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Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

16 Monday Mar 2026

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Fragment 221, Word count: 2,971.

Tags: history, philosophy, theology, power, culture, aristocracy, dominance, violence, literacy, ideality, time, freedom, creativity, politics, metaphysics, humanism.

The spirit of two philosophical traditions runs through the Fragments of In The Blind-Spot. First is the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, a city on the south shore of the Black Sea into which Diogenes was born around 410 BCE. Diogenes was the original philosophical Cynic, elaborating the idea that social convention, culture, is an artificial lens of interpretation passing as elemental reality but effectively alienating individuals from the natural primordiality of their existence as human. Diogenes practiced a strict form of de-culturing in his shockingly unusual way of living, to be free of what he identified as false social reality. The Cynic tradition developed also in Epicureanism (“ignore the talk going around about gods”) and to some degree in Stoic self-possession, all exploring a distinct humanism in the ancient Greek cultural system.

Fragment 27, April 12, 2012, The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans (word count: 2,898)

Fragment 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (word count: 6,844)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is also in the vicinity of Diogenes but is partly disqualified by his devotion to the supremacy of “the general will”. Rousseau, proud citizen of Calvinist Geneva, did, on the other hand, present a critique of the mainstream culture of arts and sciences of his time, and generally wrote in opposition to the style of life supposedly envied and sought after by everyone and exemplified by Voltaire, a life of wealth, privilege, celebrity, high consumption, and patronage of the arts, inevitably accompanied by pride in social superiority and exclusive elite class membership.

The second tradition is clearly related, being arguably a development from ancient humanism, namely the modern Euro-American Enlightenment, but especially, within that broad cultural movement, the Lutheran spirit of Protestantism, which developed alongside a body of discoveries in mathematical science (building from strong accomplishments imported from the Islamic world and ancient India), all in the context of the Republic of Letters, a network of independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities, trained to be active in secular professions, it energized a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in the international language of scholarship, Latin, releasing an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of advanced literacy. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to get beyond and get free of the most dominating cultures and factions of Christendom: The Roman Church, aristocracy, and monarchy, a classic example of a tight working alliance between forces of dominance-by-violence and those of dominance-by-dread-of-the-supernatural, all grounded in a metaphysical ideology featuring a disembodied almighty will-to-power. Agents of the Church acted as indispensable mediators between the righteous wrath of God and helpless individual sinners. Within that entrenched dystopia a revival of ancient Epicurean metaphysics, notably in the effective materialism of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) enabled a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance and promoted a more strictly scientific world-view. Materialism undermined claims by the upper strata of society to be enforcing the will of the supernatural almighty.

Both science and Protestantism were intellectual revolts against the established religious edifice of knowledge guarded ferociously by the Roman Church hierarchy, although they expressed two starkly opposing metaphysical foundations. Lutheran protestantism rests on an identification of faith as a spiritual act of autonomous individual agency, eliminating any mediation between the individual and primordial reality. Any such external mediation, such as the Roman Church’s mediation between the individual and the Deity, is a portal for misinformation, illegitimate domination, and abusive exploitation. There has been a phenomenal philosophical evolution from Luther’s conception of the inherent spiritual autonomy of individual subjective ideality. The tendency of that evolution is to retain a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, first attributed to an almighty Deity, but increasingly to relocate that transcendence from the remote Deity to the individual intelligences of human personalities. We see this worked out by a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte. Fichte’s drift to a cosmic absolute self-positing “I” seems to flip the progression on its head, and that cosmic absolutism was taken in a nostalgic Aristotelian direction by Hegel, also Lutheran. The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – subjectivity is a monadic interiority; reviving aspects of Aristotle

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – moral agency is self-legislating, requires no sovereign commands, no externally sourced superego

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) – subjectivity has the form of a self-positing “I”, Existentialism’s dawning

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) – phenomenology of spirit, investigation of spirit in the shape of history, the Absolute connects Hegel to Fichte

Max Stirner (1806-56) – a version of self-possession universalizing Machiavelli

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) – “…an act of will in self-sufficient inwardness”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – God is dead. Ubermench is beyond the reach of cultural norms.

In the Enlightenment energy system of Protestantism, the Republic of Letters, and Science, following the celebrated humanism of the Renaissance in which Medieval Christendom searched out the intellectual accomplishments of alien cultures that it recognized as more advanced, Protestantism was an engine promoting the spread of literacy beyond the professional scribal classes to the population at large. John Wycliffe inspired a movement for popular vernacular literacy in the 1380’s, promoting Bible reading as essential personal piety, an early expression of the spirit of Protestantism that highlights its origins in the culture of literacy. Science especially enabled the accumulation of an even vaster edifice of new knowledge. However, science never managing to replace the old metaphysics of Christian theology because its rejection of the concept of human spirituality was never convincing. These antagonistic culture-pools settled into a truce with each other and with the legacy of the aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence.

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

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

John Wycliffe (1328-1384) – popular vernacular literacy, the Bible in vernacular languages

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) – the Earth is not the centre of the universe

Martin Luther (1483-1546) – individual justification by faith alone

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – the Earth moves

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – Cogito, ergo sum. anti-Aristotelian physics, mathematics, metaphysics

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – mass, distance, & the universal law of gravitational attraction

The French Revolution (1789-99) – sovereignty of the National Assembly

Culture Pools in the Historical Narrative

Already from this sketch of philosophical influences, it is apparent that a historical narrative, especially of the Euro-American cultural system, but with forays beyond, is a core interest in the Fragments, in which narrative the focus becomes the profound confrontation between an aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence (still dominant, still dystopian) and certain counter-cultures inherently antagonistic to it and partly stifled under its dominance. 

