Tag Archives: metaphysics

Politics is More than Nature

08 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, University, Why thinking?

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Posting 128, Word Count: 867.

On questions of politics and social order, there is always more involved than just nature, since there is always the involvement of the subjective ideality of individuals, human spirituality. Ideologues of the political right-wing make every effort to reduce political forces to a narrow concept of nature: predetermined, rigidly and unalterably ordered by eternal categories and hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being. The right-wing concept of nature includes the right of the strongest to use lethal force to exercise sovereignty over the less strong, and conceives a general flaw in human nature, much like original sin, which means that people deserve and even require subordination to sovereign supervision. Those assumptions grow out of the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and the women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The appeal to the inevitability of nature serves the purpose of defending the advantages of those who already have the greatest advantages, mainly rights attached to possession of property. Property fits well within a narrow concept of nature. However, crucial points supposedly determined by nature on the right-wing view are really features of culture, and culture is mutable.

The Mission of the Interior Individual

The involvement of individual subjective ideality in all matters of politics and social order means, first, that the fabric of reality includes crucial forces which are very unlike the concept of nature as predetermined, unalterable, rigidly ordered by eternal categories and the great chain of being. Individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the fundamental instability of actuality, an instability represented by time. The conceptions of subjective ideality and their cultural expressions are tentative and mutable under the force of deliberation and creativity. Second, the spirituality of people means that we individually have an interior source of value, gratification, and original creation that is not connected to possession of property, that is a projecting fountain instead of a deficiency that craves consumption, acquisition, and competition. Every individual has an expressive mission that goes beyond competitions for scarce goods, struggles for survival, and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, beyond submission and obedience, beyond accumulating property, and beyond aligning with narratives spun by scribes of power and wealth in a patriarchal hive-mind. Individual subjectivities have a mission to conceive and actually make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is part of sustaining that mission. Social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas since ideas are openings into a mutable future.

The reading/ writing persona that is cultivated in literacy and education has a distinct kind of autonomy of thinking and authorship. Young people have little attachment to property, but much to their unique voice and spirituality. A great deal of human fulfillment can be derived from learning and thinking, reading and writing, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity, but such a source of fulfillment goes far beyond top-down centralizing control. It is far too autonomous and individually interior for the political right-wing to endure. Right-wing interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego to intimidate the supposed inherent vice. One reason the political right-wing is anti-intellectual and struggles to narrow eduction to vocational training (STEM etc.) is to limit a general encounter with Enlightenment era ideas which illuminate an empathic and non-property based autonomy of the individual.

Everyone’s personal state of orientation is always situated in and influenced by a historical, cultural, and political context which includes (prominently) efforts by hive-mind collectives to control the behaviour and thinking of every individual, to orient every individual within a certain story, a tragic drama asserting patriarchy as a metaphysical inevitability. There is no equivalence between the political left and the political right 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 always been an alternative vision of the individual struggling to express the mission of ideality against the great weight of patriarchy. The calling to account of patriarchal dystopia, its being exposed as such by the political left-wing, is a cultural earthquake, unavoidably a bitter and profound incompatibility of visions with little ground for compromise. Of course the messages of the left must disrupt traditional narratives that served as devices of patriarchal macro-parasitism to maintain submissive hive-minds.

An authentic idealist metaphysics is one in which brute nature participates in reality with the ideality of embodied and sociable individuals, in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of originality created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come, creating what comes next.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

