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Tag Archives: nihilism

What is Real?

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

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

Fragment 192, word count: 537.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Transcendence

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aristocracy, Christendom, Hierarchy, Nietzsche, nihilism, patriarchy, Stoicism, values, will

Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Nietzsche didn’t do anything like revalue all values, and it is revealing to consider what values he did not question: namely aristocratic superiority within the social hierarchy of wealth and power. Nietzsche was retreating into a strong cultural current from feudal Christendom, namely the ‘feudal’ current: aristocratic crime-family culture, derived originally from patriarchal dominance in herding culture: men with weapons on horses. Nietzsche loathed and worked to discredit the other cultural current from Christendom, namely Christianity, because it promoted an otherworldly (heavenly) focus that gave priority to “selfless” values. He dismissed altruism, selflessness, meekness, and turning the other cheek, which he thought of as slave values, feminine values, and nihilistic, in favour of ancient and traditional masculine dominance values, as exemplified in ancient Greek warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, dominance, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Nietzsche despised and blamed the victims of conquest and oppression. He gazed upon the same European history as Rousseau and Marx but did not fault the crime family aristocracy for being parasites on the subsisting majority, but instead accepted their claims of nobility (projecting onto them the nobility he experienced in his own creativity) and admired their viciousness. He blamed the oppressed for being weak. Their weakness made them deserve whatever oppression they experienced. Nietzsche gave the crime family class credit for whatever he found positive in European culture. As historical fact, European aristocracy could not have established the wealth and power it did without the senior partnership of the Church of Rome promoting its elaborate religious ideologies. In a superstitious age, it was the religious culture of desperate fear and hope that utterly subdued resistance and solidified mass resignation. Yet, Nietzsche blamed the Church for proclaiming a set of values that persuaded the weak and oppressed to find meaning in their oppression and de-valued the manly military values of aristocracy.

Within the legacy of Zarathustra, to which Nietzsche was drawn, the world where we humans live is irredeemably abysmal as the creation of an evil god, the lesser of the duality of high gods. Rejecting any heavenly escape, Nietzsche found himself faced with a choice between utter nihilism or the Stoic (and Romantic) determination to prove personal transcendence by a supreme act of will to accept existence as whatever it is, and even to will its eternal recurrence in every ugly detail.

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

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom, Copernicus, creativity, culture, Darwin, embodiment, individuality, nihilism, spirituality

Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Christianity taught, and European Christendom accepted for centuries, that the human spiritual drama, our unique opportunity for ethical elevation by coming to know and align with the transcendent deity, is the purpose of all existence. Humans were thought to be the primary achievement of the all-creating God. Born as an exile into an initial state of disgrace within the lusts, pains, and thrills of a mortal body, each human is capable of recognizing its existence as more authentically one of transcendent spirituality and changing its way of life to express that spirituality. The worldly society of Christendom, controlled at all levels by the hierarchy and laws of the Roman Church in partnership with the secular military aristocracy, was accepted as the means by which individuals were guided to the spiritual life, a state of grace whose reward was blissful immortality. In the sixteenth century, within a broad advance of science, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered and revealed that the human home planet was not the centre of God’s cosmos, suggesting a more marginal status for human being. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin presented findings suggesting that humans are indistinguishable from animals, just naked apes, driven by instinctive drives and passions beyond individual control, with no qualitative specialness placing us in a uniquely elevated category. For much of the educated stratum of nineteenth century Europe, this apparent loss of human standing in the great scheme of things was a revelation of nihilism, a catastrophic loss of purpose and value. This was the context in which Nietzsche conceived his mission of thinking.

With God removed from the human situation, the Christian drama of existence faded out and with it the sense of meaning and purpose derived from that drama. Reflecting on human history soon reveals that no eventual outcome of biological evolution can give value and meaning to human existence, since it is unknowable, nor can the historical progress of human civilization do it since that reveals no verifiable arc toward a fulfillment. In the absence of these large structures as navigational guides the problem of meaning and purpose becomes entirely the individual’s problem and actually defines, on Nietzsche’s view, the monadic singularity of the human individual, the loneliest loneliness. As it happens, however, the fundamental nature or quality of individual spirit, the will to power, contains within itself a dramatic dynamic capable of achieving happiness, and so defeating nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the universal ethical and existential imperative for every individual is self-perfection, though that achievement is possible only for strong domineering spirits. Only the strongest spirits are capable of the happiness of self-perfection because only the strongest are capable of self-domination or self-overcoming by sublimating the instinctive animal impulses (Dionysian) into products of a dominant personal rationality (Apollonian), imposing a unifying form and style on all expressions of that sublimated energy. This Dionysian – Apollonian dialectic is the intrinsic dynamic of the will to power, the fundamental living force. Culture that is elevating to behold and appropriate is created from the sublimation of bestial impulses and instincts. Even though those impulses and instincts originate in and always declare the body, without them there is no energy to be sublimated into high art and culture. Strong and passionate impulses require an even stronger force of rationality to impose form and style on them. Artists and philosophers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, are typically the people who discipline themselves to sublimate their great passions into creative activities. Nietzsche calls such spirits ubermensch, higher men, the only people of value in his estimation because in the ecstasy of their original creation they uniquely manifest authentic individuality. Specimens of higher men are rare and occur unpredictably in various times, societies, races, and ethnic groups, and it seems that for Nietzsche they are “The Elect”, forever predetermined for blessedness. The rest of us are a herd of doomed beasts of no interest or value, sometimes spiritualized to some extent by encountering the achievements of the higher ones.

