Tag Archives: knowledge

What Science Can’t Do

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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Fragment 208, word count: 366.

Actual Intelligence is Caring

Let it be said. Intelligence is caring, and more particularly, it is idiosyncratic caring, an individual’s caring. None of the machine-based operations currently misrepresented as artificial intelligence is even in the ballpark of actual intelligence, because none of it is in the ballpark of caring. Whatever those huge power-sucking arrays of servers are doing, it isn’t caring or anything like it.

Let’s stop pretending that science, technology such as AI, or STEM education will solve the worst problems plaguing humanity. Mathematical science, the knowledge culture that developed rapidly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, always promises the progressive change that will eliminate miseries of the past and present, but its track record contradicts that promise. Everybody is well aware of dystopian features of investor supremacist capitalism: corporate profiteering from environmental destruction, war, addictions, and rigged markets; broad injustices of stark inequality and brutal imperialism. There has been lots of technological change here and there, much of it devoted to improving the lethality of violence on every scale, including weapons for mass religion, murder and catastrophic destruction of physical culture. The enduring prominence of violence in the intent of technological innovation proves an ongoing commitment by the funders of research-and-development to the preservation of extreme economic inequality, to there being haves and have-nots, to a profound alienation between “us” and “them”, a “them” who don’t matter. It is all part of the fabric of top-down human-on-human parasitism. It also proves an ongoing commitment to placing the highest value on things that can be won, hoarded, and guarded by violence: trophies, property, weapons, bunkers, and appearances that suggest a conquest over ordinary human limitations such as collective and personal mortality. This did not change in the historical transition from the overtly violence-based aristocracy which was embedded in religion, the previous knowledge culture, into the modern investor capitalist oligarchy. So, science and technology are not authentic foundations of progressive modernity but merely new means of parasitic concentration of wealth, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The authentic foundation of the struggling seed of modernity is mass literacy*, bringing with it a new personal experience of spiritual** power.

*Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

**Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

See also:

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Fragment 179, July 23, 2021, Knowing is Caring (word count: 621) **

Fragment 184, January 2, 2022, What Knowing Is (word count: 198)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy as Knowledge

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Fragment 206, word count: 1,076.

tags: writing, history of philosophy, spirituality, culture, hive-mind, self-possession, value.

It is very common in philosophical work to find critiques of any account of reality that comes as a cultural package, as widely shared culturally orthodox conceptions of reality. Such cultural packages include justifications for the existing social hierarchies and forms of exchange, of inequalities of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The canonical values of such an orthodoxy will be the values and treasures declared and embraced by factions which are most esteemed at the top of the hierarchy. The carriers of a culturally packaged reality typically form a collective with a sense of unity and identity, held together by competition for and imitation of certain styles of living, by a shared superego abstracted from exemplars of the life-best-lived, groups with most power, property, public attention and approval, awards, celebrated talents, and evident good fortune. The collective drama of inequality is rooted in orthodox conceptions of weaknesses and dangerous powers in the individual human spirit. Such culturally orthodox conceptions of reality are fetishistic in the sense that it is considered transgressive to doubt or question them.

Here are eleven examples of such philosophical critiques.

Socrates went to the Athenian marketplace to question people, and his intent was to show that ordinary assumptions about justice and virtue were far from well founded and often incoherent.

Plato extended Socrates’ identification of popular illusions to include all change and the experience of time itself. From the metaphor of the cultural community as a cave fixated on shadows, we learn that Plato thought that perceiving reality as it truly is would be a vision of the eternal.

Diogenes of Sinope, arguably the original Cynic, lived according to ‘nature’ in contrast to normal people, whose culturally formed style of living he declared an oppressive fantasy imposed on human nature.

Martin Luther is an example of profound self-possession and alienation from orthodox assumptions about fundamental reality as represented in Roman Christian orthodoxy.

Descartes carried through a rigorous inventory of everything that can be doubted about normal assumptions, but that people usually avoid thinking about.