Aristocratic Dystopia: The Culture of Dominance by Violence

Because of the ongoing ascendance of the aristocratic-violence culture focused on competitive masculine strength-testing with strictly limited empathy, current and previous ‘civilized’ societies have all been dystopian systems of top-down parasitism derived originally from the culture of animal herding on the Great Eurasian Steppe. For techniques of herd parasitism to be applied to human communities after violent conquest, effective stabilization of extractive practices required construction of a haze of popular illusions in which hierarchy is created by setting up commanding authority in certain persons who are credible as cultural icons of dominance, and as such become internalized by individuals as cultural elements of a superego. The human receptivity to authoritative superego figures is a spiritual vulnerability trained through the long childhood years of dependence on parents. Dominance culture consistently constructs an enduring type of culture-bound collective, effectively a human hive-mind, bound together by a set of culturally embedded illusions of the primal and ultimate supremacy of certain forces: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, and trophy supremacy, all reinforcing the hierarchical pattern of the dominant faction. Aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture first created the illusion of masculine supremacy in which rights belong to the strongest. Masculine supremacy sets up the most successfully violent persons as superego icons in aid of enforcing obedience and loyalty in a hierarchical social order: an all-inclusive food-chain of top-down command and value extraction, promoted as the primal and ultimate Great Chain of Being.

Disembodied supremacy culture developed into an edifice of authoritative knowledge of primal and ultimate things, largely non-evident or hidden things, claimed to be selectively revealed to the rare chosen prophet. (theology) Disembodied supremacy involves an imagined contrast and conflict between ordinary human embodied ideality and an ideality that is cosmically primordial and as such prior to all embodiment, unrestricted by embodiment, all-creative. Disembodied supremacy sets up certain charismatic persons as superego icons, persons asserting their special knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits, based on a claim of being divinely chosen to receive revelations of the otherwise hidden ultimate Truth. Behind those visible persons looms the imagined Deity within its cloud of unknowing. Disembodied supremacy culture exploits the human tendency to personify everything, an overuse of the ability of embodied ideality to recognize in external phenomena the alien dramas of separate emotionally engaged wills, to recognize evidence of external ideality expressing its personal caring, knowing, and intending. This ability is the portal to all-important sociability and empathy, but inappropriate recognition of this kind results in fear of powerful disembodied aristocrats (lords) in the sky and in nature, violently coercive forces of willful self-assertion with strong excitable intentions. Their having power implies strictly limited empathy, as is typical of supremacist masculinity, and their disembodiment implies power beyond the predictably physical. Such invisible power inspires a pervasive inescapable dread.

In the precarious life of human individuals within nature and among other humans, the illusion of collective supremacy is easily sold as a necessary condition for safety in numbers. Collective supremacy sets up certain authoritative/ powerful persons as superego icons, persons asserting their uniquely authentic expression of the collective as the transcendent home for its people.

A culture of trophy supremacy is acted out and projected by the life of looting aristocrats or oligarchs. As apparently the most delicious form of gratification, chosen by the strongest, it tends to be imitated universally, derived from masculine supremacy and culturally accepted as the universal measure of personal value. Trophy supremacy sets up envied celebrities with the most property or the best property as superego icons, role models.

Collective Drama

This set of supremacist illusions, sometimes with still others (such as family supremacy or language supremacy), tend to form a mutually supportive structure, such that masculine supremacy is supported by the assertion that divine will determines everything including social hierarchy and individual power. The aristocratic obsession with trophies tends to convince everyone that competing for celebrity status is inherent in human nature. Collective supremacy is proclaimed by the authorities of both disembodied and masculine supremacy to help bind their flocks of subordinates in an illusion of shard collective welfare. Effective hive-mind construction does not, however, require the whole set. Any one of them can bind a collection of people together by training all to share the same orientation up to a supreme guide declaring the direction of the collective drama.

Literacy and a Life of the Mind

The alternative culture-pool that has been most impressively confrontational against the standard supremacist configuration has been literacy/ scribal culture, scholarship, the graphic recording of voices in language, by which it is made possible to choose to either distribute the record of an individual’s thinking to an audience, small or large, or to preserve it privately as a personal reminder of an accomplishment from which to advance and build. Since literacy is the craft and skills of preserving and cultivating knowledge in the mode of language, it has often been treasured within organizations focused on the illusion of disembodied supremacy in their frantic speculations concerning primal and ultimate things. Literacy has thrived in such institutions and inspired many generations to create astonishing feats of research, imagination, and reasoning. The super-powers of scribal ideality, such as enabling development of a unique reading/ writing persona, a personal literary voice, along with easing the effort of prolonged mental activity, eventually became a force sufficient, as a non-property based source of value, to oppose and rival the culture of violence (war and other looting) in terms of personal gratification from beauty and beneficial effect, importance of accomplishment, and a socially recognized foundation of respect and dignity. The experience of having a rich and powerful personal interiority through literacy is the foundation of humanism, an original map of values re-defining the adventure of existence as human ideality.

Fragment 128, June 8, 2018, Politics is More than Nature (word Count: 867).

It must be recognized that the fact of human existence, generation after generation, establishes that the under-acknowledged but really dominant source of gratification for most humans is the focus of the mainly female culture of first-language-nurture, the mutual support and caring most often found in the protection and nurturing of children. This most essential counter-culture pool has persisted eternally in the closest and most difficult proximity to the trophy/ looting/ dominance culture. Feminism has become an important challenge to supremacist hive-minds.