There are striking similarities between Nietzsche’s conception of the drama and tragedy of existence and the previously dominant one from Christendom. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. Separation of people into The Elect and the damned is one similarity. Both dramas involve a tension or dialectic between animal embodiment and some version of a transcendent spirituality which exerts itself against animality and offers a happier and more authentically meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s version, however, the impulses of the body are never left behind but always remain the source of life’s energy. In addition, Nietzsche’s spiritualizing, sublimating, force is militant rationality, giver of expressive form, stability, and style, replacing the poor Christian spirit of meek obedient submission, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, and altruism.

Such was Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. It is philosophically unusual in recasting the Christian drama by eliminate a commanding and controlling deity while still finding a way to divide blessed from damned. That vision clearly doesn’t defeat nihilism for everyone, only for the precious few his message was apparently designed to reach. However, if we discount Nietzsche’s peculiar aristocratic exclusivity, we can appreciate his “Yes” to embodiment as inseparable from the ecstasy of personal creativity, his close attention to the interior experience of creativity and its independence from any conformist herd mind.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.

Zarathustra’s Secret, written by Joachim Kohler, translated from German by Ronald Taylor, Published by Yale University Press (English edition June 2002), ISBN-10: 0300092784, ISBN-13: 978-0300092783.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History

04 Thursday Apr 2019

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

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creation, culture, freedom, History, human nature, idealism, ideas, metaphysics, monotheism, nihilism, original sin, personality, politics, reason, science, sovereignty

Fragment 145, Word count: 2,189.

In eighteenth century Europe there was an epochal change in the culturally dominant conception of reality, a change from the dominance of religion to the dominance of science. This is familiar cultural history but poorly understood because, so far in our epoch, science has kept up a barrage of triumphal self-glorification. The story science tells of itself is that over a recent and well documented period humanity’s leading teams of theorists and researchers finally came to understand reality when they used the objective empiricism of scientific method to overcome superstitious assumptions. Events, that were once considered deliberately framed messages to humans from a supernatural world of disembodied but personified (caring) entities (such as angels and demons) with effective powers in our world, were re-conceived in science as concrete cause-effect sequences that can be measured, mapped, predicted, and controlled by human intervention. With establishment of science, the global culture of intellectual inquiry is now proud and happy to have finished its task, content with a post-heroic and workmanlike mopping up of loose ends, filling in little gaps, and working out technological applications of scientific knowledge. Any re-conceptualization of fundamental reality is unimaginable. There is an intellectual certainty and a narrowing of focus that comes with faith in the unlimited explaining power of mathematical science, universally prized. This finally relegates philosophy to the status of museum piece, bringing forth a heartfelt sigh of collective relief from the community of scholars.

There is, of course, an unmentionable giraffe in this picture. The stunning oddity is the ongoing pervasiveness and cultural authority of both religion and science, in spite of their stark incompatibility. This simultaneous acceptance of two mutually exclusive principles of authoritative explanation should not be possible, but is certainly the case and apparently a comfortably stable cultural structure. As fundamental systems for explaining what is real, both science and religion are philosophical claims, metaphysical claims, one affirming and the other denying the effective existence of ideality.

Creationist Monotheism

Before science became a coherent matrix of explanation, the previously dominant metaphysics in Europe was creationist monotheism, exemplified in the three Abrahamic religions. Creationist monotheism is a dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (divine intelligence) who created the objective material world (in itself measurable, mappable, definite, and predictable) in a unique episode of exuberant caprice. Humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created in the likeness of that creator, similar to divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality, even though humans are materially embodied within the material world. This peculiar existence which has no appearance as such, the existence of ideality, is inseparable from what is familiar as personality, but the story of divine creation presents us with two very distinct categories of personality: embodied human personality and disembodied divine personality. This bi-modality was fundamental to the entire worldview of feudal Christendom, for example, explaining all existence as the will of a disembodied spirit-force, which, being pure ideality, bridged existence and non-existence in its very being. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention and agency, bearing-into-futurity teleology. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and is the essence of creation. There is no conception of creation that does not begin in teleological ideality. The idea of divine creation, like any idea of creation, falls completely within the description of personalities as vectors of ideality. What is decisive is that ideality is always personality, that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of some teleological personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, sensitivity, knowledge, and the preconception of intentions. Any claim placing ideality as crucial in reality is an idealism. With idealism something is recognized as a living being, personified, with a creative agency-calculating gaze into an open futurity, open with various possibilities anticipated from an inventiveness inherent to itself. So, idealism encompasses freedom, spontaneous creation, and unpredictable novelty, and insists on these as crucial features of reality.

In the creationist monotheistic version of dualism (Creator and created) the divine principle of creation, and so ideality, is primary and dominant, making it strictly idealist even though not often declared as such. This was the culturally dominant sense of reality prior to the advent of science, and what science meant to accomplish was the annihilation of all forms and vestiges of idealism. Since idealism affirms spontaneous creation, freedom, and unpredictable novelty, it seems, from the scientific perspective, like an easy slide to angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, because, in its essential creativity and freedom, ideality itself is essentially transcendent, something like magical in comparison to lumpen entropic dust and rocks. The tendency of science is not merely to demote ideality from its once dominant place (as divinity) in reality, but to eliminate it from reality completely. However, without some strong conception of idealism encompassing freedom, spontaneous creation, reason, and unpredictable novelty, the totality of existence is merely falling in precisely the way it must, and none of it matters in the least. That is the utter nihilism of science. It invites us to accept a grim stoicism but without the providential Logos that softened the ancient version. Not many people can seriously accept the nihilism of science because we have vivid personal lives of ideality and easy interconnectedness with other personalities making expressive utterances within lives of reasons and willful agency.

