Tag Archives: nature

War, Hive-Minds, & Dystopia

19 Thursday Jun 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Between Spirit and Dystopia

Featured

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Transcendence

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 202, word count: 1,379.

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

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

Phenomenology of Spirit: Anomalous Existence

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

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

Roots of Dystopia Now

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

Hive-Mind Reality Distortion

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

Bonfire of Vanities

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

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Playful Spirit and the B-Bang

Featured

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Fragment 200, word count: 391.

tags: time, spirit, ideality, physics, Big Bang, play, freedom, nature.

When you get right down to spirit and physics, spirit is primary in yet another sense. Spirit plays in a way inconceivable for physics. Spirit plays at the ragged new edge of nature-unfinished, as a busy principle of world organization that organizes a world in the form of an unfinished person in an unfinished world. It personifies this edge of existence as itself, localized but stretched in time by its ideality, by its memory-based knowing, by caring and anticipating, and by an active intent to shape a personal future. This time-stretch of ideality introduces locally a degree of freedom for spontaneous creativity, for improvisation. Spirit (ideality) occurs as a multitude of localizing and dramatizing principles of suppositional world organization, at the raw edge of time, a multitude that is scattered but clustered, each one organizing a sense of personal surroundings in which to carry on a life according to the principle of personal caring and agency as an animate biological body with certain sensitivities and kinaesthetic powers within the surroundings. Each fabricates a sensibility, a personal and complex vigilance in aid of its agency. Each one is busy extending its suppositional sense of surroundings as contextual readiness to make sense of whatever might be coming. Freedom is possible in an unsettled world still just bursting into its existence. If you think of the Big Bang not simply as a something blowing up but instead as the bursting forth of existence at the foundational cosmic level, then time is still the Big Bang, a breaking-open of existence, the ongoing bursting forth of existence-as-incomplete. The present is the raw edge of the breaking-open, the wave front of the burst-into-existence. Human time, the stretched time of ideality, has taken nature in this aspect of instability and made it into personalized and personally guided mutability. With intent to burst forth personally, spirit reads nature’s instability as futurity, the opening for intentional agency, using foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and power to overcome even its regularity of habits for the sake of making a distinctive personal mark on the world that doesn’t yet exist. Spirit differs from inertial actuality by suppositional planning ahead, making guesses and choices among alternative plausible futures, whereas the objects of ‘just there’ actuality remain un-playful, the media of immutable forces.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

Asymmetrical Dualism

Featured

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

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

Featured

Posted by in Nature, Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

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.

How Reality Matters

Featured

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Fragment 197, word count: 596.

Tags: nature, hierarchy, politics, essentialism, spirit, perception, reality, time, Nietzsche.

The awesome weight and depth, the clear outlines and forces of resistance, the ‘thusness” or brute presence of Nature-at-large are considered by an essentialist sensibility as unassailably declarative of “what is”, or “what is real”. The essentialist sensibility attaches itself to apparent knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as definite and enduring. Moreover, what is striking in the structure of Nature to the essentialist sensibility is a Great (food) Chain of Being extending into the exercise of power among humans, into social and economic organization. Competitive hierarchies are at the core of this essentialism and competitive hierarchies encourage stark “us against them” conceptual dichotomies: master/ slave, predator/ prey, strong/ weak, victor/ vanquished. Nietzsche, for example, in his darker aspect, embraced this essentialism with enthusiasm, asserting that some people are really aristocratic, giving them the right to dominate, control, and loot the work of others. His view included the aristocracy of men over women. Such realist essentialism defines the political right-wing for whom Nature, understood in this way, is incomparably more important, more authoritative, than ordinary individual spirituality, whatever such spirituality might be. Essentialists assume that the categories of things that make up the world (male/ female, aristocrat/ worker, master/ slave) are predetermined prior to any creative work of ideation, which is to say prior to any application of the particular interests of caring drama-projecting sensibilities. The reason conservatives get so agitated about transgender people is that gender fluidity contradicts the basic conservative essentialism which includes that male and female are different Categories of Being, different substances, different materials or essences.

Fragment 196, February 1, 2023, Spirit is Reality (word count: 283)

In our world in which spirit is reality, though, in which spirit exists as a busy multitude of localizing and personally dramatizing principles of world organization, the general authority of any essentialism is impossible. Meaning, relevance, and portent have to be conferred by acts of a spirit onto the structures and forces that are given in nature, and no kind of oligarchy or commanding height, neither human or cosmic, holds a monopoly on the power to do that. It is the dramatic conceptual work of individually embodied ordinary subjective spirits. Nothing experienced is or can be beyond the creative work of ideation. Perceiving is part of that creative work. Spirit is the questioning push directing any perceiving gaze to keep opening the world in its dramatic flight, never finished. For living spiritual agents, time is a personal future opening by the power of skills learned in the work of aging and by inherent creativity. These busy personalizing principles of world organization warp their vicinity of objects and events toward some kind of suppositional best case among multiple alternative and variously improbable futures, all non-actualities, separate from the brute actuality of nature. The existence of spirit manifests an unfinished world, always being created, a world new and indefinite in a passionate embrace of time.