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700). A survey of some main culture-pools

The Linchpin is always Metaphysics

The linchpin of the whole thing is that all the supremacist illusions divert attention from, and so hide and alienate, what is really supreme in the life of a human: personal ideality constructing suppositional time as the portal to expressive freedom. The literary gaze is inward, to the voices and conversations of personal ideality, the immediate experience of a private creative fountain of caring curiosity, ideas, and questions. Ideality is a fabric of suppositional non-actuality, which distinguishes it decisively from the brute actuality and determinism of nature. Personal ideality is metaphysically anomalous as a power creating freedom through the supposition of time structured as an opening for the personal expression of caring. The sense of the passing of time has two vectors. One consists of leavings and losses: things given up, slipping by, falling away into increasingly distant priority. The other vector is a dramatic leap into a suppositional future expected to have both grounding familiarity and surprising novelty. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjective spirituality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are abstractions from the non-actuality of time as a dramatic construct, the indispensable grounding of not-yet and no-longer, the non-actuality of purposive caring in the shape of orientation. Above all, it is only the metaphysically anomalous caring in creative personal dramas that makes anything matter. Caring is always a drama, unfinished in the dual instability of suppositional time. An ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating wave-in-time, living in and through passing and arriving in time. Freedom must always be unfinished. The genius of ideality is turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to enduring existence in freedom made possible by constant flight through a personally suppositional time.

The Politics of Left and Right

Beginning from the Enlightenment era, and especially from the French Revolution of 1789-99, the political Left has been the effort to critique and oppose the entrenched legacy of aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture, with its standard structure of supremacist illusions. As such it must identify the crippling errors of that legacy at the same time as envisioning and promoting a preferable alternative, a political vision that represents the full scope and power of existence as a human and facilitates the general expression of that existence. This has made the left the party of bottom-up philosophies, of care and expression for the many instead of just the exceptional few. Historically, mistakes have been made in identifying such a political vision, for example in claims that the left is for bargaining within capitalism for a better deal for precarious wage earners, for the subordinated, proletarian labouring and serving class. Such efforts are crucial certainly but the political left must not limit its vision by accepting societies as permanent and inevitable structures of unequal classes, conceding the inevitability of the peculiar type of hive-mind polities forged by aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture. The left is hindered by an inability, so far, to replace the metaphysical foundation of hive-mind polities. The materialism of the Enlightenment, and of Marx, has proven insufficient to accomplish that essential task.

The Meaning of War

Of course the cultural system of the current world-order is stuck. Even after the whole drama of the history of literacy, it is still dominated by patriarchal veil-of-illusions hive-minds, ever ready for the vast killing and destruction of war. Its ancient and traditional metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, the guilt-ridden fear of some capricious external invisible almighty father-force has been challenged and partly replaced by the determinist nihilism of mathematical-materialist science. (Will-to-power is Nietzsche’s idea of the pure essence of personal existence, so also the mind of God.) Science is a straightforward refusal of metaphysics, so the choices left are the childhood terror of judgment from the cloud of unknowing that must be appeased in all things, or the despair of utter inevitability. In this ridiculous state it is only war that gives life meaning for far too many people.

What Matters and Why

A way beyond the increasingly fragile dystopias of the current world-order is conceivable, but it requires enough overcoming of the old metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, and also of determinist science, to find grounding in a humanist metaphysics that recognizes improvisational freedom at the level of embodied individuals, a freedom expressing deeply personal dramas of caring and attachment, the dramas that make some things truly and profoundly matter within the uncaring actuality of nature.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.

De-Constituting Power

21 Saturday Feb 2026

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Fragment 220, Word count: 525.

Tags: power, hive-mind, culture, self-possession, orientation-lens, ideality, creativity, illusion, metaphysics.

Cultural Illusions and Hive-Mind

All cultural complexes in the veil of supremacist illusions (Fragment 219, December 23, 2025, The Veil of Illusions (Word Count: 2,841)) also bind a plurality of people together within a false conceptual orientation-lens, so constituting a human-style hive-mind. Hive-mind is present to an individual as the common sense of a community, unrecognized as carrying a number of elaborate illusions structured within it and effectively directing attention away from certain crucial features of existence as subjective teleological ideality, and in this way blocking access to personal self-possession. As such, The Veil of Illusions is a critique of power, a critique, from the point of view of an inquisitive philosophical innocence, of the cultural placement of a superego into the interior orientation-lens of each individual. It is a critique of the power derived from such a placement, which includes both political coercive power based on the threat of violence and the financial and ownership power of capitalism.

The False Conceptual Orientation-Lens

Each of our four supremacist illusions establishes power by setting up a specific superego as the mechanism of its supremacy. The superego is an individual’s orientation up for guidance and direction from some authoritative voice or force. Masculine supremacy sets up the strongest, most actively violent persons as superego icons. Disembodied supremacy sets up as superego icons charismatic persons asserting their uniquely privileged knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits. Collective supremacy sets up as superego icons certain persons asserting themselves and their power as especially authentic expressions of the collective. Trophy supremacy sets up as superego icons persons with the most property or the best property.

From time out of mind the culture has been poisoned by the patriarchal culture of hierarchical human parasitism. Building on the universal childhood experience of the power of a parent, the legacy of cultural fixations on patriarchy and the projection of patriarchy onto the cosmos at large has left us assuming that, even if the cosmos is not really personified on the grand scale, there must be some other transcendence from-on-high, maybe the genius of great men or the accumulated wisdom of heroic ancestors, sanctifying the hierarchical order of wealth, power, and celebrity, a transcendent source that would be revealed by a really determined search, which we do not know how to do. That is the illusion of generalized superego. Any culture or ideology which replaces one superego with another, which offers updated replacement superegos, is exploiting the vulnerability derived from generalized superego. There should be no primary orientation toward any high voice of authority.

The View of a Metaphysics of Original Creation

The power of original creation is metaphysically anomalous. Since the power of original, improvisational, effective creativity obviously does exist as subjective teleological ideality, then the world and its contents are not utterly pre-determined and not eternally fixed or stable. Essentialism fails. It is malign and abusive for any agent to act to limit or alienate anyone’s self-awareness as creative power. No external supremacy could ever truly negate the transcendent metaphysical anomaly that is personal subjectivity, constantly reconstructing a suppositional temporality as a navigable opening for somewhat free creative improvisation.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.

Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Fragment 218, word count: 213.