There are obviously many problems with creationist monotheism as a culturally dominant idealism. The grading of personalities into divine and human categories clearly proved to be toxic. With an omnipotent will creating the totality of existence, everything, again, is exactly as it must be, this time by divine plan in which the future is eventually to reveal some overriding goodness and reason. Divine personality was conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and tester of men, and as such a model of sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Nature had to be the actualized will of divine personality. Earthly trophies (property) were divinely awarded markers of merit, proclaiming a divine right of the strongest to impose sovereign ownership upon the lives and property of the weaker. The sovereign state, ruled by the strongest as personal property, was the local representative of divine sovereignty, a personified collective entity always being tested in conflicts with others for property and standing. What jumps out in this version of idealism is that so little was made of what human personality has in common with divine personality: the fundamental existence of living ideality. Rather than interpreting that commonality as a decisive transcendence in human existence, emphasis was placed instead on selected features of human embodiment, a fleshy animal embodiment, mortal carrier of decay, as the main determinant of human nature. (Science later built on this enthusiastically.) Human ideality was interpreted as the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. This sensed sameness, made miserable by the needs and indignities of material living, in the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of embodied personality, part of a twisted effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to a divine-like existence of individual creative freedom, on the hope that embodied denigration would atone for the claim to divinity and so qualify the individual for an eternal afterlife of pure disembodied ideality. This is the root superstition that makes creationist monotheism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human to human relations, sanctifying pervasive human macro-parasitism.

This brings us back to the weird co-existence of religion and science, strictly incompatible systems of explaining what is real. The reason these two co-exist is that they must, since neither is truly viable by itself. Science gives us a fatal nihilism and religion gives us a fatally warped recognition of the transcendence of ideality, a recognition so warped that it readily slides into fantasies of angels and demons, witchcraft and magic, and justifications for unspeakable cruelty. However, each provides a crucial counter-balance for the other. Science provides enough of a check on superstitious fears and wishes to secure a practical grounding in actuality, incidentally generating technology that channels enormous energy and sometimes provides great conveniences. Religion provides a crucial focus on ideality as essential reality, a reality in which an eventual future is expected to reveal some overriding goodness and reason to life and nature as a whole. Reason doesn’t exist outside ideality. Reason and ideality are one. Without the existence of ideality nothing matters in the least because there is no reason for anything, no sense of harm or benefit, bad or good, no sense of anything at all. There is gravity but no gravitas. It is only the existence of ideality, that is, personalities, sensitive, caring, and future-creating vectors of ideality, which bestows an importance derived from reasons on the world of things or on anything. The only strength of the religious outlook, the reason for its cultural survival, is its recognition of the transcendence of ideality, although it projects a grandiosity that warps perception of the place of transcendent ideality in reality. Of course, the idea of divinity is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It must always have been the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of divine transcendence (at far cosmic horizons) since there is no other direct experience of ideality.

Science carried over from creationist monotheism a denigration of human nature, recognizing only bodies, of course, biologically driven conflicts to select the fittest for dominance, and promising a completely body-determined psychology without the creative freedom of ideality. The nihilism of science is expressed in its eager engagement in development of ever-more lethal and destructive weapons, now bringing humanity to the brink of self-annihilation. Scientific discourse eliminates ideality completely, leaving a nihilism so absolute that it is ridiculously inapplicable to the world of the living, to our world of personalities. We certainly don’t want creationist monotheism to be any more dominant than it is, and we don’t need it. It was only ever a grandiose abstraction from the ordinary ideality of embodied personality. We don’t require a special, absolutely unique and all encompassing ideality to confer on existence a reason for things to matter. Any personality living, caring, and building a life in the world makes the world matter. The ordinary embodied personalities we live among, every single one, make the world matter. This sort of personality is clearly not omnipotent, but instead is a strictly local creativity and freedom instanced separately in vast numbers of embodied individuals. Embodiment is a necessary part of the interventions into brute actuality that constitute individual agency. So we don’t need any eventual revelations of an overriding goodness and reason in the course of existence. We need only an idealism that recognizes transcendent ideality in the ordinary embodied persons we connect with through utterances and acts which express knowledge, caring, reasons, and preconceived intentions.

There are both personal and political consequences from recognizing in every individual the entire transcendence that is ideality. First is a dismissal of legacy metaphysics and the perverse and gloomy denigration of human existence they impose from the cultural background. Politics becomes the test of truth because dystopian societies always rest on false metaphysics. A politics based in the reality of ideality will promote and protect the creative freedom of individuals and not undertake to control it with a frightening superego marshalling a collective hive mind. Hive minds make war. The organization of relationships among people does not have to be a dystopian nightmare created with force and hive mind engineering. We don’t need any “us against them” collective narrative to establish a personal identity, nor competitions to accumulate an avatar of property. Ideality is inherently and uniquely creative and experiences identity and value in expression. The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary personality, has been sensed as such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism have just evaded admitting the full ideality of ordinary subjectivity. Instead of providing a foundation for sovereignty, for the ownership of individuals by collective institutions, the transcendence of individual ideality negates any such ownership or authority. It is a declaration of individual self-possession that incidentally eliminates all versions of cosmic hierarchy such as the Great Chain of Being.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

From a Hill in the Labyrinth of Ideas

28 Friday Sep 2018

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

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culture, divinity, existence, History, ideas, metaphysics, nature, nihilism, personality, reality, science

Posting 134, Word Count: 442

A profound cultural change, which came from the rise to dominance of the scientific way of conceiving things, was a shift in the general presence of the world to people, a shift from having intelligent consciousness (personality) as the crucial presence of the world to having inanimate, inertial, objective matter or nature as the crucial presence of the world. In feudal Christendom, personality was indisputably the crucial presence, but in two starkly different versions and placements, displaying in fact a grotesque bifurcation. That conception of personality included the stark contrast between divine personality and human personalty, but the whole meaning and drama of existence centred on personality, specifically the relationship and interactions between the divine personality and human personalities as both individuals and collectives. Concrete nature was merely a trivial backdrop, a platform or staging for the drama. Both the divine and human were clearly instances of personality since only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. Human personalities do that all the time and, supposedly, so did the divine personality. This teleology of creation is a crucial identifier of personality along with curiosity, caring, questioning, accumulating orientation, and an expressive voice or agency.