The current idea of the political left-wing features struggles by organized labour for greater benefits within investor-supremacist capitalism, raising working class consciousness about structural inequalities in wealth and power. Historically, that view of the meaning of the left developed from the Hegelian/ Marxist idea of economic determinism, the idea that social classes defined by economic conditions are the units of a pre-determined progression of human societies along a course of dialectical historical stages. The idea that there is a natural large-scale structure to change in human societies was profoundly appealing in the middle of the nineteenth century because disruption of traditional social hierarchy had become alarming, in a process that began soon after the launch of overseas European imperialism in the sixteenth century, with wealth looted from other peoples pouring into Europe to financial speculators and commercial and military opportunists. Previously, tradition and custom in Old Regime Europe, the fabric of its rural-agrarian system of wealth and power, kept popular patterns of thinking quite rigidly in thrall to monarchy, aristocracy, and Church. Notwithstanding the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, eighteenth century Europe was still a largely Christian institution, pervaded by patriarchal Christian control at all levels. Disruption of the old hierarchies of wealth, work, and circumstances of living resulted in struggles over power, and broke apart the “order” that had been sacred to the patriarchs of the Old Regime. In the shattering world of new money-wealth, lost attachment to land and locality, and desperate uncertainty for masses of people dependent on industrial employment, the old system of belief and ways of thinking lost contact with reality, and people generally needed new markers by which to reorient. There was a widespread sense that individuals were caught up in forces that were far beyond their powers to control or understand. The forces at play were in fact the competitive greed and racism of the leading factions of European society, expressing the macro-parasitism inherent in their patriarchal culture. Marx’s claim that there were scientific laws of historical change gave hope to a segment of Europe’s intelligentsia, the educated heirs of the Enlightenment era, who saw this claim as a message they might use to reorient the proletarian masses being treated on their native ground in the bestial and dehumanizing ways developed to maximize profits to investors from overseas imperialism and commercial exploitation. In Europe this was still novel and startling, engineered by newly powerful social factions, beyond any custom or tradition that might blend it into an appearance of natural order.

The idea of a predetermined pattern of social and cultural change, arcing inevitably toward justice, has lost all plausibility, especially since the collapse of Marxist regimes in eastern Europe, leaving a fatal ideological void for the most popular conception of a political left-wing. However, the collapse of that idea does not undermine entirely the force of left-wing politics because there was a previous and original “left” movement before the grandiose Hegelian metaphysics took hold. That original leftist movement was the party of philosophy itself rather than the party of organized labour. Specifically, it was the party of a secular philosophy of cultural Enlightenment, and it represented what had become known as the Republic of Letters, 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 created a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in Latin, the international language of eduction, marking an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of ideality. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period. Philosophy was then, and not for the first time, the innovative force against ossified patterns of thinking, and as such it placed primary emphasis on the individual’s power of rationality, a message often difficult to sustain in the context of the vicious campaigns of race and class assault and propaganda that constituted European imperialism.

The Enlightenment

The core innovation of the Enlightenment was not so much an assertion of individualism as it was a secular concept of human nature which changed the meaning of the individual. In the still dominant Christian view, human nature had an absolute need of external sovereign supervision due to the inherent taint of original sin, declared inescapable by Church father Augustine of Hippo. Christianity reinforced Augustine’s idea with Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, both visions of top-down cosmic hierarchy, perfect models for supporting the Church in exercising the sovereignty it asserted to be necessary and beneficent. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment countered patriarchal Christian ideology with two innovations (which eventually proved to be heading in incompatible directions). One replaced the cosmic hierarchy from Aristotle and Plato with an approach that flattened the basic cosmic structure, namely monistic materialism inspired by the metaphysics of Spinoza. More important, the left was the political party of philosophy because it brandished a secular view of human nature emphasizing innate rationality and excluding any inherent flaws and taints, and as such, a human nature not inherently dependent on any sovereign supervision. That was the crucial point, and it put the Enlightenment left in opposition to basic patriarchal cultural mythology, in which the strongest have the (divine/ natural) right of unlimited sovereignty, an assumption still discernible in the idea of ‘meritocracy’, and one that was asserted enthusiastically at the time to justify the most brutal imperialism. This stream of Enlightenment was already and always an anti-imperialist force, the foundation of claims for individual human dignity and rights, equality, secularism, and cosmopolitanism. In a world of people with no need of sovereign supervision, the patriarchal assertion of sovereign rights is naked human-on-human macro-parasitism, vicious and criminal.

