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The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1.

02 Wednesday Sep 2026

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Fragment 228, Word count: 907.

Tags: history, philosophy, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, time, religion, nature, knowledge, culture, Being, metaphysics.

Part 1.

In the long record of human worrying about and searching out the boundaries, possibilities, and peculiarities of existence as a person, a dominant feature noticed has been a stark bi-modality in the structure of experience. The duality is between, on one hand, an individual interiority of dramatic caring devoted to searching through marginally coherent sensitivities in aid of the improvisation of an arc of personal movement and agency; and, on the other hand, a vast impersonal externality constitutive of the whole enveloping setting that specifically locates and grounds every caring interiority. This fundamental duality has made possible and perhaps inevitable a quarrel over the identification of apex existence. Which of them was first, which the more impressive power? From the very early conceptions of deity in the traces of human lives it seems that the first identification of apex existence went to the creative power of dramatically caring teleological agency, but in an abstracted form free of the restricting localization of embodiment, so both like and unlike human caring, similarly self-aware and expressive but exaggerated in all ways: omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, an ultimate transcendence. Regrettably, this early assessment of apex existence featured forms of caring teleology gone wild and untethered from normal embodiment, not only in deity but also in flagrant over-personification of numerous things in nature that included examples of animism, disembodied spirits, magic, angels and demons, witches and wizards. In the context of a world full of teleology gone wild and untethered the caring interiority of regular embodied individuals seemed to be an inferior imitation, dismissible and insignificant.

Object Dominant Knowledge and Being

Probably there has always been a minority report, or a minority suspicion, that the brute actuality of enveloping nature is what really merits the title of apex existence. Nature has an implacability, a vastness of uncaring determinism, an infinity of extension and a solid core of stability that suggests eternity. Those impressions of infinite and eternal presence give the vast externality a plausible priority, a primordiality, and with it plausibility as the source and matrix of embodied teleology, of caring-ideality at the scale of the human individual, and so plausibility as the evident face of ultimate Being. The problem here is that our surroundings of brute actuality do not present any evidence of deliberation over options, of making choices expressive of marginal preferences or of desperation, not a trace of empathy or of enjoying the pleasure of improvisation, which is to say, no evidence of the power to be creative. This problem notwithstanding, the minority view has inspired the work of a ‘party of Nature’ which has much to show for itself, including the accomplishments of mathematics, useful discoveries of different categories of forces and substances, and of predictable regularities in the way certain important things exist and interact with one another.

The party of Nature goes so far as to dismiss entirely the creative input of caring-ideality from conceptions of reality. One effect of this, within the general effect of diminishing teleology gone wild and untethered from embodiment, is rejection of magical thinking and of once ubiquitous superstitions of angels and demons, witches and wizards,. However, it goes further and also dismisses the creative input of personal caring-ideality. In this way knowledge can be conceived without consideration of individual knowers. On that view knowledge is some kind of impersonal map or model of the externality, of objective reality. This transitions easily into a claim that features of Nature are more than happenstance contingencies but instead are primordial and in a certain sense transcendently imposed as fundamental Being. The move from a description of how something is to the assertion of its necessity is the creation of metaphysics. (Deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ was observed to be invalid by David Hume (1711-76).)

Eternal Necessities vs Agents of Ephemeral and Contested Futurity

Given the structural duality of experience, the choice of one side over the other leans into some particular metaphysics, which means it makes a claim about primordial or ultimate Being. In the case of caring-ideality, any claim of its effective existence as locally improvised interventions into the creation of shape in events contradicts the universal uncaring determinism of Nature-as-Being, and as such presents ideality as existentially anomalous and non-reducible in such a way as to require a separate set of descriptive concepts, including the concept of a radically unfinished world with an ever-opening edge at the coming into existence of an indeterminate non-actual future always largely still to be created but pre-conceived and made actual in certain of its fragments in teleological arcs expressive of the dramatic caring of individual agents. Teleology is a living in the future. On this view the material world is a stage-set supporting the ephemeral dramas of caring that make any of it matter, the caring-dramas of individually embodied agents of a contested future.

