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Tag Archives: Leibniz

Existentialism is an Idealism

08 Saturday Feb 2020

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

≈ 3 Comments

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Americana, Fichte, Franz Brentano, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, modern idealism, Nietzsche, Sartre

Fragment 160, word count: 728.

Existentialism is an expression of modern idealism as sketched in Fragment 158, The Arc of the Monad. This will be clear from a quick review of the main points of modern idealism worked out mainly in Germany in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. It features the claim that the ideality of experience is fundamental in human reality, so that the existence of certain special characteristics of ideality is undeniable. Central to those special characteristics is that ideality is always personality, all forms of ideality occur together in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. The existence of ideas is the existence of ordinary thinking agents. The only reality we can possibly experience is completely structured as and by ideas constituting the interiority of personal experience (Leibniz, Fichte). Ideality is willful becoming, always questioning, learning, and creating, the exact opposite of being. What this amounts to is that personality is not a thing of nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation (Sartre’s existence without essence), it stands outside nature and transcends nature. The supra-actual creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but in ordinary personalities. How things matter in the world does not depend on eternal ideas in the mind of a deity nor in a Platonic heaven where ideas are master molds for material beings. It depends only and entirely on the occurrence of ideas in the living of individually embodied persons. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature at large, but each person creates a personal orientation and future-directed bearing, a life of possibilities, impossibilities, and probabilities in an interiority of non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary persons.

Existentialism inhabits experience as lived by a fully elaborated personality, what Fichte called an “I”. Heidegger’s dasein is a phenomenology of the interiority of an “I”, the monad from Leibniz/ Kant/ Fichte. The focus on freedom, decision, (Kierkegaard, Sartre) at the level of the living individual expresses the central theme of modern idealism that ideality is a transcendence, a transcendence with the drama of life-being-created moment by moment between misery and ecstasy, that is, with caring, at its core. Existentialists expanded on the drama of the life of the “I”, the everydayness of being in the world, but also the profound drama of freedom: dread, anxiety, sense of absurdity, despair, fear and trembling, and ecstasy (Nietzsche). This is a portrait of the interiority of the life of the “I” contributing to modern idealism. Modern idealism provides the conceptual cluster that encompasses freedom by conceiving personality/ humanity as ideality, something not of nature. The established conceptual cluster for nature, from scientific materialism, is antithetical to freedom, a failure of science that is crucially detrimental for politics. Existentialism and phenomenology (a technique of de-culturing) lie in the developmental arc of essentially Protestant idealism, notwithstanding that Edmund Husserl was Jewish and Franz Brentano, Heidegger, and Sartre were variably Catholic.

Nobody was Ready for Modern Idealism

As a distinctly European cultural development, modern idealism (including existentialism) was feared and loather by bearers of the ascendent culture of the USA after World War II, an ideology of national exceptionalism grown from a fresh cultural memory of cowboy-style frontier freedom and colonization, expressed now in patriotic militarism in support of the capitalist assertion of the divine rights of property. Already in the nineteenth century, with the world-shaking adventurism of Napoleon following the upheavals of the French Revolution (1789-99), combined with fervour for the explaining power of empirical observation, it pleased people to generalize from their historical moment to the idea that it is exceptional great men such as Napoleon, romantic heroes above all laws, who create history, art, culture, and civilization (eventually), with regrettable but unavoidable death, destruction, and romantic mayhem along the way. Such people had to be admired, it was thought by the cognoscenti, and given a chance to work their will. This romanticism became fundamental to the American myth-system. Such a cultural environment was lethally inhospitable to modern idealism focused as it was on the unexceptional universal individual, and so the idealism was academically marginalized and left unnamed.

Embedded Links in order of appearance:

Fragment 158, January 9, 2020, The Arc of the Monad (word count: 803)

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

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

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

Fragment 143, March 21, 2019, Frontier Freedom (word count: 447)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Dystopia, Metaphysics, and Modern Idealism

22 Wednesday Jan 2020

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

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Augustine, dystopia, Fichte, Freud, hive mind, Hobbes, ideas, Leibniz, modern idealism, nature, Plato, Sartre, social contract, social control

Fragment 159, word count: 1,010.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” (Karl Marx)

What makes a dystopia is a cultural regime, structured as a human hive-mind, which fails to recognize the creative transcendence of individual ideality. It is hive-minds that make war. A crucial feature of dystopia is that it hides and denies that it is dystopia. It campaigns, mainly successfully, to have everyone accept that, although imperfect and beset with intractable problems, it is the best of all possible worlds. Every personality is strongly influenced by social controls, the ambient society as authority, from a very early age. That makes dystopia a problem of perception, knowledge, and reality: a philosophical problem. Philosophy has a history of seeking to understand how collective illusions and delusions can separate ordinary consciousness from knowledge of the elemental structure of reality. Dystopia conceals itself with just such illusions, making it the philosophical problem.

