognition of teleological personalities creating their individual lives in the world, there is no need for Platonic Ideal Forms at the apex of a hierarchy of existence, or for Aristotelian universals, substantial forms, existing in addition to particulars. There is no need for levels of reality such as in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism. There is no need for any kind of idealism which in any way separates ideas from ordinary embodied persons. Certainly ideas are elements of culture, but culture exists only in the orientation of particular persons and the ability that such orientation includes to create, read, and understand artifacts.

Ordinary consciousness is full of ideas, full of caring. Any person’s consciousness is a bearing future-ward expressing an elaborate orientation created over a personal lifetime. It is a fountain of teleological possibilities in a creative arc of developmental continuity that is a particular life. Personality is a self-thinking idea of a particular embodied life in the world, an oriented bearing into not-yet from a particular no-longer, here among a structure of theres, now among thens-no-longer and thens-not-yet, in a creative arc of ideation. Personality, the self-thinking idea, is always revising itself without breaking its creative arc of continuity. Every individual at any moment is calculating the probabilities of an array of expectations, enacting intentions, reading sensory stimulations as revelations of the surroundings, searching for reference markers and making adjustments on the basis of surprises, constructing a teleological structure within the sense of the passing of time. This being is a fountain of original curiosity, guesses, and expressive impulses, a being of ideas and ideality. Reading sensations in perceiving brute actuality is restricted to some here and now, but there is no perception of here without a sense of there, and there is no now without a sense of then, and then and there are always ideas, features of a person’s orientation in a continuously elaborating situation in a world in time, a situation demanding ongoing teleological reconstruction of intentions, aspirations, and guesses about possibilities and probabilities in an increasingly remote future.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Welcome to Metaphysics

12 Friday Jan 2018

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

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creativity, freedom, idealism, Immanuel Kant, materialism, monotheism, philosophy, Plato, politics, spirituality, teleology, time, transcendence

Posting 121, word count: 1,312.

Metaphysics is part of the framework of orientation within which any individual operates. Everybody has some metaphysical framework or other, typically learned from ambient culture at an early age without recognizing that it might be questionable, thinkable. The way in which a person’s framework of orientation deals with the incongruity between subjectivity and objectivity is its metaphysics, as both subjectivity and objectivity have been asserted as a revelation of what is uniquely and exclusively real in the cosmic whole, and they are starkly different from one another.

Subjectivity is remarkable due to its ideality, the personally interior experience of living a particular bearing of sensitive teleology in a life in the world. Ideality is the source and origin of the idea of transcendence since only ideality (spirituality, intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objectivity, and as such a clear transcendence of nature. This makes personal engagement in the passing of time, a tilting into and toward an openness of time to come, fundamental in subjectivity and in the transcendence of nature. With subjectivity there are no eternal necessities, no finality. Everything is a tentative construct for navigating into a non-actual futurity, a strict ideality guessed at but unknown, questing (desperately) for opportunities to construct shapes and works, interventions within lumpen actuality, along the way. The bearing-into-futurity of subjectivity is a questioning that changes continually with experience and learning. Its whole conceptual framework of reference markers can change from internal reconsideration. Since personal subjectivity is not publicly measurable it has been characterized as inward, and so inwardly we have an ever-questing orientation, a directionality of caring at some moment in an embodied life in the world, a directionality which is the spiritual construct, representing an increasingly remote personal no-longer or previousness, of an interpretive context (immediate expectation, readiness, and bearing of intervention) for present experience.

On the other side of metaphysics is a universalizing of objectivity (on the model of “medium sized dry goods”), a conception of hard-structure forms, enduring, definite, final (“real”), determinate, self-subsisting concrete material objects in configuration, energy field structures gliding in an eternally pre-determined fall shaped by mathematical necessities such as inertia and entropy, categorically excluding the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality. Overall, it is the timelessness of objectivity, the finality of objects and their entirely predetermined arc of changes, manifesting eternal mathematical necessities, that stands out in claims placing objectivity as exclusively and uniquely real.

Subjectivity, and so transcendent ideality, is multiple rather than unitary, occurring in separate embodied and mortal persons clustered and scattered over the surface of planet Earth (that we know of). The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary subjectivity, has been considered such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism (metaphysical claims placing ideality in some form as primary in reality as a whole) have just evaded admitting the identity of ideality and subjectivity! Plato’s Ideal Forms, for example, are a mythological mashup of materiality and ideality, taking ideas of types of objects as essentially united with the objects. Existing separately from any person’s life in the world is a feature of objects that Plato ascribed to Ideas. Abstraction is entirely an operation of individual intelligences, but in Platonism the abstract categories of things are ultimately causal in the existence of every ephemeral particular of objective actuality. This announces one of the jaw-dropping surprises in the history of formal metaphysics, that what seems the most obvious and common sense occurrence of transcendent ideality in ordinary embodied individuals has gone conspicuously undocumented.