Either of two presuppositions make it impossible to recognize the unique creativity of individually embodied caring teleology. One is elimination of caring-ideality from conceptions of fundamental existence, as in materialism. The other is conceptions of caring teleology gone wild and untethered as in angels, demons, deities, and inappropriately personified items of nature. This alienation of caring-teleology from the only context in which it is experienced directly, in expressions of ordinary embodied individuals, is regrettably the universal norm, so that even in cultural settings which conceive caring-teleology as apex existence, ordinary individuals are not granted the dignity appropriate to that metaphysical status.

 … To Be Continued.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.

The Intuition of Apex Existence

16 Sunday Aug 2026

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Sunday, August 16, 2026

Fragment 227, word count: 2,091.

Tags: philosophy, history, fearful unknowing, apex existence, caring-ideality, inquisitive innocence, vast externality, teleology, time, hive-mind, knowledge, drama, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

An interest in philosophy is inseparable from an interest in history because philosophy exists first within the fabric of drama in which people live and that we feel ourselves playing out day to day. ‘Philosophy’ here denotes a configuration of orientation, a culturally shared set of features that structure the subjective interiority of individually embodied future-opening caring personalities. This is ‘wallpaper’ philosophy, uncritically familiar as casual background encompassing ways of understanding what is foundational, primordial, and ultimate within the personal experience of human existence. There is also artisanal and ‘fine art’ philosophy, original questioning of orientation from inquisitive innocence, resulting in texts or utterances, personal voices expressing that questioning. Whereas there is a reliable market for normal fine art as investment grade items of luxury decor, the audience for artisanal philosophy is typically non-commercial and almost entirely scholarly. Artisanal philosophers mostly form academic guilds, clusters and streams of influence, homage, and conceptual cohesion, each stream with school-defining celebrities, methods, questions, and pre-approved conclusions. The thing to watch for is that philosophical conceptions sometimes burst beyond their niche of origin and change the cultural taste in wallpaper.

From this context, it is clear that the work and ideas of any inquisitively innocent writer must be considered in relation to the wallpaper ideology-of-reality at their cultural time and place, the ancient Greeks in relation to Greek mythology, or Enlightenment-era rationalists in relation to post-Reformation Christianity, aristocracy, and monarchy, for example. Greek philosophers often conflicted with their ambient culture of Olympian gods. Socrates was executed on the charge of introducing new gods. Again, during the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a politically radical philosophical movement that was officially persecuted. However, usually the philosophical ‘fine art’ tradition has accepted much of the ‘wallpaper’ embraced by politically powerful factions who benefit from and defend the dystopian culture of their violently stratified societies.

Existence as Caring-Ideality

The most common philosophical conceptions of specifically human existence, existence as embodied caring-ideality, have been diminishingly oversimplified, reflecting the requirements of ambient culture. In the context of Christendom, for example, it was mortally dangerous to propose a concept of human spirituality with anything but a minimum of creative freedom, for fear of seeming to rival deity. The shocking degree of this problematic self-denial or self-effacing in the legacy of human reflections on what is ultimate and primordial in our existence defines the core of philosophy.

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

Metaphysically Apex Existence

The only direct acquaintance anyone has of ideality is their own experience of living as a dramatically caring person embodied in the world, supplemented by expressions of bonding over shared caring by familiar people and other animals. It is clear from cultural constructs all around this that caring-and-creative-ideality is often enough intuited as an anomalous metaphysically apex existence. The materials of our surroundings overwhelmingly lack evidence of a complicated and peculiarly individual interiority of caring out of which they express well-being or ill-being, urgent intent, or discretionary attachments. They do not question, remember, or foresee their future. They present a specifically material nature that is already everything it can be. In relation to that material nature, the desperate vulnerability and power of foresight and effective agency in personal experience is taken to qualify as anomalous, with a different order of purposive outward reach, sensitivity, apprehension, conception, and ideation, a metaphysically apex existence. However, because of the vastness of fearful unknowing in human experience, and our genius for forming imitative attachments, there has been a collective unwillingness to accept the exclusiveness of this apex existence. The specific fear often preventing this recognition has been fear that accepting the status of metaphysical apex would enrage some other more powerful metaphysical apex and result in retribution in the form of punishment and destruction. In the common discourse of communities, the freedom and creativity of ideality has been conceptually and culturally alienated from humanity, exported to suppositional other beings, and replaced in ourselves by diminishing versions of determinism.