European imperialism had given patriarchal dominance-culture unprecedented power both economic and cultural, especially in the hands of new commercial factions. The materialist side of Enlightenment was not a problem for them and in fact was a helpful frame of reference. Mechanistic materialism was making impressive advances in understanding objective nature and delivering new machines for the benefit of large scale industry and commerce. Under the banner ‘science’, claiming to represent strict mathematical rationality, it was acquiring ever-increasing prestige, at the same time realigning with patriarchal assumptions of natural hierarchies, and giving up any claim to flatten the fundamental structure of nature at large. This was the side of Enlightenment that rode the triumphant wave of imperialist wealth and power, but there remained a stubborn minority report: the basis of the political left.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature drew on a history of development that included the campaigns for universal literacy from the time of John Wycliffe (1331-1384), as well as the Lutheran emphasis on a personally interior relationship with divinity in a free act of faith. From that history, Enlightenment human nature was an inherent richness of individual interiority: curious, creative, empathic and sociable, and a rational learner and eager user of language (spoken, written, printed) in engagement with others, deriving fulfillment from mutual support and engagement with others. Cultures are crucial to individual human development, but cultures are bottom-up systems, as illustrated by ever-mutating language, not a gift from on-high, nor dependent on colonial masters or any other sovereign power. In the later part of the eighteenth century, within the milieux of Enlightenment culture which was already a force against imperialism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant worked out a sort of phenomenology of spirit (interiority) in which human individuals are understood as inherently self-legislating, and so, again, not dependent on outside sovereignty. This idea was the unacknowledged pinnacle of long centuries of cultural development in Europe, a minority report presenting an alternative vision for post-Christian society. It means that the decisive theme of western history, what makes the Euro-American cultural system interesting, is the contest playing out there over the legitimacy of sovereignty.

Kant’s philosophical work was arguably the best expression of Enlightenment ever produced, a considered advance beyond Spinoza’s materialist monism. There was room in Kant’s vision for both objective empirical science and for an individual interiority that was truly transcendent in its creative freedom. The problem was that, in the context of the mesmerizing frenzy of race and class violence in the era of high European imperialism, nobody was ready to digest the idea of human subjectivity free of an inherent dependency on sovereign power. In spite of that, the enriched conception of human nature had deep historical and cultural roots in this increasingly literate society, flourishing in the Republic of Letters and embryonically in Protestantism, far too embedded to be dismissed. This made a deeply divided cultural landscape that included patriarchal Christianity with its long-established ideology of sovereign power; newly triumphant money-wealth culture, heir apparent to patriarchal macro-parasitic top-dog-ism; scientific materialism as the servant of money-wealth culture; and a vision, contested by all those other cultural forces, of individual interiority as the fountain of creative freedom. The other cultural streams have strong and separate reasons for fearing and loathing the radical Enlightenment idea of the individual. Science can’t abide the existence of creative freedom as a transcendence beyond its laws of determinism; and even the new patriarchal hierarchies can’t abide the prospect of loosing their controlling grip on the work and consumption of the masses, a grip they conceive as power. Those forces have done their best to suppress the radical Enlightenment insight, and have had considerable success working cooperatively.

The Marxist conception of the political left is surely dying, but that is not a decisive loss for a politics of the left, and should be a benefit. Marx’s dialectical materialism and its laws of history show how materialism quickly goes to strict determinism, unfreedom, and the disappearance of transcendence into meaninglessness. In addition, the introduction of Marxist ideas in the nineteenth century revived, in a new form, the pre-Enlightenment assumption that collectives are the primary independent human entities exercising legitimate rights over individuals, traditionally by means of monarchy, aristocracy, and the hierarchy of the Church, but also by means of police, military service, civic pageantry, censorship, and mass propaganda. Marxist party leaders took over that fundamental idea of authoritarian sovereignty, and in doing so decisively deflected leftist development away from its original trajectory. Some philosophy consistent with the radical Enlightenment insight, a secular vision of rich individual interiority, transcendent in its creative freedom and as such the basis for community, cultural development, and fulfilling human interconnection, must be the perennial core of any politics of the left, its taproot as the party of philosophy.

Recommended

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, Edited and with an Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, Translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0-226-80530-1.

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, written by Jonathan Israel, published by Princeton University Press (2014), ISBN: 978-0-691-16971-2.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by  J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The World that Doesn’t Matter

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 124, word count: 750.

Without the engagement of living subjectivity the world has no meaning. It can’t be beautiful or ugly, happy or sad, good or evil. There are no ethical issues in such a world. It is a world without tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce. Whatever happens in such a world does not matter. Only the teleological consciousness of future-bound subjectivity confers meaning on anything: sensitivity, conscious intent, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity and construction, for freedom; and doing so with a directionality or bearing of intent that is an interpretive construct of no-longer. The idea of freedom is a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which relevant novelty can be projected deliberately. Since time to come and a no-longer which situates relevance are entirely ideas rather than existing actualities, we are here encountering the subjective ideality of time, orientation, and spiritual bearing. It’s this creative freedom of ideality which is transcendent, and it qualifies subjectivity as the essential subject matter of an old branch of thinking known as metaphysics, long since gone out of style in our era of empirical science. Subjectivity, fountain of meaning, is one of the two metaphysical modes, the other being objectivity. Objectivity is the world imagined without ideality, the world that doesn’t matter.