Spinoza, like Plato, thought that properly perceived reality would be “under the aspect of eternity”. Since this is far from the norm, then normal perceiving involves some profound illusions about reality.

David Hume found rational grounds for scepticism about material substance, cause-effect, and the continuity of objects and of the subjective person. He concluded that, because of our psychological nature we soon forget our philosophical rationality and revert to ‘common sense’ habits of assuming we know what we really don’t know.

J.J. Rousseau did a critique of his contemporary culture, a critique of up-to-date arts and sciences in the tradition of “the bonfire of the vanities” and in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Rousseau’s critique was launched in opposition to the ‘man of the world’ style of living promoted by Voltaire, the life of wealth, privilege, consciousness of social superiority and exclusive group membership, consumption and patronage of the arts and sciences.

Kant figured out that individuals are self-legislating, and so not fundamentally in need of any exterior sovereign. That was a peculiarly philosophical discovery with profound political and social implications firmly rooted in the Lutheran tradition. Just as Luther conceived the individual as independent of the mediation of the Church, so Kant followed by showing the individual independent of the state or any other externally imposed superego.

Nietzsche wrote explicitly about common human herd mentality and the necessity of breaking out of it to do anything creative.

Wittgenstein saw his philosophical work as a way of “getting the fly out of the fly-bottle”. For Wittgenstein, the fly in the fly bottle was people caught in philosophical problems, snared by “language on holiday”. However, it isn’t just the vanishingly small population of philosophers who get themselves caught in the fly bottle. Culturally orthodox ways of conceiving reality also can do the same for all users of a common discourse.

A Graphically Projected Language Model of Thinking

Something that emphatically enables an exceptional perspective outside collective orthodoxy  is the personal use of writing in the process of developing and expressing judgements and ways of understanding reality. Of the examples listed, only Socrates seems not to have been a writer, although he was likely literate. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and available people, untethered from the common discourse. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces an assumption of inevitability about the way things are.

The experience of breaking free from common discourse itself involves the acquisition of some uncommon knowledge, such as knowledge of the power of community discourse to impose collectively shared conceptions of what is thinkable and what is unquestionable in community orientation, as well as knowledge that the community orientation is capable of hiding reality, including the reality of human existence itself. Philosophers often speak from knowing that the sense of reality which is normal and normative for speakers of any given language is largely supplied by ambient culture and carried in the meaning structure of the language as used in ordinary conversations. This is knowing that there are cultural hives of false reality, and that human collectives construct themselves as such hives in part to shelter from the potential terror of not knowing the most profound truths of existence, in part to fabricate a human unit larger and stronger than the embodied individual in the face of the cosmic vastness, but also to preserve certain dystopian injustices from which powerful factions benefit.

As the examples show, a philosophical sensibility often includes recognition of a personal discordance with the orientation stipulated by a culture-hive, and a sense of curiosity about encountering existence in a way beyond cultural influences. This is acquaintance with an individual spiritual power that is completely at odds with a top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. It is an experience of profound self-possession and creative power, and as such discovery of a human spirit not confined as cultural orthodoxy stipulates. Such knowledge is transcendently important, bringing gratification that is non-competitive, non-imitative, and adventuresome.

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Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Between Spirit and Dystopia

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Fragment 202, word count: 1,379.

Tags: nature, knowledge, simulation, caring, transcendence, politics, religion, science, spirituality, self-possession.

Experience can be situated and explored in terms of two cardinal points of philosophical concern and discovery, with a focus on individuals managing some degree of agency in the interplay of two great forces. The first of these is the force of agency itself: any individual’s own anomalous existence as personality, embodied spirit or intelligence, ideality vectoring future-ward with hope and expectation, with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and power to overcome its own normal habits and regularity, power based on impulses of self-expression, constant learning, and impulses to make a distinctive personal mark on the world. The other force is the individual’s social context of dystopian culture: economic, political, interpersonal, metaphysical. Phenomenology of embodied spirit is at the centre here, ruling out all claims about disembodied spirit, including all-knowing surveillance and moral ledger-keeping. Dystopian societies constitute the main context for spirit, but not the whole context. The context also includes brute uncaring nature as well as the great human interconnectedness, the most important human achievement. There is considerable tension between individual spirit and social dystopia.