Fragment 216, October 2, 2025, Self Portrait as Spirit (Word count: 311) deity

Two additional reasons that have made it variably dangerous to acknowledge the full creative freedom of embodied ideality are coercive hierarchical politics and deterministic materialism. First it was politically dangerous to recognize too much inherent dignity and power in individuals universally because that would undermine justifications for the coercive top-down social control and human-on-human parasitism that hierarchical power arrangements manifest. When the demands of apex social factions began to be contested, there was a cultural turn to materialist explanations for everything, banishing all spontaneous personally discretionary teleology and insisting that the brute physicality of nature required everything to exists exactly as it was, is, and has to be, completely determined by mathematical cosmic laws. There is no room anywhere in this strictly scientific view for the dignity and discretionary power of individual creative freedom.

Even with conceptions of ideality distorted by these manifestations of fear, it still must be attributed in some form to ordinary individuals because we obviously care and impose our dramas of caring in arcs of teleology vectoring future-ward, but ordinary ideality is culturally required to be restricted to include only enough creative freedom to justify individuals being punished for certain actions, and otherwise overwhelmingly determined by forces beyond ourselves. In the process of being exported and alienated from individuals in the conceptual construction of communal cultures, the personal ecosystem of ideality as lived has been disassembled and reduced to subsets of its existence in versions of idealism. In Plato’s idealism, for example, there is an eternally unchanging primordial mind, the One, contemplating the complete set of Ideal Forms of objective existence. Personal discretion in the face of a risky and only partly predictable future has been removed along with the whole lived complexity of agency-in-time. An even more common form of exported apex idealism retains the creative improvisational spontaneity of ordinary ideality but completely removes the limitations of embodiment by conceiving the apex ideality as omnipotent, omniscient, and disembodied, resulting in the terrifying concept of deity.

Determinism

Determinism in various forms has been the official version of human behaviour and mental activity. The determining forces mainly fall into the categories of deity or brute nature, so either an external primordially apex teleology or a world of utterly unreflective materiality in which any identification of teleology is false, deceptive, a mirage. (Note that mistakes and illusions are exclusively features of ideality.) A third category of determining force sometimes separated off from the others is a universal human nature which imposes, from within every individual, urges, impulses, drives, and pre-conceptions which remove any profound freedom or spontaneous creativity from individuals even if their occurrence is so random or chaotic that predictability is difficult. The Freudian model of subjectivity represents the scientific requirement by attributing an individual’s self-sourced motivation (id) to animal biology, in a remodelling of the conception of human nature from feudal Christendom featuring enslavement by the inherited taint from the sin of Adam. Vicious motivation from inherent vice is taken to be easy to reduce to mechanisms, and so suited to scientific explanation.

Knowledge of the Vast Externality

Both Rationalists and Empiricists were focused on understanding knowledge. Mathematical science was showing great power and promise. In this niche intellectual culture there was considerable optimism about finally achieving an empowering certainty about the non-teleological vast externality that envelopes the human body, not ephemeral or localized but plausibly constitutive of eternal and universal Nature, a presence that earns some recognition as perhaps the actual apex existence, especially with recognition of the power of human ideality repressed and conceptually alienated. Rationalists and Empiricists each had a core conception of that ultimate object of knowledge, the vast externality to be grasped. Both accepted that their object of knowledge was elementally prior to and more important by far than knowers. For Rationalists it was their version of Logos, the underlying principle of math, language, intelligence, and material reality, at once interior and exterior to knowing individuals. For Empiricists it was the world of brute actuality, measurable and map-able nature comprising the whole cosmic setting of human lives, distinctly exterior to the knowing of individuals, and revealed only by objective perception.