Scientific Nihilism

By contrast, the scientific conception of the world completely excludes personality (teleology, abstraction, ideality, intelligent consciousness) from fundamental reality in rejecting the possibility of transcendent freedom. Personality gets placed on a list of phenomena to be completely explained as an illusion at some future time. This creates a deformed lopsidedness to the conceptual system of reality in modernity, which is something like an inverse of the lopsidedness of the Christian conception of the world. Science dismisses the creative freedom of personality as merely illusion, just as Christianity dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama of personality. Of course the grotesque bifurcation of personality into human and divine was another layer of lopsidedness in the pre-scientific conceptual system of reality, which removed the transcendence of personality from ordinary embodied individuals and projected it into a metaphysical monstrosity: disembodied personality as divinity. Just because personality is ideality, that is, immaterial, does not make it more perfect when disembodied! With the modern lopsidedness, science actually needs the continuing culture of personality from feudal Christendom because without it, with only scientific principles of explanation, nothing matters, since it is only to personality that anything matters. With only inanimate nature, we reach a complete nihilism, but people generally know better than to accept that. So, the lopsidedness of the scientific conception of reality prolongs the lingering of outmoded metaphysics and political ideology from feudal Christendom.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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1517, 1789, Hegelian idealism, Johann Fichte, Kantian idealism, Martin Luther, Marxism, modernity, nihilism, Platonic idealism, Romantic idealism, Roy Bhaskar, spirituality, The French Revolution, the Kantian revolution, the mind of God, The Thirty Years War, the tragic sense of life

This is Episode 2 of The Tragedy of Romanticism

Tags: Spirituality, Platonic idealism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Kantian idealism, the Kantian revolution, Johann Fichte, Romantic idealism, Martin Luther, Roy Bhaskar, the tragic sense of life, nihilism, modernity, The French Revolution, 1789, 1517, the Thirty Years War, the mind of God

Informal Romanticism

The French Revolution of 1789 expressed a primal, informal, romanticism that was an inspiration for the philosophical romanticism that developed soon after. It was a projection outward of subjective aspirations, heroically, against the teeth of practicality and realism as defined by the apparent balance of forces and probable achievements. “This is what we want. I don’t care if dreams cannot come true. This expresses my (spiritual) interiority.” The romantic attitude is the opposite of “practical” and “realistic” as ordinarily used. Plans and proposals that count as practical and realistic always expresses a normative political force. In authoritarian cultures, any kind of change in the organization of wealth, power, or status, is considered unrealistic and impractical, and so romantic. That is core conservative political rhetoric and mind-set. In the conservative lexicon “romantic” means frivolous, trivial, crazy, dangerously destructive. Informal romanticism is an assertion of the power of subjectivity against objective actuality, a willing acceptance of the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, but still asserting its value and power. In addition to privileging subjective non-actuality over brute objective actuality, informal romanticism is also a certain characterization of subjectivity, emphasizing the creative, chaotic, emotionally expressive character of dreams in subjectivity. It doesn’t have to be a denial of the reality of objective actuality, only a categorical rejection of the sovereignty and sufficiency of actuality, a resistance to claims of such a sovereignty. The romantic attitude puts emphasis on the creativity of subjectivity, on subjectivity as lawless and capricious, and so on the removal of subjectivity from the pre-determination of both nature and the normative force of cultural models. (Every individual has normative social conformity requirements in addition to the fall-line of physics to limit the possibilities of overtly manifested creativity.) That removal from pre-determination is here called the spiritual interiority of subjectivity.

There was something wildly terrible, tragic, and beautiful (romantic) about the French Revolution, the doomed efforts of age-long victims of aristocratic macro-parasitism, risking their lives and a marginally viable way of life for a slim hope of justice and dignity. By the time of that revolution, Germans had long ago attempted their revolution in the form of the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and which eventually brought the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), down on their heads. That history left Germans pretty well intimidated, but still substantially Protestant (in very regulated forms) by 1789. However, it could be argued that the Revolution became necessary in France because the Reformation had been so quickly and brutally repressed in the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, soon after Luther launched the protestant movement. So, as a continuation of post-Reformation re-thinking of fundamental certainties and possibilities (the Enlightenment movement), the Revolution burst forth, and afterward the reactionary backlash inevitably followed, just as it had against the Reformation.

In yet another historical rebound of cultural forces, philosophical Romanticism was an interpretation of the French Revolution by the German academic, literary, and artistic class, just as the Revolution was a kind of French interpretation of the German Reformation (then more than two centuries in the past). The human interconnectedness is a medium and an echo chamber in which cultural creations get refracted by interpretations from person to person (interiority to interiority) and from group to group. In 1789 Germany was emphatically backward looking in political culture as a legacy of the Thirty Years War. German intellectuals such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814) and the artist known as Novalis (1772-1801) were both excited and repelled by the Revolution because in Germany they were immersed in a neo-medieval ideology of admiration for Christendom and its chivalrous aristocracy, even though they longed for complete freedom of thought at the same time. The young German intellectuals felt the thrill of new freedom but desperately wanted to fit it into the stability of existing (medieval) institutions in Germany. They merely wanted people like themselves to be recognized as meriting membership in the fellowship of the privileged.