Institutions of military-backed states survive by keeping as many as possible dependent, and the crucial dimension of hive-mind dependence is (drumroll) metaphysics. For example, if you accept anything like the Freudian conception of human nature then you loath and fear your own individuality and feel allegiance to externally imposed authority symbols against yourself, siding with the normalized practices of ambient society no matter how bizarre. There is a strong tendency to normalize whatever bizarre power inequalities happen to exist. Although Freud presented his work as scientific, the overall model of personality he offered followed a pre-existing and pre-scientific set of speculations and superstitions with contributions from Plato, Augustine, and Hobbes. The Freudian model of human nature places inherent personality (id: biologically generated drives with a tinge of the demonic) in urgent need of social control by an internalization of authority symbols (superego); recall philosopher kings, divinely established religious authority, and a social contract for absolute sovereignty. That conception of human nature is a longstanding piece of metaphysics which misidentifies what is fundamental to humanity or personality by conceiving it as something of nature: a determinate set of attributes, fixed, unalterable, and universal. That bit of metaphysics, a conception of individual personality as a bit of nature tilting demonic, serves to legitimize patriarchal power and control. Freud’s model dovetails with social contract theory, upholding the ancient and traditional view that human beings can’t thrive without strict social control. What’s wrong with that is that personality is not a thing of nature, but, as existence without essence (thank you Sartre) transcends nature.

Instead of defining metaphysics as commentary on ‘being’ (strictly impossible to define *) it is more effectively understood as commentary on the occurrence of ideas, of ideality. Being is defined as universal and eternal, which, by fiat, makes ideas as ordinarily experienced inadmissible. Ideality doesn’t have being. The fact that you are conscious as you read this is proof in a general way of the truth of idealism, the most obvious thing there could be. Consciousness is ideas. The only reality we can possibly experience is completely structured as and by ideas constituting the interiority of personal experience (thank you Fichte and Leibniz). Nature is adequately comprehended by physics, since there is no intrinsic drama to brute actuality, no structure of what matters to make sense of or explain. Ideality is the only home of drama, of things that matter, of purposes and reasons. Neither physics nor biology is helpful in understanding ideality. The question of human nature brings us into metaphysics immediately because any individual person exists as ideality, and ideality is necessarily the stuff of metaphysics. In the modern idealism worked out in the wake of the Protestant Reformation it is recognized that ideality is always personality, all forms of ideality occur together in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. The existence of ideas is the existence of thinkers. This idealism retains a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality (personality transcends nature) but relocates it from a patriarchal Christian deity to ordinary individual human personalities. The supra-actual creative power (again transcendence) is removed from Platonic heaven or gods and demons to ordinary personalities. After all, how things matter in the world does not depend on ideas in the mind of some deity nor in a Platonic heaven where ideas are master molds for material beings. It depends only and entirely on the occurrence of ideas in the living of individually embodied persons. We know ideas from personal caring and our engagement with others who express caring. Living personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and purposive activity. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which express ideation: caring, sensitivity, knowledge, and the preconception of intentions, the drama of inventing, moment by moment, a particular life in the world. Ideas are openings of newness, created outside actuality, interventions of an instance of supra-actuality, non-being, which is a living consciousness. Ideality is willful becoming by always questioning, learning, and creating, the exact opposite of being. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in a universe of interiority, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary persons.

Dystopia hides behind false conceptions of fundamental reality, distorting every individual’s self-conception so the old systems of top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism can be maintained and wars can be fought. Every individual is still a fountain of original re-conceptions of a future, of self-creation, with an inherent capacity to be free of hive-mind influences, starting with hive-mind patriarchal metaphysics. That is a bit of cultural conditioning that can be controlled at the level of every individual. Any aspiration for cultural, social, and political change must be founded on an appreciation of creativity, recognition that reality is mutable because ideas make up so much of the structure of reality. To change the world, it is first necessary to go beyond the colonization of patriarchal metaphysics.

Notes

  • Medieval Philosophy, Volume 4 of: A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2019), ISBN 978-0-19-884240-8. (Chapter 25: It’s All Good – The Transcendentals, especially pp.179-80.)

Doubting dystopia? Think about these articles in other publications.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/06/615483/A-message-from-Black-America-to-the-People-of-Iran-

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/chile-rapist-path-chant-hits-200-cities-map-191220200017666.html

Internal links:

Fragment 106, May 10, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (1) (word count: 520)

Fragment 158, January 9, 2020, The Arc of the Monad (word count: 803)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

 

The Arc of the Monad

09 Thursday Jan 2020

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

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

Fragment 158, word count: 803.

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

How Aristotle Placed Personality

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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

Posting 130, Word Count: 1,368.

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

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

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

The Two Principles of Reality

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

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