We are completely familiar with subjectivity at the level of our personal locality. Anyone’s personal subjectivity looms large in the shape of how what-there-is matters. We care about what happens, certain situations and outcomes matter to us. We also experience the intelligence of people and animals around us in how they care and direct themselves in a world that matters to them. This is reasonably straightforward but everyone’s personal orientation is also situated in, and influenced by, a historical, cultural, and political context. There has been a history of projecting conscious intent beyond the kind of embodied persons familiar to us, outward to the cosmic far horizons. Such a conception is a personification of the cosmos on the large scale, a strictly incoherent idea but one that sets up a habit of trivializing the local sensitivity and conscious intent that we live with and recognize in the people we engage in conversation. However, it doesn’t take any special kind of subjectivity to confer meaning on the world. The presence of any and every one of the ordinary sensitive and teleological people we live among confers meaning on the entire cosmos. In fact, there is no way for any subjectivity to be special or extraordinary in a way that sanctifies what matters to it as what “really” matters. When anything matters to any subjectivity, then it matters in a way that is as absolute as it gets.

The legacy of cultural fixations on patriarchal hierarchy and its projection into the cosmos at large has left us assuming that, even though the cosmos is not personified on the grand scale, there must be some especially transcendent consciousness from-on-high, maybe the mysterious genius of great men or the sum of wisdom from heroic ancestors, which sanctifies the culture of values expressed in the structure of wealth and power. However, no such special consciousness exists, and none is required for meaning in individual or collective life. The transcendence of ordinary subjectivity is the only transcendence there is.

Since meaning is always and only conferred on events and situations by sensitive and caring teleology, it is not collectives, not culturally engineered “hive minds” or discourses, that merit a privileged role in defining what really matters. Such things are not instances of subjectivity. Nothing matters to a discourse, an artifact, or a text. Discourses don’t care or think, and neither caring nor thinking is confined within discourses.

Culturally supplied frameworks of orientation always include ideas that are meant to anchor the meaning of individual and collective life in relation to the ever-looming large scale of things, the global or cosmic scale, and the only way that any meaning can be anchored is in relation to some conception of subjective ideality. Everyone feels the looming of the largest scale, and so fashions some metaphysical frame of reference in an idea of the relationship between the transcendent fountain of meaning that is subjectivity over against meaningless objectivity. In spite of the historical tendency to universalize patriarchal hierarchy, metaphysics doesn’t need any special subjectivity or ideality. The subjectivity and ideality of ordinary experience is perfectly effective at making a world that matters.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Rudiments of Thinking

18 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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In the search for transcendence there is no longer any plausibility in a gaze toward far horizons, and finally we must recognize that transcendence is only in the gaze itself.

posting 119, word count 1,919.

There is no way to prevent the formation of neighbourhood street gangs exercising competitive team spirit when team spirit and competitions between team-spirit-bonded collectives is universally glorified and modelled at all levels of social organization, from school sports teams to nations in violent conflict, all expressing the manly culture and value system of “us against them” for the glory of winning trophies.

The large scale team-spirit-bonded collectives such as the USA, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, for example, are conspicuous examples of collective hive minds (and not the only ones). The broad national acceptance of American exceptionalism and the civic religion of militaristic American patriotism reveals that for many Americans there is nothing to be gained by knowing other orientations, other forms of interconnection, discoverable, for example, in other people and in the history of ideas, and so they remain ignorant of world history at large, and, like North Koreans, swallow the steady stream of carefully de-contextualized, edited, and slanted stories of history, ideas, and current events flooding mass media, propaganda that glorifies and terrorizes them through their identification with national institutions and symbols. No one would deny that modernity is an age of scientifically engineered messaging, of corporate, political, and ideological efforts to control public opinion, streamed pervasively through mass media, all at the command of the small group with the ability to mobilize great wealth.

Truth to the Masses

Elected officials with their advisors and assistants spin out narratives based on a perceived duty to mediate between factions with established power and the ordinary majority of people. The message that serves the purpose of politics will always be what seems most likely to reconcile a mass audience to the expectations or whims of the most powerful. The narrative that best supports the most powerful people and factions will always seem the most responsible and realistic. So it is that trying to be a responsible journalist, for example, often prevents a determined search for, or presentation of, fully contextualized truth. The danger of telling truth to power is a cliche, but politicians, academics, and journalists face real risks telling truth to the masses, and the masses are not the source of the danger.