Tags: metaphysics, caring, ideality, existence, creation, freedom, personality, empathy, expression, value, philosophy, spirituality, time.

The foundational distinction for metaphysics is between the world that doesn’t matter, (which is the vast material world of strict actuality, essentially complete but energetically rearranging in a sort of ceaseless falling) over against the existence of caring, shaped as the never-finished personal dramas of any embodied ideality sensing total and desperate vulnerability to a somewhat malleable and entirely suppositional future. The metaphysical presence is caring with its context of a future sensed as open for certain improvisations, for creative expression. Entities of caring-ideality matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Only caring is suppositional, orienting in terms of non-actualities of its own creation. The experience of embodiment grounds the emphatically monadic existence of beings of ideality as individuals. To identify and become acquainted with the metaphysical dimension of existence is to construct a sharp focus on the starkly anomalous existence of individual ideality, some indefinite number of distinct “I”s, vectoring future-ward in our effortful self-improvising, drama-clouds intervening at the coming-into-being edge of existence. Individual subjective existence is the experience of spiritual intervention, intentional freedom via creative ideation of personal and non-personal futurity-as-opening in the strictly subjective context of the particular importance of this expressive agency, without forgetting empathy and aesthetic appeal.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

War, Hive-Minds, & Dystopia

19 Thursday Jun 2025

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Thursday June 19, 2025

Fragment 214. word count: 1,561.

Tags: community, culture, value, hierarchy, non-linguistic ideation, personality, innocence, self-possession, philosophy, nature, metaphysics.

It may seem that people generally must take their given social surroundings, their community’s cultural edifice of norms, values, treasures, and respectable achievements, as their whole personal range of expectation and opportunity, embracing styles of life, pathways through the institutionally structured life-cycle, that offer some degree of prosperity, reputation, and dignity within available practices. Since the hive-mind form of social organization (structured by common identity definitions and broadly shared dramas featuring emotional triggers spread by public media) has been plausibly ubiquitous in human history, there has always been a community-based cultural and mental framework that encloses individuals by external authority within a larger, purportedly immortal, abstract person. There has always been a culture-derived mental framework internalized by individuals involving personal confinement within hierarchies of prestige, strata of personal value, freedom, and power. Not all hive-minds have a formal hierarchy with a dominant leader, a chain of command, and a legally compulsory code of good and evil. Some hive-minds (for example, sport team fan groups) have only common heroes and saints, a common orientation toward select events and goings-on, and something like orthodox attitudes and triggers of approval and disapproval. There is still a sense of belonging and of some degree of closeness to an inner-circle with exceptional knowledge and style who speak to and for this cultural niche.

Partisan culture-war movements, common on social media, are also significant hive-minds, as are organizations insisting on a strong “corporate culture”. Military forces, their constituent units and divisions, and similar organizations such as police and sport teams themselves are all examples of very tight hive-minds. Embracing a culturally stipulated category as a personal identity definition is joining a herd, also a form of hive-mind. This includes gender identity, class identity, racial, ethnic, religious, demographic niche, geographical origin, social presentation style, or any hierarchical sub-category.

Polity-defining hive-minds are structured by dramas which are deadly serious communal pageantry, all requiring dedication and acquisition of skills and knowledge, and they rest on myths that happen to have gained cultural currency. There are national dramas in the competitions among nations for power, prestige, and wealth, involving evil enemy nations and virtuous friendly nations, with always the possibility and often the actuality of war. There are religious dramas involving personal and collective merit and guilt in relation to fictitious supernatural persons with ultimate power, unrestrained by embodiment, threats and promises of eternal reward or punishment in an afterlife, and the teasing possibility of miraculous divine interventions. There are gender dramas in which every individual must closely orbit some ideal type of male or female. There are social class dramas involving pressures to accumulate wealth and trophies, as well as to perfect performances of certain manners, tastes, and appearances, a certain accent in speaking. There are civic sports dramas delivering ecstasy from victory and misery from defeat. These are socially staged emotional engagements with stakes and consequences for interpersonal bonding and approval, for self-esteem, status, and avoidance (or not) of a range of indignities and miseries. Together they make a framework of social meaning.

Hive-minds structure their group orientation on assumptions held as certainties, as unquestionable knowledge and definitive categories of everything: essentialism. This cultural certainty follows from embracing either divine decree or fundamental laws of nature as imposing a discernible necessity in all things. Of course, different hive-minds have their own certainties, so immersion in any of them is a limitation on encountering reality.

Even people who are not emotionally invested in the symbols and emblems of their nation state, for example, who do not care about civic celebrations or their nation’s standing among nations, even such non-patriots are likely to be oriented in their sense of personal value and potential (self-worth, personal force of being) within the cultural norms of the economic structures around them, the hierarchy of occupations ranked by wealth and fame, attitudes about the gradients of a good life, and how those things match up with personal abilities and performances.

It has been widely accepted that such cultural multi-mind collectives are good for individuals and possibly necessary. Immersion within a hive-mind culture does include a “sense of belonging” along with other benefits. However, people with influence and control within a hive-minded collective conventionally interpret “belonging” as “being owned by” the collective, granting the collective power to confer individual freedom or repression, sometimes life or death. The flip side of belonging is being owned, being the collective’s property. Serious hive-minds make war in which killing and dying are glorified and individuals are dehumanized and sacrificed as expendable.

Human communities have generally been dystopian, repressive and randomly cruel, overly controlled by a competitive and acquisitive male-strength-glorifying culture, and as such, profoundly questionable at the level of most individuals. The dogmatic essentialism of hive-minds always ignores and strives to exclude from attention a great swath of individual experience. The sense of self or personal identity is at play in this positioning of an individual within or only partly within a cultural meaning system. This is not merely about a variable sense of self-worth, but of the metaphysical status of personally existing as a particular “I”. Personal being-in-the-world can be defined as a rank in the hierarchies of culture: manners, norms, appearances, possessions, ways of presentation and performing socially, but these are traps in the shallowness of sophistication. To get to richer levels of human existence it is necessary to get beyond cultural pre-digestion through a personal cultivation of innocence.