Broad Effects of Philosophical Fundamentals

Those historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with philosophical fundamentals, and especially philosophical conceptions of idealism, of which romanticism is one particular form. Idealism generally asserts that there is a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual, transcendent, and as such indispensable in any conception of reality. That category is what was described above, in relation to informal romanticism, as the spiritual interiority of subjectivity. Both of the following usages of “ideal” illustrate that special interiority. Certain politicians are described as ‘idealist’ rather than pragmatic. Idealist politicians are aspirational in the sense of striving for something not yet actual, something there is reason to believe would be better, but which might be impossible. Also, there is the sense of idealism in “idealized”, in which things are simplified and imagined in a perfected condition. The “idealized” item is distinct from any actual items, and it is commonly understood that, as such, it is interior to some or other subjectivity as an idea. In articulating the importance of a category of non-actuality, idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Idealism is politically explosive because it is an affirmation and embracing of a supra-actuality, something more important than whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors have bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world.

Standard Idealism: Plato and Hegel

The directionality of any human gaze is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, (caring, anticipation, evaluation) that it points (in addition to a region of surroundings) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Any philosophical idealism is some model of spirituality and a recognition of spirituality as elemental or non-reducible. In other words, idealism is some version of absolute recognition of the special interiority of intelligences. Recognizing the special non-actuality of spiritual interiority gives any position an aspect of idealism. A strong idealism asserts that the most fundamental character of the cosmos is intelligence or spirituality.

Romanticism is a kind of idealism, but not the only kind. For example, Plato’s idealism is quite different, and Platonic idealism has been the most influential by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the European system of cultural reality that still has considerable force. Plato’s Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so automatically associated with (the interiority of) some kind of divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of a metaphysical hierarchy, a structure of descent from a divine One-ness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Their association with intelligence is far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some romantics have imagined as divine intelligence. Also, Hegelian idealism has been vastly influential, especially as it lives on in Marxism, in spite of the declared materialism of Marxism (dialectical materialism). The historical effects of Marxism are yet more consequences of the mutating conceptions of idealism. Hegel’s is clearly a mutation of Platonic idealism, a vision of cosmic history as the striving of all-encompassing universal Being toward full reality and self-recognition as Ideal Form. Hegel retains the Platonic metaphysical structure (including levels of reality not unlike those in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism), but in Hegelian idealism the universal Being starts from the bottom and is striving up the “chain of ascent” to the divine One-ness at the final and highest stage of reality.

The Kantian Revolution against Platonism

Then there is the kind of idealism which occasioned philosophical romanticism, namely Kantian idealism, which maps out the necessity of personal spiritual activity in the construction of ordinary knowledge of the world, of every individual’s orientation in the world. Kantian idealism is the most personal and subjective of the philosophical visions of spirituality, especially as tweaked by Fichte. Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. Fichte’s vision is a re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Kant and Fichte, and there could have been no Fichte without Kant. Romantic idealism was clearly a development from Kantian idealism, although hardly a straightforward one.

Although Kant did describe his work as “a Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, it is not clear that he recognized the full bottom-up social and political implications of his personalized idealism. Kant was a social and political moderate-conservative, and as a university professor employed by the state, his livelihood depended on being seen as a supporter of the status quo, more or less. However, the spiritual entity who is the subject having experiences in Kant’s vision is self-legislating and so has no need for the Church, aristocracy, or any other social authority. Personal spirituality for Kant is almost monadic, clearly influenced by Leibniz in that way but completely free of Leibniz’s totalitarian predetermination. Kant’s personally interior idealism would logically lead to an equality of individuals based on autonomous spirituality, and so it implicitly discredited the whole social edifice of aristocracy and the hierarchy of Christendom. That qualifies Kant’s idealism as an extension of the European revolutionary movement into the matrix of ideas. That is the Kantian revolution, although it is doubtful that the early romantic philosophers understood it in that way. Nevertheless, the response in Romanticism was something altogether shocking: a declaration that philosophy as an activity should be abandoned completely and replaced by art; a call to forsake philosophical thinking, the better to seek immersion in poetry, music, stories, and images. That is why romanticism is more prominent as a literary and artistic movement than as a philosophical system. Something in their interpretation of Kantian idealism brought the romantic philosophers face to face with a vision of human tragedy from which they recoiled. The tragedy does not arise from Kantian idealism or Fichte’s absolute I. Those are not tragic visions.

The Tragedy of Romanticism

Radical French philosophers had made an attempt to construct a Plato-busting bottom-up metaphysics with their materialism (in the footsteps of ancient Epicureans), after the suppression of the reformation in France, and it had been remarkably effective up to a point, but it was not sustainable. Materialism and freedom are mutually exclusive. It was Kant’s elaboration of Luther’s idea of spiritual freedom which really accomplished (on the second attempt, so to speak) the bottom-up metaphysics. Kant’s idealism is clearly set at the level of the ordinary individual person because it is in continuous engagement with brute actualities of the ambient world within which the spirituality finds itself, entangled with effects of the “thing-in-itself”. However, the early romantics encountered Kantian idealism in their studies as Fichte’s philosophy students, and so really encountered Fichte’s interpretation of Kant, and they never took it seriously enough as a description of normal individual intelligence or spirituality with broad implications for empathy, sociability, and politics. Romantic philosophers lived in a very hierarchical culture and age. They would have taken value strata among human beings as self-evident givens. The grip of their top-down orientation was so strong that they couldn’t conceive the absence of hierarchy. So, they came to understand Fichte’s absolute “I” (so much more monadic than Kant’s because of the absence of a countervailing thing-in-itself) as a portrait of divine mind, the mind of God. Certainly it could be argued that the main effect of Fichte’s dismissal of the thing-in-itself was exactly to make his conception of spirituality less human and essentially divine.