Hive minds all work the same way, cultivating in every member a personal orientation to look up to authorities, to a commanding height, for a declaration of the personal/ collective situation, for updates on the story which defines the situation of everyone personally and of collective institutions. It is an orientation of cognitive and emotional dependence on the narration from a commanding height, or, in other words, it is patriarchy. In terms of individual psychology the orientation toward commanding height is the superego. A superego which you have been socialized to accept without question strictly limits your thinking. To begin to think autonomously you first have to recognize that much of your orientation was provided culturally with intent to immerse you in the hive mind story, and that important features of reality, of history for example, have been distorted or edited out to construct your orientation, so that your impression of reality is very unlike actual reality. It is possible to reconnect with reality, as illustrated in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, through a certain kind of self-directed re-education with a component of philosophical thinking (because metaphysics is crucial).

Two claims are made for the necessity of patriarchal sovereignty, and both are false. The first claim is that only the manly force imposed by the patriarchal hierarchy maintains social order against centripetal forces of self-interest, against the “state of nature” which would be a war of all against all (Thomas Hobbes). The problem with that claim is that it isn’t the the top-down power structure, a manifestation of a traditional hyper-masculine ethos, that enables the functioning of civil society. Instead, the sociability that makes civil society work is constructed perennially by the first-language-nurture socializing work performed continuously by women caring for infants and children. Language is a model of bottom-up social engagement operating independently of the commanding top-down hierarchy of force and law. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but something entirely different: mutually nurturing systems of sociability. Those processes that actually construct the coherence of societies are already operating reliably, but, absurdly, the profundity of their effects remains absent from even the most liberal of intellectual conversations.

The second claim is that the hierarchical organization of force is the eternal and natural order of things. This is a metaphysical claim, an assertion of eternal necessities decreed by a transcendence at the far horizons: god or natural law, obedience to which constitutes virtue. The appeal to natural law becomes metaphysics as soon as findings about what “is” are asserted as evidence for what “ought” to be. (Thanks David Hume.) Patriarchal thinking operates within an orientation in which eternal necessities, decreed from the farthest horizons, pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual, so that everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. This metaphysical claim is the ultimate justification of an orientation that looks to a commanding height for declarations of value, order, and identity, because the transcendence at the far horizons is the ultimate commanding height from which all others draw legitimacy. However, this metaphysical claim is untenable, merely privileging selected aspects of reality by appeal to something mysterious and too remote to be examined, and as such is a superstition. There is a more plausible alternative metaphysics based on anyone’s personal experience: the transcendence of individual creative consciousness, of individual free agency. More of this in a moment.

Hive Minds Make War

The kind of hive mind constructed within human social systems is always a way to persuade a majority to remain unthinking about the legitimacy of political and economic institutions. It demands blind faith in arrangements by the most powerful to proclaim the collective story, for example, proclaiming the need for a pre-emptive military strike against another collective. Cultural hive mind is a readiness for emotional responses to culturally supplied triggers, programmed belief and collective response. The ultimate reason for this unthinking is to defend and perpetuate a structure of sovereignty, the compulsory control over a majority by a minority faction, maintaining the immunities, advantages, and privileges of those who benefit most from and sponsor this sovereignty as a system of perpetual and acute inequality. It isn’t merely that controllers of great wealth have by far the most influence on government policies and practices, through political party funding, control of ‘think tanks’ and news media, and the paid activity of lobbyists, but also that the military-legal-police essence of governments as they exist is an expression of a peculiarly top-down hyper-masculine ethos glorifying a commanding height, a legacy and manifestation of entrenched power and wealth inequality, of self-preserving oligarchy.