Language is a crucial cultural system that provides a complex structure of pathways for thinking. However, in thinking about the inner processes of an individual’s acts of learning and creating intentions and acts of personal agency, it isn’t helpful to focus too strictly on the acts called “thinking”, which are always deeply associated with language. There is a vast swath of non-linguistic ideation that includes the whole context of personal orientation in space, time, and embodiment, orientation to culture and to relationships with other people, the personal cloud of dramas that express and specify any individual’s caring in their making a world that matters personally. Caring is not perceived but rather initiates, directs, and colours the spiritual reach or search that is the first personal movement of perception. The individual fountain of creative caring and curiosity is the spiritual force of individual existence as an “I”, and is never convincingly honoured or expressed in collective life. It silently looms as a discordant context surrounding the accidental certainties of cultured life, and beckons as the richer freedom of self-possession. Each of unorthodox religious speculation, philosophical questioning, and mind-altering drugs, sometimes combined, have been techniques used in different societies by individuals to explore that spiritual context as an exit from the confinement of a personal identity stipulated by hive-mind culture.

Ideality is willfully improvised becoming, building a future while questioning, learning, and working, the exact opposite of either being or a simple becoming. As just noted about caring, subjective ideation is not entirely receptive, reactive, or perceptual. A whole fundamental swirl of experience is a personal exertion to make something of felt existence, and to make something relevant to personal caring from received stimulations. Projecting the personal drama of interest and curiosity is a spiritual power of agency. This is creative world building in the medium of ideality, developing a sense of place-and-heading in a world shaped by external objects and forms internalized as relevant in personal dramas. Each fountain of caring, curiosity, questioning, attachment, and personal construction of orientation is an anomalous presence in the world of otherwise inescapable conservation, inertia, and entropy. The force of personality is not a thing of that nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation, stands outside nature and transcends it. The creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but only in ordinary personalities, in the embodied existence of dramatically vulnerable agents. There is no equivalent to this genius at a collective or community level.

By using the separation of people into niches of dignity, power, opportunity, status, value, and esteem, by using that separation as the structuring principle of a community, hive-minds alienate people from one another, block the reach of anyone’s empathy, and normalize a relative disrespect/ contempt for so many. Being held in contempt is dystopian. This way of categorizing people severs everyone from recognizing the stark metaphysical anomaly of subjective ideality as such. In restricting an individual’s grounds for self-evaluation and definition so much, hive-minds create a need and opportunity for philosophical questioning as a spiritual enlargement.

Thoughtful, cultivated innocence is the core of philosophy as an original consideration of the situation of a perceptive and reflective “I”. Philosophical work is a self-guided change in the way the world as a presence and the reflecting agent as a presence are perceived, conceived, and experienced; an achievement, by private questioning, of as perfect an innocence as can be dared. This cultivation involves effective de-culturing, with inherited prejudices made irrelevant. The state of de-cultured unknowing isn’t merely a void. It remains in the vicinity of questioning and caring as special states of a particular spirituality, a unsatisfied readiness for discovery.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

Bonfire of Vanities

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Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 207, word count: 696.

tags: Savonarola, spirituality, self-possession, value, hierarchy, culture, class, time, dystopia, hive-mind, Spinoza, metaphysics.

There is a perennial conflict, including culture wars, between two tendencies of human motivation. The overwhelmingly popular tendency is based on acquisition, competition, display, and quests for approval and admiration. The other tendency derives from a personal experience of transcendent spirituality. From the spiritual point of view, many objects that are popularly valued seem like mere vanities. Vanities display a dependence on external validation, and an absence of acquaintance with the force of personally autonomous creativity as authentic spirituality. The term “bonfire of the vanities” is typically associated with the fifteenth century Dominican friar Savonarola who preached a fundamentalist Christian theology that emphasized the value of personal spirituality over wealth, status, and public displays of virtue and accomplishment. He famously organized a Shrove Tuesday bonfire in Renaissance Florence on February 7, 1497 into which were thrown all sorts of prideful distractions from his idea of a properly spiritual life. Items burned included, among other things, books, musical instruments, and works of art, all precious to the hearts of the envied, propertied, and highly cultured classes. Savonarola’s specific justification for his bonfire, namely a certain type of Christian theology, was certainly misconceived and, as itself an ostentatious display, its own forum for vanity. It had a warped and malevolent conception of spirituality and transcendence in the human situation. Savonarola was not completely wrong though. He was keenly aware of the perennial conflict noted above.

It is true that everybody needs some stuff and there is such a thing as innocent pleasure, sometimes aesthetic pleasure in the particulars that help make a livable environment and an interesting life. Even so, the capitalist valuables list really does contain a hefty portion of vanities, and not harmless ones either, but vanities which are laying waste to Planet Earth. The legitimacy of hierarchy and of the cultural markers of status must be disputed on the basis of spirituality. There is something more important than nature’s food chain interpreted as a Great Chain of Being decreed by divine or cosmic fiat, and the more important reality is the metaphysically anomalous existence of individual creative spirit, not the religious conception of an external almighty to whom mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a conception which recognizes individual human time-creation as the radiant transcendence.

The World-Lens of Personal Ideality

There is a kind of experience that invites comparison with Spinoza’s “under the aspect of eternity” as a personal encounter with transcendence, but Spinoza’s emphasis on eternity is all wrong. The idea of eternity is a false transcendence. Actual transcendence is the personally crafted sense of the ceaseless opening and passing of time, deliverance from the deadening weight of the Eternal Now via the anticipating living will, the context-bearing gaze that picks out value and novelty by perceiving and acting through a construct of inward ideality, a personally gathered, interpreted, and organized lens-world in living action to understand and inhabit the public world. As storms of ideality, we plunge into a future which is unknowable and malleable, expecting certain features of geography with enough probability as a frame of reference for now. We manage a balance between energy sources and costs in effort, between anxiety and pleasure. It is possible to face full acquaintance with ourselves as human without being overwhelmed by dread, anguish, and complete absurdity.