Phenomenology of Spirit: Anomalous Existence

Freedom is possible, and indeed actual, because of the anomalous existence of embodied spirit at the unfinished temporal edge of a world always still emerging into existence. Embodiment brings with it a radical individuality of placement, strict locality, and peculiarly personal limits to sensitivity and mobility. The anomalous existence of human personality, as compared to nature’s rocks and rivers, has been characterized speculatively as an existence that reflects or mirrors nature from just outside it, reflecting the world in such a way as to register and be moved by its inexplicable beauty and grandeur. However, we are very bad mirrors of nature. Spirit constructs itself partly as a crude and limited knowledge-simulation of the great environment in which it finds itself, a simulation in the form of ideation, expectation, a non-verbal sense of having a specific location and a specific directionality with respect to a pattern of features in what is open to mobility, all elements of this simulation chosen, assembled, and shaded as an expression of what matters to this particular personality. There is an active gaze by a creative knowledge builder among shapes of matter which don’t matter at all in themselves but only as I or another caring builder project personal dramas outward and bring objects into them. We are not about appreciating the awesome grandeur of the existence of nature, but rather about coursing through time to change and re-create our world, to personalize it and make it a livable and delightful home. There is always a spirit from which any gaze upon objects derives its reasons for being, its expectations and rewards. Every personally experienced visual encounter with objects, every moment of every gaze, every looking, every seeing, is an act in someone’s personal drama. Something is surprising here. Something is missing. Something is being hunted, something expected or hoped for is sought, maybe found. Something is being loved in this loving gaze or feared or hated. Some personal state of dramatic caring must always be the driving source of encounters-of-perceiving with items in the world. Such encounters re-structure and extend the personal knowledge simulation.

So, the metaphysical principle that spirit brings to reality is a principle of personalizing world simulating that builds its suppositional structure around personal interests and cares, creating an embodied life in a world of bodies and other spirits. The world of physics is made up of things, but spirit is not a thing but a spontaneous and fluid vector of intervention into not-itself guided by an imperfect simulation, localized and caring desperately about its own continuing force and viability in the world, a personalizing vector of world-reorganizing.

Roots of Dystopia Now

As for dystopian societies, the kind of stratification that is common globally is exactly as if there was in ancient times an outpouring of conquering herders from the great Eurasian steppe who transferred their control and exploitation of herd animals onto the human communities they defeated by violent assault. This stratification is not mere inequality but exclusionary subjection, contemptuously arranged, the cruel exploitation of creatures made to seem weak and unworthy by those in a position to benefit, who define themselves as noble and superior beings. Another dystopian force derives from the exploitation of fear toward demons and deities, occult personalities. Charismatic enthusiasts convince people they are chosen by divine power to exercise unlimited sovereignty, ownership, over communities, enforcing rules of conduct and rites of submission and self-denial. This foundation of power, like the first, licenses unlimited greed and cruelty, justified by unquestionable assertions of supernatural command. Imperialist war, slavery, colonization, genocide, extractive devastation of the environment, all follow directly from these origins. Such are the living legacies that shape neoliberal capitalist dystopia in contemporary societies. These roots of dystopia begin from metaphysical denigration of human spirit, the failure to recognize human spirit as transcendently anomalous, universally.