A third claim made in defence of patriarchy is that individuals can’t do without immersion in some herd or other because individual personhood (individual thinking) does not exist. The first thing wrong with this is that any learning or socializing requires the activity of a pre-existing individual subject or self exercising an already coherent spiritual bearing. There is no now without a then, no here without a there, and every there and then is brought to the here and now spiritually by a person’s intelligence reorienting to immediate sensation, to its unique embodiment. Any situation is given meaning and sense by the action of a personal sensibility bringing specific context (specific questioning, curiosity, expectation, caring, hope: bearing, the sense of the passage of time) to it, transforming sensation into perception by interpreting sensation through a personal context. It is creative activity, a thought or idea of temporal opening that is thinking itself into the world. All of that must be active already before any cultural imitation or socialization can occur, so an individual’s thinking always retains a fundamental independence from any collective orientation or cultural norms. Individual personhood, independent of hive minds, is guaranteed by the rich individuality of consciousness and embodiment separate from any cultural socialization. Autonomous thinking exists, and there’s nothing more fulfilling.

This is where the previous refutation of the metaphysics of far horizons shows its consequences, because here we have a replacement metaphysics. In the search for transcendence there is no longer any plausibility in a gaze toward far horizons, and finally we must recognize that transcendence is only in the gaze itself. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power and eliminates the imperative to orient to an external commanding authority. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human. Since transcendent consciousness (freedom) occurs at the level of the embodied individual, and collectives have no original consciousness, there is no collective transcendence. With no transcendence at the top, collectives have to be legitimized from the level of the individual. Just as the metaphysics of far horizons implied a top-down social organization, this new metaphysics of individual consciousness implies a bottom-up organization. It means that metaphysics lines up on the side of women against patriarchy.

Another mistake in that third claim for patriarchy is the implication that human interconnectedness requires force, that there would be no culture or community without it. However, getting rid of patriarchal orientation does not require getting rid of human interconnections in general. Hive minds can be replaced with the better kinds of interconnection that already exist, with social arrangements among people who do not have or need an orientation toward a commanding height, but who instead interact with others in the joy of sharing the powers of creative consciousness among distinct individuals. Mutually nurturing systems of sociability are already operating and the patriarchy is merely a parasitic system imposed on them. For an orientation outside hive minds, human history is still human history, profoundly misrepresented by the stories that are used to fashion hive minds. Every individual still participates in that larger history that includes the whole collection of hive minds as well as what exists beyond them. As a self-possessed agent you have a special place in the historic cultural movement dissolving patriarchal dystopia.

In the ancient conception of philosophical thinking, the goal was to achieve imperturbability, which followed from what was identified as transcendent, namely eternity, eternal necessities. When the world is eternally pre-determined then cultivating imperturbability makes sense as an accomplishment of thinking. With rejection of totalitarian eternal necessities, replaced by recognition of transcendent individual freedom-in-the-passing-of-time, the whole point of philosophical thinking changes. In this orientation the intended achievement of thinking is autonomous agency, claiming and practicing the creative freedom which is the transcendence of spiritual beings in a life in the world. Agency is the truest expression and realization of human spirituality. In this age of scientifically engineered propaganda, of corporate, political, and ideological mass messaging, of identity politics, philosophical thinking as a portal to self-possession or agency has become crucial.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics (3): Crisis of the Left

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 117, word count: 1199

Metaphysics is the ultimate weakness of the political left-wing. Right-wing politics is the promotion of patriarchy, and the main pillar of patriarchy is the widespread personal orientation (superego) formed around bogyman metaphysics, assumptions of cosmic moral ledger-keeping in preparation for a final reckoning, a cosmic plan. Any conception such as karma that includes the idea of a cosmic reckoning, or any other reward and punishment after death, is personification of nature on the grand scale (bogyman metaphysics), entrenching an idealized paradigm of patriarchy as a top-down personal orientation. Platonic Ideal Forms and any other metaphysics ascribing primacy to some conception of eternal Being or a Great Chain of Being are also examples of top-down metaphysics. It is the top-down orientation which confers meaning on imperialistic war. Right-wingers have elaborate social and biological theories (Hobbes, Darwin) cementing conflict, trophies, and centralized monopolies of violence as crucial forces of civilization and society. Such theories are expressions of top-down metaphysical assumptions, and the metaphysics is the ultimate support of right-wing political power. Right-wing thinking operates in an overall conception in which the objective world consists of certain specific, determinate, and eternal structures (great chain of being) and categories (atomic facts) which pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual. In that right-wing world everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. The right-wing orientation is a looking outward for transcendence or for an equivalent for transcendence in material determinism, categorically given and absolute in the Great Chain of Being. Top-down metaphysics is entirely bogus but unfortunately is the universal cultural default, entrenched by history and tradition. Such is the dystopia in which the prospects and strategies for autonomous thinking as an individual must be devised. The good news is that, since the personal superego is the patriarchy, then disrupting the patriarchy is an accomplishment of thinking, an intellectual and cultural enterprise. More good news is that there has been since ancient times a cultural stream of philosophical thinking, a minority report, that resisted and disputed the dominant orientation.