There is nothing wrong in itself with pursuing delights, and possessions can be authentic resources, tools, and guides in the desperate spiritual adventure. However, the enjoyment of life should be approached with full awareness of the transcendence of spirit over things, even things that are excellent works of spirit, and with recognition of the deceptions of hive-mind constructs meant to normalize for everybody that there is nothing better than to ape people with the most or most stylish possessions, and that nothing can be done about the resulting dystopian society. If, respecting the dignity of persons and understanding the reality-distorting effects of dystopian cultural legacies, a person takes delight in some possessions or cultural products, there is room for this, so long as the enjoyment isn’t the foundation for an affectation of serious personal or group superiority.

See also: 

Fragment 202, August 13, 2023, Between Spirit and Dystopia (word count: 1,379)

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

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Popping Hive-Mind Bubbles

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Fragment 201, word count: 722.

tags: utopia, dystopia, politics, culture, reality, spiritual simulation, metaphysics, phenomenology.

It is typical of utopian texts from the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to idealize small societies with a strong collective sense of unity *, societies in which every individual agrees with everyone else about the dramas that constitute the emotional vectors of life and especially collective life. This collective cultural and psychological uniformity was, and often still is, seen as the foundation of social stability, and it is supposed that social stability is an ideal to be sought. However, what is always sinister, oppressive, and inhumane about repressive authoritarian governments is the deliberate social engineering of a collective single-mindedness, a cultural hive-mind in which dissent is punished with intent to obliterate. Human hive-minds are far more pervasive and ubiquitous than ordinarily recognized, and there is no point in trying to distinguishing good hive-minds from bad ones. All of them are destructive of individual self-expression, creativity, freedom, and self-possession. Remarkably, and this is the nub of the issue, the richness of sociability and the great human interconnectedness does not depend on hive-mind reality bubbles.

It used to be thought that if people in a community had different religions, for example, or no religion, then social breakdown would soon follow. It is now obvious that societies with a mixture of different religions and no-religion can thrive. The same thinking applied to sexual orientations, to gender identities, to a fixed hierarchy of genders, to race, language, and to reverence for a sovereign leader who, along with various officials who judge and evaluate compliance with social norms, would be universally internalized by people as a dominating superego. It is now obvious that none of these is necessary for a thriving human interconnectedness, and nor are symbols of collective identity such as flags, uniforms, monuments to glorious battles, a romanticized and sanitized history, heroes, weapons, a fearsome and contemptible enemy, an exceptional group destiny. These are all mechanisms to bind individuals into a hive-mind, and there are influencers pressuring people to embrace them, supposedly for the communal good, sometimes called the higher good. The conforming societies that result are not the realization of any higher good.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of an essential structure to existence that extends into the order of societies, are always canonized in dystopias to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. Dystopian arrangements become normalized and accepted through the use of fantasy metaphysics to persuade people that hierarchical social arrangements are the inevitable products of God or Nature, both pillars of essentialist belief systems. A phenomenology of spirit, on the other hand, establishes that social arrangements are not inevitable and certainly not pre-determined by God or Nature. Such a metaphysics of experience is the route to de-normalizing dystopia. Any exit from dystopian societies will require the individual self-possession that comes with self-acquaintance unmediated by antique cultural fantasies.

The Spiritual Simulation

The sense of the world by which an individual is oriented and grounded is built from fleeting perceptions and personally curated memory, and since it can’t be a sculptural physical likeness or scale-model of the world, nor any kind of continuous perceptual contact with every part of the world known by the individual, this sense of being oriented within knowledge of some region of the world is a personal simulation of a world. These simulations are constructed of perception-based suppositions arranged in the service of an individual’s pattern of personal caring, all accomplished in the medium of suppositions, ideality, the poise of a busy self-interested spirit at a place in the world. Spirit orients itself and survives by simulating a world un-naturally stretched in time, supposing what it no longer perceives and anticipating the world as staging for a moment by moment enactment of its self-created arc of intended interventions. Supposing, caring, anticipating, and intending are spiritual non-actualities, postures of ideality, the only metaphysical reality. This phenomenology of spirit recognizes that individual creativity in manifesting a caring personal agency is crucial to the shape of all aspects of the human environment. It reveals the very opposite of essentialism, an alternative to the determinism stipulated by theologies or by physical materialism.

  • Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (Chapter 42, pp. 298-304).

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Asymmetrical Dualism

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Fragment 199, word count: 534.

Tags: nature, metaphysics, ideality, Fichte, dystopia, patriarchy, property, hive-mind, sovereignty, self-possession, politics.

The Primacy of Ideality

The physical world does not care, respond, or prepare. It does not question or answer. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us, as Copernicus observed, but it also has no other accommodations for our sensitivity, desperate caring, freedom, or wishes and plans. Subjective ideality, which is to say, willful spirituality, does not determine objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. However, in a crucial sense ideality comes first because of its crucial evidentiary or experiential primacy.

When Fichte observed that the existence of the objective world occurs in a spirit’s positing (supposing) such a world, he has to be referring to the physical world as a conception of what is being received by a spirit, a conception created by a spirit in its quest for effective agency based in a sense of orientation. No matter what we receive via sensory stimulus we still individually have to make something of it in ideality, come up with a way of conceptualizing something as other than the excitation of a personal sensitivity. Reality is mutable because the structure of reality is crucially suppositional.