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

If the truth of metaphysics can be spread about, the truth that there is no Great Chain of Being (that idea being an article of class propaganda) and that in fact the world, especially the social world, is mutable because every individual person is a source of creative power (transcendent opening of possibilities for the shape of things in an otherwise inertial and entropic world), then political essentialists lose their legitimizing ideals.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.

The Metaphysics is You

Featured

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 185, word count: 505.

tags: philosophy, metaphysics, dystopia, embodiment, personality, reality, politics, culture, nature, freedom, Plato.

Rarely does an individual have much control over the evolutionary momentum of multigenerational cultural entities such as religions, sovereign states, cities, industries, or institutions such as armies and war, universities and literacy. A lifetime is barely enough to get a well contextualized sense of what they are. We behold them for a heartbeat, a blink, as we transform through the life cycle of a human animal. This combines with generational amnesia, the personal-level, deeply experienced knowledge lost with the mortality of each generation, and also with the new-generation’s  innocence and its inclination to have a joyful life in a joyful world. Biologically, our lives are expressed in bodies which are at some moment in an arc of species mutation already in progress for some unthinkable duration. We live the gifts and limitations of our moment in that long arc of mutation. It is not surprising then that, socially, accommodations are made for whatever activities and systems of relationship are practiced at our moment of intervention, even if they have a dystopian core, because often enough that seems to make it easier to find some joy in being alive. This makes a certain sort of philosophical work almost impossible.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of a fixed and eternal structure of existence, are always canonized in dystopia 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. For example, the commanding heights of Plato’s conception of metaphysical reality, typical of dystopia, exist somewhere on the invisible far side of objects, a substrate behind the impersonally given world of objective things. They are meant to make sense of how the never-ceasing fluidity of familiar things can be connected to a stability profound enough to count as essential reality. On that view, the situation may be tragic, but it is nature and you can’t change nature. Things are what they must be, manifesting an existential bedrock of categories and laws. Although canonical, this is only wild speculation.

There is an opposing metaphysics of primordial existence, a conception that denies any categorical commanding heights. In the most straightforward way, you are the metaphysics in your world, the living ideality here on the near side of phenomena. All forms of ideality occur in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s embodied life in the world. Ideality is always personality, the creative transcendence of ordinary, individual-level, temporal agency living a creativity that transcends nature and makes what sense it will of the physical or divine givens of nature. There may be a system of stark givens, but it has no intrinsic purposes, doesn’t matter to itself and cannot care, and that system has no immutable grip on the conceptions of us agents of temporal ideality. Social systems derived from this metaphysical source can be perfectly free of any influences from the patterns of organization in brute actuality.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Edge of Existence

28 Monday Jun 2021

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 178, word count: 1,044.

tags: existence, metaphysics, time, creativity, freedom, caring, drama, agency, empathy, science, religion, politics, patriarchy, civilization, malaise.

The difference made by recognizing a bit of metaphysics, specifically a certain conception of ideality, is a much needed and long overdue disruption of two canonical but failing universal explanations: religious personification of nature and the materialist fatalism of science. Thinking of ideality as embodied (discontinuous and discretely located) points and arcs of creative intentionality* opens a way to recognize human-scale freedom and creativity as real without wildly speculative and implausible personifications. Human reality is a beach where a personal interiority of ever-reshaping dramas made of caring and ideas (expectations and hopes, questions, aspirations, and intentions) gush out in deliberate activity and wash actuality. Features of brute actuality can be shaped into culture by these actions. Culture in this sense is any product of intentional craft, any effective application of purposive ideality to the merely natural material of actuality: the carved wood, the ploughed field. Freedom is real in this tumbling co-existence of gushing creative ideality and the absolute incompleteness of existence (both ideality and actuality) as witnessed in the endless passage of time. Any serious conception of freedom requires enduring points of ideality actively living, forming actuality, at the incomplete edge of existence, continuously actualizing a stream of spontaneously invented intentions within a personally learned and learning context of expectations. Knowledge is always an elaboration, specification, and development of personally created dramas of caring.

Since the European codification of mathematical science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after nearly a millennium of theocratic Christendom, the most innovating civilizations have been stuck with a dysfunctional codependence of scientific materialism and immaterial angels and demons. Both religion and science have ongoing appeal, science from rapidly developing commercial applications, especially communication and data processing technology (innovations in entertainment with advertising), vaccines of course; and religion from a most primitive reflex to personify the world, which is to suppose that purposive intentionality creates everything. But the binocular culture which perceives with the materialist lens in one eye and the world-personifying lens in the other is spectacularly unsuccessful delivering peace and justice in its political and governance arrangements, and no wonder. Science and religion have in common a fundamental legitimation of patriarchal hierarchy as core social organization. To be clear, this is top-down human-on-human macro parasitism, various forms of the master/ slave relationship. Religious personification asserts that such organization is the eternal divine plan (divinity is the primordial master), and scientific fatalism that such a food chain is made inevitable by immutable forces of nature. These are both conceptions of existence as profoundly complete, without any possibility for the creation of real novelty. In that context governance is a matter of imposing on everyone an orientation up the hierarchy for a sense of direction derived from an overarching culturally stipulated drama.