Historical Roots of the Political Left

The main roots of the political left, expressed for example in socialism, are in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically in the radical branch of the Enlightenment which asserted universal human rationality, a transcendent power at the level of the individual, and developed that claim into a profound rejection of social and economic inequality as most evident in such institutions as monarchy, aristocracy, and religious hierarchies. The other looming presence in the ideology of the left, Marxist theory, was merely a footnote to and a distortion of Enlightenment ideas, and Enlightenment ideology itself was a particular formulation of the cultural stream of philosophical thinking that disputed the dominant orientation since antiquity. Marxist theory attempted to change the foundation of egalitarianism from universal human rationality (at the level of the individual) to the predetermined working out of economic laws governing class struggle in history: dialectical materialism. It was a variant of Hegelian (top-down) metaphysics, driven by the cosmic Final Cause, and a tragic dead end innovation. The collapse of communism in The Soviet Union and eastern Europe exposed the absurdity of using materialism as a bottom-up foundation for such Enlightenment ideas as innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy. Although materialism can claim to be an alternative to top-down orientations, and was promoted as such by the radical branch of Enlightenment, it cannot avoid determinism and so becomes a justification for anything that exists. The idea of economic determinism is still an institutionalized assumption in the science of economics. Karl Marx’s ideas of dialectical materialism and laws of history demonstrate how materialism settles into strict fatalism, unfreedom, and the impossibility of transcendence (the creation of unforeseeable alternatives and possibilities). The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just the way it has always been. The collapse of Marxism was not the collapse of the long historical development of egalitarianism as implicit in Enlightenment ideas, because the same egalitarianism was vestigial in ancient humanist philosophy and in Renaissance humanism and in a continuous stream of cultural developments in western cultural history. The pressure of egalitarianism has lasted so long against apparently crushing forces because it expresses the fundamental reality of transcendence at the level of the individual, implicit in the idea of universal human rationality. The collapse of Marxism merely discredits materialist and top-down metaphysics (as in economic theory) as a base for the political left.

Metaphysics for the Political Left

Although in the early twenty-first century the political left is faltering badly for lack of an articulated metaphysics, it already has an informal conceptual framework, a thinking orientation, which implies its metaphysics. Left-wing thinking operates in a conception of the world in which individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures. In that context, individual subjectivities have a mission that goes beyond struggling for survival and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, a mission, instead, to conceive and make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is an essential part of that mission. On the left-wing view, then, individual subjectivity is transcendent in relation to the merely inertial and entropic world. If metaphysics is the identification of transcendence, then the political left is already committed to a metaphysics. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human.

The salvation of the left does not lie in abandoning transcendence in a rush to the metaphysical bottom of materialism, nor in a backward-looking reverence for antique conceptions of top-down cosmic providence, but instead in a reconceptualizing of transcendence that builds on the Enlightenment recognition of individual rationality. The great mistake in metaphysics has been to gaze outward, especially toward far horizons, squinting to make out messages in the haze. The focus of metaphysics has to be the looking itself, not what is seen but the seeing. Consciousness, and only consciousness, is transcendent, and consciousness occurs only at the level of the individual, and not as a passive receptivity but instead in the application of personal context in a moment of interpretive sensitivity, a context-projecting moment of interpretation. There is no looking or seeing without an encounter of personally specific context with novel sensitivity, a personally spiritual act.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Superego and Social Attachment

25 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by in Gender culture

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Disrupting the connection which the superego welds between an individual and the hive mind of a sovereign state is not disconnecting from human attachments. In fact, there are two parallel systems of human interconnection, operating simultaneously. One of them is the patriarchy, roughly described in Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. This system asserts that social cooperation and stability depend on enforcement from a commanding height, a sovereign. It institutionalizes a masculine ethos in which it takes the strongest among aggressive individuals to prevent continuous conflict of all against all for strictly personal gratification. The patriarchy is a prime example of authoritarian top-down social control, operating by force, the fear of force, and a general deference to power achieved through police and the edifice of laws, courts, lawyers, and prisons. Anyone’s superego is a commanding height construct, a structure of habits of deference to power. The other system of interconnection can be described as first-language-nurture culture and centres on the nurturing and socializing of children, including development of language competence, commonly practiced by women from time immemorial. The feminine process is bottom-up community building and the fact that women carry on their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness in societies, with people who can speak to one another and form mutual relationships. Disrupting the superego is discarding the commanding height patriarchy, the showy but minimally effective welds of human interconnectedness, preserving the really effective bottom-up sources of interconnection.