As a vision of the divine mind, there was profound novelty about Fichte’s “absolute ego” as compared to the God of Abraham, of Maimonides, or even the purely rational God conceived by Leibniz (much closer to Fichte in cultural tradition). The Abrahamic God is bound and limited by goodness and by love for his creatures. However, the philosophy students who were on their way to developing the romantic vision, could not help but see Fichte’s divine subjectivity through the lens of their experience of the French Revolution, an intensely violent uprising completely justified by the stark contrast between the lives of the privileged in European society and the lives of the drudgery classes, gross institutionalized injustices, any change to which threatened the entire social order of their world. In that light, it was impossible to hold onto the idea of divinity limited by goodness. To the romantics, Fichte’s divine mind is absolute monadic creativity, an artist god, with no responsibility to any other and not bound or limited by anything. Fichte’s absolute ego, in its romantic interpretation, was not the slightest bit interested in morality or orderly civil society, and was nothing like perfectly rational as Leibniz’s God was. He issued no demands to humans for obedience, reverence, or worship, but also offered nothing to balance human suffering, no eternal reward, no redemption from guilt. Instead, he was a playful artist creating drama, emotional upheaval, and shocking beauty. In many ways, this was an historically novel concept, including a form of creativity that was broadly applicable to individual humans. With the absolute ego from Fichte, the emphasis is more on creativity than on command, control, reward, or punishment, and that removes some emphasis from command and control generally even in worldly social and political situations. It also recognizes creativity as the core of subjectivity. Fundamentally, it was gender neutral in conception, although in style and application it was full of male bias.

For Romantics, then, there is a single immaterial spirit with a personality and mental life quite similar to a human’s but with infinitely more power. The Romantic deity is an artist. This spirit has dreams, it indulges itself in daydreaming, and those dreams are the world that humans inhabit, ourselves being dream-things in those dreams. Whimsically, he picks certain people to be his prophets, and grants favours and inspiration to certain heroes and artists, like the gods of ancient Greece were supposed to do. Every landscape is an inner landscape for romantics, pervaded with dream code-work, disguises, and multi-layered associations, unrestricted by cultural norms or by the laws of physics. With the inner landscape, things display (obliquely) their emotional meaning in their appearance, as things do in dreams. What romantics saw in this new idealism was the artist God who toys with the world, and with the humans in the world, without any interest in justice or redemption, as proven by the spectacle of the Revolution and the light it shed on social organization and the force of history.

This conception of the divine mind meant that the Christian religion as traditionally constituted, with pledges of eternal reward and redemption, upon which the stability of the European social hierarchy and culture depended, was a lie. Earthly suffering has no meaning other than the whimsical amusement of an omnipotent daydreamer. Romantics saw the political enforcement of Christendom as a version of Plato’s “noble lie” (Republic), and they accepted the necessity of using that lie to preserve the organization of society, so that some small minority at least could devote themselves to beauty and ideal things, supporting and enjoying the arts, the work of artists, for their own immersion in transcendent beauty. The human artist became the example of the optimal, godlike, human being. However, the romantics also felt tragedy in the need to lie to repress the vain aspirations of the vast majority, in a world so made as to depend on such a lie. Privileged people don’t want social justice and can’t want it because for them the age-old forms of injustice are the price that must be paid so that some few (themselves) can live the higher life of refinement, beauty, and ideal things, a milieu enabling such contemplations as math and science, but above all artistic beauty, as close as possible to the life of the high God and as such the authentic heartbeat of their civilization.

On that worldview, we humans are dreamed just enough in God’s image to think sometimes that we have freedom and power to achieve justice, but that thought is an illusion, and so the human situation is fundamentally tragic. The immediate form of our tragedy is the squalid institutions of unalterable human inequality. We must either accept being deceived by the dirtiest of lies or else be parties to proclaiming that lie, and the problem with philosophy is that its history has brought it to the point of exposing the deception and undermining the civilization of the champions of beauty. For romantics, the only real power we have is to dream, to create our interior non-actualities. That is the romantic vision of transcendence available to humans, and they take it as our shield against glimpsing the ugliness of the broader human situation. The romantic idea of the deity is an emphatic confirmation that the social oppression they witnessed was so entrenched as to appear metaphysically decreed.

Romantic idealism, then, is yet another top-down vision of divine spirituality, a mutation of Platonism into a more modern idiom. The real implication of Kantian idealism was completely different, a sort of re-distribution of spiritual creativity and power down from on-high and into the multiplicity of agents engaging in ordinary experience. The romantic vision of tragedy arises by removing spiritual agency from every individual and ascribing it instead to a universal deity, imposing a completely inappropriate top-down orientation on Kant’s vision of interior spirituality. In doing that, philosophical romanticism seems to glorify subjectivity, but in fact trivializes it. The romantic call to leave philosophy and turn to art and culture is profoundly political and strictly conservative. Their nihilism was the angst of the unjustly privileged, an awareness of the stark and pointless contrast between their lives and the lives of the drudgery class.

The Tragic Sense of Life

We are still living with legacies of romantic idealism, for example in the commonplace declaration that “stories are all we have”. The conclusion and fulfillment of that philosophical Romanticism is a resolve to abandon thinking that goes beyond stories and instead to concentrate on moments of subjective ecstasy or rapture in the altered states inspired by poetry, tragic drama, music, and stories of magic, wonders, and heroes. “Since actuality is ugly, depressing, and utterly beyond our control, let’s achieve the transcendence of personal tranquility and joy by listening to awesome music, contemplating beautiful images, or absorbing our minds in narratives of heroism and nobility.” The romantic “elevation” of ideal things is completely idle, and the narrative sparkle and flash of tragic heroes, witches, wizards, demons, exotic locations, high drama, violent conflict, glory in battle, dangerous rescues, lost causes, fatal flaws, futile but beautiful gestures, narrative suspense and satisfying resolutions, are all merely hiding romantic nihilism. That turn of romanticism is very much like mysticism, which embraces the trances and altered states of consciousness resulting from sensory deprivation, drugs, or mortification of the flesh as if they were higher states of being.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Lines of Human Parasitism Through Western Civilizations

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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human parasitism, nihilism, philosophy, political history, transcendence

A crucial thread in tracing the progress of top-down human-on-human parasitism is the history of disembodied spirits in human culture, and especially the fear of an angry father in the sky, a projection of the culture of human alpha-power onto the cosmos at large. The humanistic progress made by ancient Greek Stoics and Epicureans was eventually forced underground (in a cultural sense) by violent empire-building that swept over the Mediterranean regions, swamping philosophical movements under a resurgence of God-cultures associated with conquerors who subordinated the known world from around 300 B.C.: Alexander of Macedon and later the Roman imperium. Although conquering looters are often materialist in their evaluation of assets, they normally place great importance on their connection with a special personal god or gods, and assert such a connection to their troops and victims. Because of that, generals do not support secular or humanist world-views. That wave of imperialist activity in ancient Mediterranean societies created a cultural atmosphere that was unfriendly toward secular humanism, and rewarded belief in a spooky spirit world.