Hive-Mind Reality Distortion

In order to maintain coordination among factions in societies with these vicious value dynamics, some special mental accommodations are required. People must be persuaded counter-factually that, no matter how miserably certain groups are living, they themselves, along with most others, have a chance of doing all right, and that, in spite of appearances, the collective is a single entity profoundly unified by transcendent elements: a deity, a sovereign leader, a common origin and history, a destiny, an exceptional grasp of ultimate reality, enemies. Stratification is explained as a matter of merit. Not everyone is equally good. The life style of the most wealthy is idealized and accepted as the measure and proof of merit and worth. Everyone wants to ape the wealthiest, encouraged to take vicarious pleasure in the luxury of those who possess the most. There are goods to be had and ways to win them for those who deserve. It is crucial that people concentrate on the competition for dreamy trophies and not on the exclusionary contempt and cruel exploitation. Attention must be kept on working to do better, on the dream of doing better. Maintaining this focus on dreams of great possessions as a culturally given shared orientation always depends on a body of false but authoritative teaching about sacred and transcendent things, beyond ordinary evidence and logic, declaring that the master/ slave social hierarchy of wealth and power is pre-determined by God or Nature, so sadly inevitable, even though it has to be maintained often by violence and misinformation. The pleasure and relief we gain from companionship and sociability inclines us to full  spectrum imitation and conformity. Such are the bindings of dystopian hive-minds that block awareness of even the possibility of spiritual self-possession.

Bonfire of Vanities

The sometimes comfortable life of a hive-mind focused on market-centred competition for increments of status, value, personal meaning, and self-esteem, existing as a reflection projected back in treatment from the world around, is ultimately a disablingly unspiritual condition. This degree of imitation and conformity feels like a collective evasion of reality, and it is. There is an alternative to this kind of dystopia-masking hive-mind. There is a current of value that doesn’t have to be bought, won, or earned in any way, and can’t be. Self-possession in the dystopian context requires deriving personal value from something other than property, titles, trophies, competition, or anything that can be bought. Recognition of this follows from discovering an innocence, sometimes an active de-culturing, a (figurative) bonfire of cultural vanities. Two connected areas of discovery are crucial: first is direct acquaintance with the anomalous metaphysical self, of spirit, which includes the fountain of original creativity from within. This replaces the cultural denigration of humanity/ personality with a recognition of where transcendence is found in ordinary experience. Spiritual self-discovery is soon followed by discovery of the dystopian context which clashes so violently with spiritual reality. Recognizing dystopia breaks the hive-mind faux-reality, the false sense of political collective identity. This alternative is a personal adventure of existence as embodied spirit recently arrived into a very ancient nature and a vast and terrible cultural edifice. It creates new possibilities for the crucial human interconnectedness.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Knowing is Caring

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Fragment 179, word count: 621.

Tags: caring, knowledge, learning, sensibility, phenomenology, sensation, time, representation, evidence, Edmund Husserl.

Caring is more important than sensation in the perception of anything, and caring is personal. Knowledge is always dependent on and derived from someone’s caring. It is always an elaboration, specification, and development of caring. Knowing is a personal effect and consequence of caring. That means that perception, as a means of coming to know, is also an application of caring, a personal act of anchoring care in certain particular actualities presenting as phenomena. Caring and what it is that cares are not adequately presented by a description of the most immediate actualities to which this caring is anchored. You can’t get anywhere near understanding the richness of a moment of personal caring (the living moment of a sensibility/ intentionality*) by mapping the most evident actualities it is conscious of. Phenomena don’t count as anything without being identified within the context of a perceiving sensibility. Larger dramatic vectors of personal caring are necessarily involved. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, it is also a creative act in the drama, a move forward motivated by personal drama, and meaningful because of the essentially dramatic integration of knowledge and personally intended interventions. A perceiving and learning gaze is a personal drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world.

Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), a definitive move of philosophical Phenomenology is to remove any suggestion of deriving from perception any knowledge of a Kantian “thing in itself” as absolute reality, so, bracketing off the question: does this experienced appearance represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?. What is bracketed off is the question of the representation of phenomena, the question of whether or not they represent, depict, or disclose some existent object which is independent in its reality of being perceived or not being perceived, being cared about or not. In this context, phenomena are technical objects of consciousness definable with maps of sensations, positioned quanta of sensory stimuli with specific qualities. They are impersonal arrangements of appearances (sense data) that may suggest an internal integrity. “To the things!” declare Husserl’s phenomenologists.