All concepts of the large scale structure of nature as a Great Chain of Being with perfection at the top and evil at the bottom are projections of the masculinist idea of the necessity of a commanding height. Assertions of the necessity of top-down control emphasize a certain view of human nature, a human nature tainted by original sin or other inherent vice, dominated entirely by self-gratification, often willing to do monstrous acts to get it. However, the monstrous acts of humans are consequences of acquired culture, not of impulses inherent to human nature as such. Whatever connects us to one another as spiritual entities is no Great Chain of Being ordained from on-high, or anything like it. Disrupting the superego is personally accepting primary agency, taking responsibility for making sense of things, taking on the authority to think autonomously. It is not the unleashing of monstrous internal impulses such as those included in the Freudian idea of “id”.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is Metaphysics

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Spirituality, Time, and Ideas

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Irritation Alert!

21 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Freedom, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Tags: time, spirituality, metaphysics, idealism, religion, civilization, interconnectedness

A certain philosophical position is being developed in these blog postings, and it is likely to be irritating to almost everybody. At the core is a certain metaphysical claim about time, freedom, intelligence, and transcendent spirituality. Time is taken as a spiritual reality although not an objective actuality. This involves a claim that a somewhat novel idealism is required for understanding time, which will be nonsense to people devoted to materialism, realism, empiricism, and the application of those notions in science. However, the account of spirituality rejects disembodied caring, cosmic moral ledger keeping, original sin, a cosmic plan, faith in mysteries, and the relevance of eternity, most of the key features of religions, and so will be distasteful to adherents of religion, both eastern and western, antique and New Age. This philosophical position supports the optimistic claim that the best days of humanity should be in the future, and so will disappoint those who long for a return to the wisdom of ancient, medieval, or other pre-modern cultural systems. In common with an important stream of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, it finds dystopian features in what is called civilization, in all existing cultural systems including the post-feudal and post-colonial Euro-American regime of investor supremacist capitalism. (These dystopian features are crucially linked to questions of philosophy and yet are unrecognized by historians and social scientists.) That line of exploration will be just noise to supporters of market solutions to social problems such as liberals, corporatists, investors, and most academics. The account given here of the human interconnectedness denies the importance of the masculine virtues of strength, kinetic action, and competitive spirit, and so will be distasteful to sports fans and generally to males in traditionally masculine sub-cultures and occupations. It rejects the importance of the symbols and the pageantry of communal unity and transcendence, of superiority and inferiority, including property accumulation, and so will be opposed by traditionalists, social pragmatists, communitarians, and symbolists. It rejects the legitimacy of sovereignty, and will therefore be distasteful to monarchists, conservatives, communists, and meritocracy enthusiasts. However, it takes human interconnectedness and sociability so seriously that it will be distasteful also to gun and property-focused libertarians. Yet, it is a kind of metaphysics of individual autonomy and supports the universality of individual human dignity as conceived in the Enlightenment, so alienating post-modernists. It rejects the tragic view of life and the spiritually ennobling effect of stories, music, fine arts, and monumental architecture, so will be distasteful to romantics and opera fans. It asserts philosophical thinking, rather than journalism, as the way to hold power to account. Many of the postings may feel long and troublesome to read, with unexpected progressions. However, if you really want the “red pill” experience, then, as Cypher said to Neo: “fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye bye”.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Metaphysics occurs as a scattered multitude of distinct individual eruptions, each personally entangled in the duality of physics and spirituality. Each spirituality is self-aware as a flight (variably desperate) into a semi-obscure future as the form of the most personal incompleteness and newness. In contrast to every instance of spiritual flight, the surroundings of physics does not care, anticipate, aspire, or evaluate. It merely falls like an ocean wave utterly frozen in timeless uncaring; and we scattered eruptions of metaphysical time stand tilting fallward on the tsunami of actuality and each carve a personal mark, surfing the entropic descent.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.