Even though ideality senses its condition as a receiver of a world it does not plan into existence on the grand scale, and finds itself placed within and dependent on the world of not-self so received, the primacy of ideality means that however anomalous and superfluous it might seem in relation to the vastness of not-self brute actuality, ideality does exist undeniably and exists in an asymmetrical duality of mutual influence and determination with uncaring actuality. The existence of ideality changes everything by adding a metaphysical principle to existence. It means that a certain sort of incompleteness and uncertain-anticipation is native to existence, to reality. Nature otherwise lacks any trace of anticipation. It’s just physics. With ideality, reality is no longer just fields of force occurring as they must, at rest in nature even when unfixed or unbalanced. Ideality, as metaphysics, is the world now making something of itself, planning out, searching out, and building a multitude of personal ways into the non-actual not-yet. Now the world is at risk and not at rest. It is restless, curious, and living.

The Dystopian Predicament

The human predicament is not metaphysical but rather cultural and political in that we find ourselves surrounded by ubiquitous and pervasive dystopian societies. Historically, dystopia forms as misogynist patriarchy, in which privileges have been seized and claimed along with property through violence and the threat of violence. Competitions for dominance create stacked layers of social stratification, a hierarchy of dominance in which each stratum prides itself on being a superior beings club with a cultured contempt toward the less wealthy and powerful. What often keeps the layers together as a functioning hive-mind, in addition to the core dedication to the language of competition and to accumulating trophies, is a universal orientation up toward a top layer asserting ultimate sovereignty. Deity (or Nature) serves as a cultural paradigm of sovereignty as all-powerful commander and judge with absolute ownership over the less powerful. The metaphysical situation means that this actuality is mutable and that self-possession is viable against hive-mind.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 193, August 25, 2022, Spiritual Self-Possession (word count: 1,093)

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

The World of One and Many

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Fragment 198, word count: 604.

Tags: nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, caring, thinking, agency, knowing, metaphysics, Hegel.

The world is organized by two very different sets of principles. One is a system of “laws of nature” as described by empirical/ mathematical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy. This system of nature appears to be universal and immutable and presents itself in a vast natural world-structure including enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. The other set of organizing principles is a scattered multiplicity of separate and distinct points, namely the set of busily gazing sensibilities, each encountering and personalizing parts of the natural world, each curious and needy and learning to make sense of its surroundings which it must come to know to situate and orient its personal agency. The personalizing and coming to know is the world organizing activity of sensibilities. Through careful attention to specific qualities among the contents of strictly personal sensitivities, each sensibility organizes an idea of a world that surrounds it, a sense of enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. What is crucial to sensibility is a semi-reliable set of known place-markers for an effective orientation of agency for an unstoppable and dangerously indeterminate future.

It has been speculated that the world of objective nature would be incomplete or insubstantial if not for knowing sensibilities who each personally organize from their sensitivities an idea of the world and then live with and build that idea by sensitively touching fragments of objective nature against it. There is speculation (Hegel) that nature calls sensibilities into existence in the course of perfecting itself, so that it can know itself, reflect and appreciate the awesome grandeur of its intricate existence. Sensibilities mirror nature, certainly, and are often struck by nature’s beauty. The speculation suggests that mirroring the world of nature, knowing its details and its evasions of being known, is the purpose and fulfillment of the existence of sensibilities. However, sensibility is not fulfilled or completed by knowledge severed from the drama and caring in its personal purposes. Sensibilities are very bad mirrors of the objective world since the personal idea of the world that any sensibility organizes to live through is unavoidably very different and largely remote from objective nature. Each sensibility organizes its idea of the world according to its personal principle of caring, with the result that relatively few objects or patterns are noticed or remembered. Any personal idea of the world needs helpfully simplified schematic impressions, abstractions, generalizations, variously structured forms of ideality. (search circle)

As bad as sensibilities are at mirroring the brute actuality of nature, we do manage, in orienting ourselves for ongoing personal agency and expression, to organize our creative ideality into a world we recognize as hugely not-self, and in doing so we manifest what we are as more than objects in nature, as supra-objective particulars existing as neighbours of the hard not-self, the uncaring and unquestioning natural world. Although nature seems to subsist independently of sensibilities, it must be kept in mind that “I think, therefore I am!” highlights that the only certainty of knowledge we have is our own personal existence as a world organizing principle. Thinking is caring and questioning, the ever-questing focus of personal caring. It is caring and questioning so specifically that the focus of attention passes from relevant detail to relevant detail, revising and filling out a precisely pointed future-ward movement. Our certainty of the world of nature is based on the certainty of our personal existence as a caring world builder. The objective world of nature is, after all, an idea, a structure organized by sensibility for the purposes of living and enjoying what it is to be living.

Context

Fragment 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity (word count: 788)

Fragment 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky (word count: 2,752)

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (word count: 2,321)

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

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Spiritual Self-Possession

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Fragment 193, word count: 1,093.

Tags: culture war, property, spirit, time, metaphysics, violence, sovereignty, creativity, self-possession, values, ideology, power.

There has been a cultural uprising raging in the Euro-American social system from the time of the European Enlightenment (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and even well before that, with, on one side, a culture with property possession as its prime value and, on the other, cultures emphasizing the primacy of spirit at the level of the embodied individual, often with an intellectual focus. This opposition is the deep foundation of the political division between right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing political conservatism is the champion of property possession as primary value and is anti-intellectual because intellectual achievement has threatened the cultural primacy of property possession. The political left and the political right are not equivalent in the culture war because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has not yet managed to be clearly specific about its prime value, but a good characterization would be something like: spiritual self-possession. History includes many examples of artists and ‘thinkers’ who overtly value personal creativity more than possessions. The real prospect of universal literacy was the fundamental dignity conceived by the Enlightenment, developed out of Wycliffe’s project of having everybody capable of reading the Bible in vernacular translations.