However, instead of putting attention on what might or might not be on the ‘far side’ of phenomena as given in sensations, it is decisively more important to deal with what is on the ‘near side’ of phenomena, the source of caring that is reaching future-ward through its sensory display. No matter what uncertainty there might be about sensory appearances as true depictions of impersonal actualities that lie beyond, there can be no doubt that the shape of caring in phenomena truly represents a personal sensibility and intentionality*.

Fragment 123, February 8, 2018, Brentano’s Gift (word count: 999)

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

In spite of the fact that the technical definition of phenomena excludes the personal, there is a sense in which actual phenomena must always represent a person, by a kind of backward representation. A personal ideality is always the matrix of phenomena. Whatever definitions might be imposed on phenomena, they are primordially experiences, and experiences are always acts of an experiencing sensibility, a person living a particularly embodied life. The most important representation by phenomena is a person, what it is that cares and brings caring to this existence. Caring is personal, a complex personal vector of drama within a willful sensibility. It isn’t possible to reveal what it is that cares and constructs a life of dramatic movements of caring by using descriptions of phenomena that bracket off the desperate ephemerality of what is personal. Although what-it-is-that-cares is never a phenomenon, the existence of phenomena is necessarily the existence of a unique dramatic ideality that is expressing its caring in its engagement with these phenomena.

  • ‘Intentionality’ in the sense of a pre-conceiving of future interventions in actuality for specific purposes, a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Consciousness is a Time-Wave

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Fragment 170, word count: 377.

Consciousness can’t be adequately described by even a complete catalogue of its objects. Objects have only a passing and tentative almost-presence unless they are made to matter by a rich personal context of ideality. Consciousness is formed of anticipatory intentions of agency and the reasons for agency within a personal life-drama. There is an emotionally committed questioning, a desperately caring gaze from an ever-learning knowledge-poise of orientation with its bearing onward, defining a point and arc of creative agency improvising the personal drama which is an individual embodied life.

We individually create a supposition of not-yet and been-and-gone defining a newness and incompleteness as the primordial context in which we exist as dramatic free agents, leaping future-ward in our drama, aware that everything in our envelopment of entropic actuality is falling away continuously. The supposed content of not-yet and been-and-gone is changing constantly. Knowledge and expectation are forms of supposition that constitute a drifting context-content slipping into proximity and then into an increasingly remote separation, a sense of things slipping by and falling away in the ephemerality of objects. Such is the context of personal agency as it leaps into anticipated openings of not-yet. That everything actual is slipping away is essential to the drama of individual human existence, to the willful creative leap open-ward which answers it as a moment-by-moment affirmation of a power of living to open reality and make it unexpectedly more than it was. Ideality moves to make actual a specific not-yet, to realize a new non-actuality, and that is the creativity for which freedom is possible.

The medium (non-actual past and future) in which time-waves exist is not independent of the knowing, curious, questioning, dramatically desperate agents who propagate ourselves in ceaseless ephemerality. Consciousness thinks itself as a time-wave, a formation of ephemerality through which freedom is possible in the genius of ideality as not-a-thing but a self-propelling continuity of creative expression across time. It is a fountain of future possibilities from which is enacted, having learned and conceived aspirations in been-and-gone, an original arc of developmental continuity that is the personal drama of life-creation.

Embedded links:

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750)

Fragment 118, November 8, 2017, A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory (word count: 1,656)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Time is a Dual Instability

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

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Fragment 166, word count: 416.

‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘an anticipatory ideation of agency’. The existence of teleology is a certainty, perhaps the only one, although we also act routinely on the practical certainty of known features of actuality that have been reliably stable. I know what a coffee machine is, where mine is, and how to use it to make coffee. That knowledge is part of my orientation, my sensibility. Let’s accept from science that measurable nature is perfectly non-teleological in its brute material actuality. The completely different existence of teleology is a certainty because it is the very genius of our knowing and caring agency, our living existence within brute actuality. “I anticipate, expect, wonder, and intend, therefore I am.” Since teleology conceives a place and grasp in the non-actual future, it is by definition an idea, a constant re-directing of the willing of an ongoing agency. Every teleology is, of course, an individual person. With teleology at the core of our dramatic lives of knowing and caring (we know because we care, we reach knowing through caring *), we cannot coherently claim uncertainty about its existence or its power to intervene effectively in the arrangement of things in brute actuality. So, we discern reality in its duality, two contrasting but entangled moving streams of instability, one which, in itself, doesn’t matter in the least as it falls insensitively by inertia and entropy. The other is teleology which creates importance and relevance in the personal drama of its individually embodied living. Teleology is the only reason anything matters, and that, along with its ideality, is its claim to transcendence. The notion transcendence tends to lift our gaze to the sky, away from the simple light of individual consciousness. However, it still makes sense to call teleology transcendent when it only belongs to embodied personalities of the familiar kind and not something skyward or cosmic. If teleology (the only certainty) isn’t transcendent then nothing is. The foundational status of ideas and ideality in the world that matters, the world as experienced, lands us in metaphysics, and the whole of metaphysics rests on the single question: What should we make of teleology? What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which is our consciousness of time as our primordial context? The answer lies in conceiving an idealism that identifies teleology as a multitude of individual and locally embodied sensibilities in an irreducible duality with measurable actuality which is perfectly non-teleological: time is a dual instability.

* Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t care, so can’t know.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

The Arc of the Monad

09 Thursday Jan 2020

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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.

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.

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

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

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Posting 118, word count: 1,656

Post-modernist theory rejects the mental autonomy and creative agency of the individual that Enlightenment era philosophy introduced into modernity. It’s also the universality insisted upon by philosophical claims that post-modernists reject and deny. Implicit here is the post-modernist claim that individual identity is inseparable from an ambient cultural hive mind made up of specific ‘discourses’. That individuals can move their personal orientation beyond an ambient hive mind (cultural discourses), beyond an ethnic identity, and reorient into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally, and so engage in thinking with a peculiarly philosophical universality and autonomy, is rejected by post-modernists. The claimed necessity of ethnic identity is the theory behind a postmodernist imperative to refrain from criticizing cultures, to respect the peculiarities of all cultures because criticism is always from some ‘colonizing, imperialist, alien cultural perspective’. The fragmentations of identity politics follow. Without philosophical universality you can’t criticize patriarchy or patriarchal superego. This is our point of dispute.

It is not controversial that individual people universally share both consciousness and embodiment. The question is this: is there enough that is inherent in only consciousness and embodiment for an individual to have a viable identity able to enact an exit from hive minds? Part of the post-modernist claim is that there is no coherent person, subject, or agent without the input of particular cultural norms encountered and learned from ongoing interactions with other people within an ambient community. This claim has essential common ground with the claim of David Hume (1711-76) that there is no continuity of interior subjectivity.

Hume’s Phenomenology

Hume’s phenomenology of subjectivity as a “bundle of impressions and ideas” in which he could identify no enduring self or person, emerges when experience is pre-conceived as passively receptive and determined exclusively by the bombardment at every moment of a manifold of stimuli from surrounding objects and events. Such a pre-conception is typical of empiricists with their idea of consciousness as a “blank slate” that exists only as the sensory stimuli and afterimages that appear there. That model is inaccurate, however, because consciousness doesn’t work passively. A person comes to each moment as an agent, searching, reaching, and delving as an interpretation of a personal past. Such temporal depth and agency is exactly subjective continuity since responses to lessons learned enacted as a personal vectoring into futurity are acts of a subject. Knowing is nothing like a mental photocopy of facts, not the ability to recover an afterimage of words or images from a stack. When something is known it has been made a fixture of a person’s orientation, embedded in a personal sense of context and bearing, an overall sense of where you are, where you are coming from, and where headed: the personal context for making sense of anything sensed or perceived. Knowledge isn’t afterimages but instead a rich directionality of flight, a poise or bearing. Any consciousness is already agency expressing a subjectivity whose particular identity is formed very much by embodiment but also by spiritual individuality, an individual peculiarity of sensitivity, point of view, questioning, impulses to make a personal mark, individuality of voice. Embodiment gives us the personal identity of a particular shape and placement; mobility, experience of moving and shaping other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effort and effect. What persons have in common universally as consciousness and embodiment are dimensions of individual identity.