The example of Alexander the Great illustrates that the history of religion is intimately intertwined with the history of looting-family dominance. Alexander of Macedon was the great event that separated the stories of embodied gods in ancient Greece (and the Greek philosophical humanism that branched off from them) from the cultural diffusion westward of the One incorporeal God from the Arabian deserts. The ancient importance of the individual Greek polis and its gods was shockingly diminished by military defeat at the hands of Alexander, followed by supervision and exploitation by a distant imperial city representing a more powerful God. Alexander, like the One angry father in the sky, attracted emotional projection of parental qualities onto a single external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood. Alexander was the prototype and paradigm of the One God of monotheism, even though personally Alexander seems to have favoured the dualistic worldview of ancient Persia, and even expressed admiration for Diogenes the Cynic philosopher.

The Christian religion originated in the area of the Arabian peninsula where the God of Abraham emerged, an area of deserts dominated by nomadic tribes of animal herders. An overview of the individual’s situation within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among those ancient herder-nomads, as represented by Abraham, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. Such beliefs situate every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. All the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely commanding and meriting obedience and worship from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and then reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. The relationship of the Abrahamic God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent expressions of admiration, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. However, instead of direct Revelation of Himself to the flocks, Abraham’s God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a totalitarian sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

The ancient (Epicurean) consciousness of the general hegemonic effect of culture was completely transfigured in the floods of religion that swept out from the Arabian deserts into the whole Mediterranean world, from the missionary expeditions of St. Paul around 50 A.D. to the Islamic conquest (via Northern Africa) of distant Spain in 711 A.D. and for centuries after. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire after 313 A.D., and after 600 Islam was launched into the world. In that tide, religious culture was understood as not natural but supernatural, a force, knowledge, and technology from outside the world of individual persons, a divine gift. Proponents of that religious culture believed people benefited from having that grace imposed on them, which encouraged and justified great concentrations of power in a few central patriarchs. Divine religious culture went well beyond the words in the holy books, especially in creation of religious law and supervisory organizations. It included the hierarchies and entire myth systems of entangled organizations of religion and worldly power.

Citing the world-views of a couple of Roman emperors illustrates the shift from humanist philosophy to father-in-the sky religion. Marcus Aurelius, emperor 161-180 A.D., was a Stoic philosopher. Emperor Constantine, in power 306-337, converted to Christianity late in life. Constantine moved the Empire’s head office east of Greece to Byzantium/ Constantinople, closer to the heartland of ancient civilization, and his imperial Edict of Milan, 313, legalized Christianity within the Roman Empire. Then, with the influx of waves of Germanic tribes, the Empire withdrew completely from western Europe and carried on for centuries in the east as the Byzantine Empire, incorporating organized Christianity, the Greek Orthodox Church, as the imperial religion. When a Rome-based Christian Church branched off independently, spreading west again around and after the sixth century A.D., that Church adopted a policy of placing Church officials who were literate, educated, and well connected socially and professionally, into the executive councils and households (often as tutors of youths) of the most powerful (looting) families among the new Germanic conquerors, providing those families with much needed advisors and executives. That technique put the Church into a position to act as the power behind the thrones. Such officials were in a position to influence everything about the operations of those families, but especially to insist that all persons under their control become active Catholics under the direction of the Church. The faith was to be spread by decree from the militarily powerful. So, from very early in the medieval rebuilding of Europe after the Roman imperial organization abandoned it to move east, the organization of Christianity deliberately rode the coattails of those military-estate families, essentially crime families, to establish itself in power. There was also an ongoing “revolving door” between the Church and those families. Many of the ‘second sons’, who could not inherit a family’s aristocratic title and lands, would go to school (Church operated) for a good education and then into positions of power in the Church hierarchy.

From these considerations it is clear that the partnership of the Medieval Church and the violence-based military-estate oligarchy was deep and profound. The military class of medieval Europe was united with the ethos of Christianity and its hierarchy by the patriarchal and parasitic culture of nomadic animal herders. Since the Germanic tribes who occupied the western Roman Empire originated in the east, in close proximity to, if not within, the great Eurasian Steppe where nomadic herders and their culture of parasitism dominated, their original culture of masculine parasitism came from involvement with that established ethos of the Steppe. Reinforcing that cultural background were very specific engagements with the nomadic herder culture of the Middle East.

Legacies of The Crusades

The Crusades of the period 1096-1291 were wars of aggression incited by popes promising crusaders forgiveness of sins and all the loot they could take. The Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth, especially in the form of ancient Christian relics, old bones and artifact fragments considered sacred and magical, from what Europeans call the holy lands. (A main reason for the achievements of Gothic cathedral architecture was to house the looted relics in suitably intimidating splendour.) The European knight practiced a style of battle centred on formations of armoured combatants mounted on heavy horses. The social class which could afford such military equipment and the training it required was made up of families exploiting vast land holdings secured by their private armies, crime-families. Combatants from those families became invaders of the communities of the Middle East, with full support from the Christian hierarchy and its considerable myth generating capacity. The aristocratic culture of Chivalry took on its enduring character in that context, in an effort to refine and glorify the most brutal parasitic looting by dressing it in Christian myths and symbols.