Trophy Property is Core Conservative Value

Property possession as a means of self-definition and personal evaluation is ideologically foundational for political conservatism, and property possession is meaningless without institutional readiness for violence to protect it. Possession of property is inherently precarious, vulnerable to the point of being socially destabilizing. Private property owners are terrified their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Property can be taken by force or trickery, and so requires a vast system of protection involving personal weapons, organized readiness for violence, an ‘us against them’ conceptual system, elaborate legal/ police systems, and overemphasis on authority and forceful sovereignty. Property owners assert the authority, through police and army, courts, prisons, and the hangman, to protect their possessions. The “haves” project their obsession with property onto everyone else and are terrified of losing their stuff to the underclass. The more property a person has, the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of loss, which means they depend on as much as can be arranged of the power that comes from the barrel of a gun, the machinery of armed violence in the form of the “right hand” of sovereign government: police, military forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as sovereigns always do. Law and order is so prized by conservatives because it is the only way to protect the security of property possession. Such sovereignty also implies the whole dystopian apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of mass subordination to patriarchal power. From that stream of cultural tradition comes the demand for everyone to conform to a strict set of beliefs, behaviours, gender and persona types. Cultish hive-minds of patriotism are a social construct for the protection and enlargement of the value and privileges of property possession. Conservatism is based in an essentialist and violence-ready fear and outrage at the arrogance of anyone meddling with the traditional hierarchy of wealth and privilege.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with the conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant system. Right-wing personal interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego representing sovereign authority.

The Primacy of Spiritual Self-Awareness

Spiritual self-possession involves, as a matter of metaphysical knowledge, self-recognition as spirit. Spirit is the personalizing principle of world organization, a questioning push directing a gaze at the world in aid of acts which are effective personal expressions of a caring, knowing, and supposing intentional agent, continuously creating a specifically relevant suppositional world that is opening in time. Spirituality is the sense of time passing in this embodied life, featuring fear of the future. Time is the active existence of creativity. Creativity is impossible without a reality which is profoundly incomplete, with time into which to suppose possibilities, probabilities, and impossibilities. Without a supposition of the absolute vacuum of futurity then creativity is impossible. Without creativity there is no time. Meaningless Being exists without time, with only a warp of instability, its instant of momentum, falling. The awareness of time is not a perception, not passively receiving the imprint of a stimulus. Sensing the passing of time involves active suppositions and abstractions to fashion a framework of bearing into the empty opening of a future, searches expressing curiosity as well as desperation, and questions that reconstruct a framework of directional orientation. There is an interior suppositional sense of active positioning relative to the shape of exterior surroundings, updated continually in detail by perceptions of features: ground and sky and passages of accessibility with dramatic portent. The dramas of personal agency integrate learned expectations with a poise for interventions that actualize previously conceived and presupposed acts, new reality in the opening of time. Any gaze of consciousness is a gaze at nature from a particularly embodied drama, and also a creative act in the drama, a move forward that matters personally, integrating personal purposes and questions, suppositions (knowledge), and an arc of interventions.

Spiritual Self-Possession

The spiritual value orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. In this understanding the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is inherently greater than the cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a situation in which the best case is as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence) and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 172, January 7, 2021, Dissent by Metaphysics (word count: 680)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

What is Real?

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Fragment 192, word count: 537.

tags: dystopia, oligarchy, metaphysics, nihilism, drama, meaningless Being, acts of spirit, teen angst.

Every person reaches a moment of recognition and decision, as a teenager usually, when they have learned enough of the world to assemble the complex fact that the society in which they live is a dystopia. In dystopia the economic and cultural systems are dominated by a parasitic wealth oligarchy which brandishes bogus metaphysics as proof that oligarchic social organization is inevitable. Dystopian metaphysics asserts the realty of primordial commanding heights: willful divine spirits, eternal templates of form, or necessities derived from physical nature, imposing hierarchies which inevitably replicate themselves everywhere including as biological, economic, political, and social systems. The individual’s moment of recognition that, as metaphysics, this is self-serving and wildly implausible fantasy, is a shock of personal isolation because great public media effort is devoted to evading and disrupting any such recognition. At that moment of facing the darkness of the cultural and economic superstructure with which we must live and somehow work, most of us see no alternative but to submit to oligarchic metaphysics and devote ourselves to the values, symbols, and competitions for its markers of self-worth. The choices are stark: first, submit to the oligarchy as we see people doing all around, to enjoy if you can some of the pleasures it boasts of. Alternatively, espouse a resistance or revolutionary ideology which is likely another oligarchic system based in equally bogus metaphysics, or become a nihilist and live entirely through unprincipled impulses.

The question: What is real? is typically a search for a world of stable and measurable forces and structures that exist whether or not they are engaged and interpreted by any limited and ephemeral subjectivity. However, what is undeniably real in the context of this or any question is subjectivity itself, the spirit of questioning, searching, learning, and the personal assertion in every tilt of curiosity. The reality of this spirit is personal uncertainty of survival, the inescapable anticipation of a future reconfigured constantly by loss and a rain of novelty, with personal harms and benefits always at stake. As such, the realities of any such spirit are dramas of caring agency that creatively appropriate the forces and structures at hand, binding them within this spirit’s orientation and bearing in a world now furnished by this work with ground and sky, water and forest and growing things that can (and must) be consumed for pleasure and power, a world with crowds of other embodied spirits, among whom are closely attached family and friends, expressing their own questions and dramas. This individually embodied questioning, interpreting, and intervening is no cosmic commanding height. Meaning, relevance, and portent do have to be conferred by acts of spirit onto primordial meaningless Being, the structures and forces that are simply given, and it isn’t any kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, which does that work. Rather, it is the dramatic conceptual agency of individually embodied subjectivities.

The first philosophical act is to recognize dystopian society as a reality-distorting cultural force field. The next is to abandon dystopian metaphysics, along with oligarchic markers of merit, through direct acquaintance with personal creative power, recognizing the transcendent reality of spirits moving through the uncertainties of their time as effective intervening agents.

Embedded link:

Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.