Creationist monotheism is a metaphysical dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (intelligence) who created the objective material world in a unique episode of exuberant divine caprice. It is normally considered that, within this created material world, humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created as images of the creator, fundamentally similar to the divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality. In that version of dualism the divine principle of creation, and so ideality more generally, is, as it is in Plato, primary and dominant, making it idealist even though not a declared idealism. Again, however, it is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of transcendent temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It was always the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of a senior transcendence at far cosmic horizons. There is no other direct experience of ideality.

Given the dramatic differences between subjectivity and objectivity, anyone’s metaphysical framework of orientation will be a conception of reality as a whole that either includes or excludes the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality (spirituality) with its freedom and transcendence of nature. A strict metaphysical objectivism (materialism) can remain coherent only by denying transcendence completely. (One problem with that is the implausibility of deriving ethically sensitive intelligences from insensitive lumps.) A metaphysics of transcendent ideality can remain coherent without denying the existence of objects by accepting a dualism of multiple embodied subjectivities each living a particular life as spirituality intervening in brute actuality.

Can the World be an Idea?

Contrary to Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, for example, the world can’t be only and entirely an idea because ideas are features of a personal orientation of some embodied individual in a particular life in the world. It has been claimed that the world is an idea in the mind of God, but the idea of God goes far beyond a particular embodied life in the world, and so is not strictly coherent. The way in which the world is an idea is that what is known of the world is always the construct of personal experiences of the world. The world is an idea for any and every individual, and individuals have been sharing ideas about the world with one another and have constructed various cultural ideas of the world. In any individual’s life, the world is an idea, largely learned from some such ambient culture. However, to use Kantian terminology, the world “in itself” can’t be only and entirely an idea.

We can say two things about a world with transcendent spirituality. First, it is not entirely pre-determined by anything. Its fate in detail is mutable, strictly indeterminate, with possibilities for novelty at any moment. Second, anyone’s ideas of the world, and any culturally transmitted ideas of the world, are also mutable, not etched into the blueprints of the cosmos, not final or essential elements of reality, but rather tentative abstractions, subject to revision or abandonment with the assimilation of more experience. Ideas of the world are typically cultural constructs originating from multiple contributions from various individuals’ experience and creative thinking.

The effective activity of creative transcendence at the level of the individual has important political consequences, especially in support of egalitarian and mutually nurturing systems of sociability, the opposite of patriarchy. It means that social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas. Ideas are openings into a mutable future. An authentic idealist metaphysics is a metaphysics in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of novelty created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics in which there is active transcendence with effects in brute actuality, a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come. Political conservatives either just deny transcendence completely and interpret the world as mere physics, entirely fated or random, or adhere to something like the Platonic or monotheistic idea of transcendence, a unique supernatural expression at some far horizon which determined how things will be forever.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Hierarchy, Transcendence, Why thinking?

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

creativity, idealism, metaphysics, politics, spirituality, thinking, transcendence

On the subject of thinking, metaphysics is the first matter to clarify because the power to think is the only really transcendent power there is. This clarification of metaphysics isn’t speculation about anything, and not a matter of learning what text-book philosophers have claimed. Since everybody is drawing from the encounter with time, the crucial metaphysical datum, you don’t have to follow anybody else’s thinking. It isn’t necessary to think what nobody has thought before, but only that you not follow somebody else’s thinking in your own. It is entirely a matter of self-aware experience. To approach and clarify time it is only necessary to notice the bearing of consciousness that is not given as sensations. It is the most primary of primary research, thinking as acquaintance with original innocence, opening to let what is there be noticed.

Transcendent spirituality is ideality, but contrary to the classical Platonic conception of ideality as the perspective of eternity, radically removed from time, in fact ideality is inseparable from the personal sense of the passage of time. Ideality is the personal creation of transcendent freedom in conceiving teleological time, an open futurity. A spiritual person as an idea carries lessons (ideas) interpreted from no-longer and with them creates a personal reach into that not-yet.

What divides the political left and right is precisely metaphysics. Conservatives live in a world that is finalized in form and structure, which imposes on every individual the urgent imperative to conform to the eternal necessities of the Great Chain of Being. The conservative world is Platonic and eternal, determined from on high. Progressives live in a world with creative freedom, a world still being created, malleable, mutable, un-Platonic, and this political conception of creativity derives from an intuition of the temporal agency at the heart of any person’s consciousness.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

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