The enemy that confronted the looting class of Western Europe when it reached the Middle East was the military class of the Arabs, just a few generations removed from their own nomadic herding way of life, now preserving the values of that culture while combining it with the sophistication of societies they had conquered in Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran. The knights of the west came to admire the manly values of their Arab adversaries, and flattered them by imitation. If the parasitic animal herding values of the western military class had been softening, they were refreshed and energized by the Crusades. The arrogant cruelty practiced in assaults on foreign non-Christians was brought back with the crusading knights to their domestic life, to relations with each other, to relations with other orders of society, and especially with ‘heretics’ and social dissenters of all kinds. That legacy is still very obvious.

Defending Parasitism with an Ideology of Nihilism

When the Christian father-God-in-the-sky lost credibility, starting after the Great Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, there remained a cultural legacy, a culturally conditioned disability to accept the equal dignity and transcendence of every individual person as an intelligence. Even in the shadow of Christendom, Christianity was still an important cultural presence, and individuals were generally thought to be intrinsically sinful, tainted (the Gnostic taint) with an impulse toward disobedient pride and autonomy. That very identification of the human taint reveals that the idea of individual freedom was present, ambiguously, but very weak in Christianity and its aftermath. To fill voids left by the declining credibility of the Christian vision, other forms of externalized transcendence were given increased emphasis. As examples from the Renaissance era (roughly), the political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) were indifferent to the Church and Christianity as such, but supported the sovereignty of princes (still claiming divine right), convinced that the mass of individuals required strict and awe-full guidance (herding) from a source accepted as higher in some profound way. As a widespread proletarian spiral of revolt gained credibility, advancing the wave of cultural disillusionment recognizing the illegitimacy of (violence based) monarchy and aristocracy, then the privileged classes started to create an ideology of nihilism, declaring that any general denial of external transcendence opens an abyss of chaos, hopelessness, absurdity, and meaninglessness, the contemplation of which is ultimately fatal (first to sanity), and which must anyway be false because of its intuitive repugnance. In spite of the fact that the ideology of nihilism was formulated specifically to be rejected and discredited, there was also some real fear and even covert acceptance that nihilism is the truth, because the external transcendences really are shams.

That crisis of nihilism was especially, maybe exclusively, an experience of powerful privileged factions of European society, the factions with a literary voice: The propertied faction, families who had their livelihood from ownership and investing, and their scribes, the specialists of advanced literacy, professionals, knowledge and book specialists, who for centuries had been coddled and controlled by the Church and indeed to a great extent were the Church. The meaning of the parasitic lives of those privileged factions had been sanctified by the old mythology of Christendom, and without it they found themselves in an abyss of naked parasitism, which they preferred to interpret as cosmic nothingness. Of course the great mass of the population had been engaged in the miseries and delights of surviving all along and were actually liberated by the death of Christendom.

The basic enabling error for nihilism is a prior identification of transcendence as external to ordinary individual intelligences, as in, for example, a disembodied father-figure in the sky. Since that external identification of transcendence is always a distortion of reality it will never be completely convincing. Inevitably there will be intuitions inspiring doubts and questions leading some people and groups to recognize the falseness of the external identifications. The overwhelming cultural training in outward orientations will make it nearly impossible to trace or accept the true transcendence of the interior freedom of ordinary intelligences. With all hopes pinned on the false transcendence, the immediate response to its loss will be a vision of an abyss of hopelessness: nihilism. In spite of the fact that individual freedom was recognized to some extent, that freedom could not be recognized as uniquely transcendent, as it truly is. The whole nihilist turn of mind was possible because of a culturally conditioned, post-monotheist disability to accept the transcendence of every individual person, in spite of the egalitarian effects of spreading proletarian literacy, Renaissance humanism, and the Republic of Letters of the rationalist Enlightenment era. In the trembling world-view of the privileged factions of society, only a supernatural source, external to nature and individual persons, could be convincing as the bestower of a kind of meaning which would legitimize their top-down human-on-human parasitism.

The Roman Christian tradition always sees an abyss of meaninglessness as the only alternative to the Christian story (to itself), and, since it held the position of hegemonic worldview in European civilization for centuries, it goes on engendering irrationalist reactions to an ideology of nihilism it both loves and fears. However, there is also the humanist tradition of individual freedom philosophy carried through a Protestant and post-Protestant line of influence that includes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as well as the interpretation of Martin Luther (1483-1546) by Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) (the individual’s inward and creative leap), which convincingly pointed toward the answer to nihilism. It is an answer which Church loyalists, Romantics, and even Deconstructionists (there is nothing but text) are unwilling to accept. They can’t accept the answer of individual transcendent freedom because they remain under the influence of cultures constructing a blind spot over the experience of that transcendence, partly with a romantic love of the drama in their vision of darkness and the cultural conservatism it speciously seems to legitimize.

Sources for the origins of human-on-human parasitism:

A Study of History, written by Arnold J. Toynbee, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1947, and Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1957 (Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 47-2302). In the 1947 volume (Volume 1 of the Somervell abridgements) see pages 152, 172-4, 181-2 for indexed discussions of “nomads as shepherds of men”. In the 1957 volume (Volume 2 of the Somervell abridgements) see page 230. Toynbee was the first to explore the parasitism of nomadic animal herders in my personal reading experience, and is certainly the source of the idea in my thinking.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor Books (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. See page 6 for the description of human-on-human macroparasitism, pages19-20 for humankind as a disease, page 48 for agriculture-based humans as attractive hosts for macroparasitic groups (among whom the most importantly are nomadic herders), page 75 for the example of China.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

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