Martin Luther as Philosopher:

The Metaphysics of Eternal Necessities vs 

The Metaphysics of Creative Caring-Ideality

Luther merits considerable credit as a philosopher. So much of modernity derives from his assertion of “Justification by faith alone”, which translates directly into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I exist.” (Descartes’ dualism, featuring extended substance and thinking substance, was his inevitably awkward effort to combine all-determining mathematical ‘Logos’ partly revealed in clear and distinct perceptions, with the Lutheran subjective power to overcome the most profound doubt in a creative act of self-definition, all in the context of an ambient culture of an all-determining Catholic Deity.) “Justification by faith alone” also translates directly into Kant’s vision of the self-legislating moral agent, also into Fichte’s self-positing “I”, and into Kierkegaard’s self-sufficient inwardness. Fichte’s vision is completely congruent with Sartre’s existentialism featuring “existence before essence” as the heart of human existence. Luther’s assertion of an individual’s power of faith in the context of unanswerable uncertainty is pure metaphysics, a recognition of the anomalous creative power of individual caring ideality. As such, his intervention was crucial in the historic shift of influence between two great adversarial systems of reality, first, the metaphysics of eternal necessities, asserted by Plato, Christianity, and science, for example, here contested at last by the metaphysics of creative caring-ideality in embodied individuals.

Luther and those inspired by him were not focused on knowledge. Luther experienced profound uncertainty about what he considered most important in existence, the presence of God, creative and discretionary teleological caring-ideality as apex existence. That vast externality for Luther was a cloud of unknowing, unanswerable doubt, instead of knowledge. In the face of that uncertainty Luther turned to the creative power of caring ideality interior to each individual, the power to create and impose structure within the drama of living. To choose faith is to set the future shape of the personal drama of caring. What matters in the future-facing life of a person is not determined by any vast externality, since no externality includes or creates a person’s caring or the future opened by that caring.

Luther, Nietzsche, and Hive-Mind

“Justification by faith …” cashes out as: you can’t live in the world as a spiritual power of agency if you are expressing a culturally imposed hive-mind, doing conventional things such as ‘good works’ assigned conventional values. Instead, to own your apex existence (or in Luther’s case your likeness to apex existence) you have to go profoundly alone, to a personal interiority which no one else can surveil, judge, police, or stipulate. This rejection of immersion in the orientation of a human herd was something Nietzsche got directly from Luther.

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

The Philosophical Turn From Knowledge to Drama

Nietzsche has been identified as a pioneer existentialist and as a Romantic (recall Wagner), expressing both of these conflicting but closely related visions of specifically human existence, each inspired by Fichte’s philosophical voice. Romantics and existentialists are not so interested in knowledge or any grand and ultimate objects of knowledge (remarkably, since Fichte’s big project was constructing a science of knowledge). Instead, they are focused on the dramas of living as a person embodied in the world, on the dramatic quality of personal experience. Drama was the new focus because drama is the temporal shape of any person’s caring, improvised among stakes and risks in the ephemerality of living, and as such caring-in-time is metaphysically anomalous as apex existence. Here is the epochal turn in western philosophy away from the metaphysics of eternal necessities and toward the metaphysics of subjective caring-ideality. The former is the foundation of everything politically conservative, whereas the latter leans into a profoundly different political future which is yet to be worked out, a post-hive-mind collective bonding. The looming of this unfinished business is the root of the current malaise of the polarized and aimless Euro-American cultural system.

Cultures of the past preserved ways of facing a fearful unknowing. It is perverse to cling to that condition. The very common impulse to preserve at all costs a legacy language, religion, or the charming trophies of a wealth class or other niche culture always leads to a repetitive dead end of violent exceptionalism, cruel repression, and disabling isolation. No communal bonding can ultimately negate the metaphysically anomalous creativity of every individual caring-ideality.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.

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

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

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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

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

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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.