Culture in this sense is the complex system of imitative, repetitive, and normative human activity that expresses and sustains a collective’s sense of unity and identity. This is the sense in which culture, in the context of patriarchal parasitism, imposes a hive-mind on its participants. This has produced and maintained dystopian political regimes poisoned by the history of war culture abetted by religions that demand irrational credulity and fervent expressions of reverence and supplication upward, situating deity at the apex of human hierarchy. Outsourcing the determination of reality to a God, impersonal Platonic Ideas, or even just nature denigrates human ideality by alienating the creative work of conceptualization actually required and accomplished by individuals orienting ourselves in the world. It represents human interiority as a passive recipient of a pre-completed world, including the social and political world, and has the effect of cementing individuals into a mass mythology of inadequacy and dependence. Science further denigrates personal interiority by reducing it to biologically pre-determined lusts and reactions to external stimuli, and religion denigrates it as an engine of error and misery, completely hopeless without the controlling intervention of some more perfect and powerful personification.

Individual ideality, however, is profoundly more active and creative than religion or science can recognize. The primordial act of self-creation by every ideality is the supposition of time. Ideality is the non-actuality which supposes. Every ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating time-wave, living in and through a constant flight through time. A time-wave is a dramatically-propelled progressive change of suppositions. One vector of this flight consists of things slipping by and falling away, and the other vector is a dramatic personal leap into a supposed future. Time is a personal dimension of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality in which, oriented with knowledge, expectations, and questions abstracted from a supposed ephemeral past, an intelligence creates specific intentions to project itself with a degree of creative freedom into an ever-newly-opening not-yet or future. This being-in-time distinguishes ideality from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the opening of freedom-from-nature at the edge of existence and as such the transcendence that spiritual interiority brings to the beach of reality. With an appropriate sense of this interiority the personal importance of competitions and appearances falls away. 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, personal hero story) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in the culturally dominant conceptual system.

The political difference made by recognizing persons universally as metaphysical engines of spontaneous creativity, exploiting a precarious position at the edge of existence by improvising a desperately caring drama of sensitivity and personal expression, is a flattening of the political landscape. There is no justification here for master/ slave social organization. There is no general disrespect or denigration of humanity/ personality inherent in this conception. The political imperative changes from imposing control via belligerent us-against-them hive minds to cultivating and encouraging autonomous creativity and person-to-person interconnections shaped by empathy.

The often lamented malaise of civilization is the result of extreme cultural denigration of humanity/ personality combined with a romantic overestimation of the explanatory power of mathematical science. These have killed off innovative thinking involving metaphysics, but only a certain metaphysical reconceptualization can amend the currently toxic cultural legacy.

Note

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

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Class War, Embodiment, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

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 any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Existence Matters, Being Doesn’t

30 Monday Mar 2020

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 162, word count: 340.

Humanity/ personality is a gaze into nature from a time-bound drama in which some things matter more than others. Without the gaze of a personality, nature has no drama and nothing about it matters. The gaze is a questioning of what’s there to encounter, a living point in an arc of intended intervention, knowing, anticipating, aspiring, discovering, and learning. The seeking gaze is a bearing onward in an ever changing poise of orientation that defines a monad of agency conducting the personal drama of a person’s life. Not only is the gaze of consciousness a gaze into nature from a particularly embodied drama, but it is an act of the drama, a move forward in and by the drama, a creative act that is an essential piece of the drama. The gaze is the drama in the act of building and playing out, of extending itself by going on living in the world. An individual’s momentarily located orientation and bearing is inseparable from the emotional stakes of the larger dramatic idea of this embodied life. The direction and sensitivity of the gaze, the specifics of its questioning, are the application of a curated sensibility, a many layered orientation, a sum-up of all previous engagements, lessons learned, and vectors undertaken, the whole of a personal no-longer. All the context that makes sense of anything is in the questioning of the gaze, the sensibility expressed. The orientation and bearing of an individual’s questioning is reconfigured by everything learned, by every recognition and discovery. What personality has instead of an essence is a learning arc, a personal fountain of curiosity and intent expressed in a questioning engagement and in the creation of an ever changing path through a temporally unstable actuality. The scientific conceptual system leaches all drama from existence, and so leaches out reasons, meanings, creation, and ideas in general, and so presents a limited impression of reality. The only kind of conceptual framework that can comprehend the drama of what matters is an existential idealism.

Embedded links:

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

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

Fragment 160, February 8, 2020, Existentialism is an Idealism (word count: 728)

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.