Discourses Don’t Think (Only Individuals Think)

When “thinking” is mentioned it might still suggest an outward gaze, an opening through sensitivity to objects in the surrounding world, maybe contemplated after the fact with retained impressions or from reading or hearing spoken reports. There is much to think about in the tumultuous, terrible, and wonderful world, from dinner to politics. However, there is also much to think about concerning thinking itself, the action of a personal sensibility that brings to any sensitivity all the context that gives it meaning and sense, a sensibility that delves sensations for confirmations of expectations and opportunities for personal aspirations. The directionality of any human gaze is so guided by what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) to what can only be characterized as a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Spiritual agency isn’t an object or a substance, has no completed outline or appearance, but it still has plenty of identity.

A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity which includes a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring (a marker of spirituality). Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of empathic sociability. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle knowledge and kinaesthetic-metabolic knowledge) in a construction of expectation and directionality.

For such a sensibility, time is something about now, specifically the personal context-in-flight brought to bear upon now as the portal to creating a personal future. The sense of time to come, of passing into time to come, is a glimpse of the freedom of ideality, of the ongoing (never finished) self-construction of sensibility. In a certain sense we exist entirely in our spiritual reach into not-yet in the context of lessons interpreted from no-longer. Only spirituality (intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity. Teleology of creation is another identifier of spirituality, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive gestures or voice. Consciousness, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea-of-a-life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself through the world, is a fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating openness in an otherwise inertial and entropic world. In such a world, consciousness can recognize its temporal bearing as transcendent in its outreaching sensitivity, its caring and curiosity, its ever renewing ideality, its freedom and power of embodied intervention within the shape of brute actuality. In the strictly inertial and entropic world, this very limited freedom is shockingly transcendent.

The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of nature, transcending its own embodied particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion. Instead of having any definitive personal particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality, namely freedom, time to come as freedom into which a possible future extension of self, of life, is projected, a personal metaphysical non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by enacting interconnections with others. The flight of ideality creates a special sensitivity to other fountains of unforeseeable possibilities, other conscious agents. In such sociability we have: empathy, the comfort of companionship and sharing, co-operative bonding, community, ethics, morality, culture, and conversation.

The agency inherent in consciousness, particularized and empowered by embodiment and yet made transcendently open and creatively indefinite by spirituality, establishes that personhood, viable identity, is not fundamentally a construct of cultural norms. We can judge and criticize patriarchy, patriarchal superego, and any other cultural norms from the perspective of the inherent agency of individual consciousness which is always outside a hive mind orientation. Not only that, but the personal transcendence in spirituality is a guiding beacon in a process of thinking that judges (and discards) culturally assigned labels, categories, and evaluations of personal identity which contradict and deny personal transcendence. We still have an inherent sensitivity to other conscious agents and good reasons to re-invent empathic interconnections.

There certainly is a requirement of sociability, and we construct our sociability initially by learning, conforming to, and using the norms of interaction on display around us. Individuals imitate and twist the norms of interaction we encounter. The imitation of such norms of identity is pragmatic role-playing, constructing a sort of costume or mask which can become habitual and obsessive and yet always removable in principle. The original agency is not replaced or destroyed. The identity markers assigned by culture depend on the inherent agent to make them work, are in fact parasitic on the inherent agent, and agency remains when an individual moves personal orientation beyond a cultural hive mind or ethnic identity and reorients philosophically into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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

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

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

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

Mathematical Idealism

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

Christian Platonism

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

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

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

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

Separating Spirituality from Embodiment

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

Platonic Heaven, the Immaterial Stratum

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

Freedom and Time

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

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

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

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

Selected Sources and References

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.