Tag Archives: philosophy

The Metaphysics is You

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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 Loneliest Un-Loneliness

08 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Nature, Political Power, Why thinking?

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Fragment 181, word count: 913.

tags: human hive-mind, embodiment, attachment, war, philosophy, un-loneliness, culture, imitation, originality, freedom

The most urgent issue for philosophy is the relationship between individual persons and collective identities of the kind described here previously as hive-minds which make war with each other. This urgency can be illustrated by reference to the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians, in which the crucial divide between the Asian cultural system and the Euro-American cultural system is eastern collectivism (extended-extended patriarchal family values) as opposed to the legacy of individualism from the European metaphysical upheavals: Reformation, Enlightenment, and the Revolution of 1789-99. Obviously, western societies are also still largely organized as patriarchal hive-minds. Human hive-minds, collective identities, are the important and dangerous structures behind war, colonization, imperialism, and national exceptionalism expressing the conviction that strength and power merit the privilege of dominance and special rights. Hive-mind collective identity is distinctly not universal but instead an imprint of the point of view of some self-proclaiming superior beings club, an ‘us against the unworthy’ ideology. However, the metaphysical contests of western history have had some effect, and citizens of the resulting modernity are somewhat less rooted in an unquestionable patriarchally defended essentialism with its vision of rigid permanence in the structures and cycles of everything!

To be human is to relish engagement with other intelligences, and culture is always created to aid that engagement. Personality is inherently a creator and imitator of culture. As a deliberate intentional act, imitation is a declaration of intelligence to another presumed intelligence, a declaration of sensitivity, perception, memory, and caring, within a declaration of recognizing or supposing perception, memory, and caring embodied separately and paying attention. Imitation is a crucial declaration of pattern recognition and an invitation and promise of a conversational future, imitations with surprising innovations.

Absorption in an ambient culture is so crucial for people that the understanding of basic reality in any individual’s encounter with the world is almost completely mediated and structured by culturally transmitted religions, stories and ceremonies of national patriotism, and the ethos of some specific and exclusive stratum of social status and esteem: socially normal expectations about styles of consumption, work, and family relations, of gender expressions and attractiveness, social manners, niche cultures of decoration, costume, dwellings, celebrations, topics of conversation, and markers of success. The human world is a patchwork of such cultural niches (up to and including civilizations) all addicted to certainty about themselves as the best possible expression of divine will and of nature, the bedrock of categories and laws that determines things to be just as they are. Each collective’s cultural expression supports it feeling superior to others no matter what appearances and comparisons may suggest, stridently unwilling to accept reality checks, dangerously threatened by reality checks. As superior beings clubs, these culture pods are determined to remain as they are and to keep everybody under the spell of their dramas. However, cultural ideas that self-aggrandize, and externalize a supposedly less worthy subset of humanity, are arbitrary stipulations based on superstitious fears and magical wishes. In this context thinking philosophically can be a serious business that depends on a personal separation from the cultural currency of suppositions. The stakes are high here for individuals, and in this cultural context philosophy can be a reality check where a reality check is needed desperately.

Notwithstanding reveries of utopias and primordial states of nature, philosophers have not often questioned the stratification of society and political power as they found them. They mostly laboured to ‘justify the ways of God (or nature) to man’ on the essentialist assumption that food-chains of power, wealth, and social esteem (essentially master/ slave social organization in superstitious hive-mind formations) are unalterable basic reality. It is assumed that it must always be this way because nature is strictly pre-determined to vary within a narrow range, fated to swing through ever-recurring cycles. However, there have been various intuitions of monadic personal agency, in which the embodied individual, as a fountain of creativity and freedom, is recognized and treated as inherently greater in depth and scope than the imprinted cultured conceptions of any hive-mind. This can be illustrated by a consideration of language. Language is a public transit system. Experience for any individual goes vastly beyond the territory marked out by language, just as geography goes vastly beyond the streetcar tracks. When poets or philosophers make efforts to communicate experience that is not included in the current transit system they have no choice but to bend and stretch and sculpt new parts of language to draw attention to previously private regions. The individuality of spontaneously questioning sensibility grounded in embodiment is enough to permit individuals an exit from-hive mind collective identities.

The lesson of philosophy in its long and complex history is that individuals, as defined by embodiment, have the power to conceptualize creatively and originally the world that can be abstracted within the rich spiritual context that digests what is given externally. Philosophical statements have been an individual’s declaration of independence as a conceiver of living a life, and, as such, a challenge to the collective orientation of hive-minds. Philosophy is a person’s description of encountering the world after discounting the cultural currency of suppositions previously supplied by an ambient society, when, in their loneliest un-loneliness, they encounter the universality of innocent experience: intentionality, sentience, caring, within an eventful given world. In this innocence no one is a member of any collective subset of the interconnectedness of personal beings.

Embedded links

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

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

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia

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Fragment 171, word count: 780.

There is a western consensus that the rapid launch of mathematical science in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe drew the decisive line in human history, the crossing of which heralded a future with unlimited improvements in all human affairs. There was some speculation that after understanding the energies of nature humans would use them first to perform essential production work and then venture on to accomplish our fondest hopes. It was thought to be self-evident that ingenious mechanisms for channelling energies far greater than human and animal muscle power would free people from the physical burden of work and create such abundance that none would suffer privation. This, roughly, was the theory of science for a better world, material progress. It didn’t work out because understanding the energies of nature did nothing to change the cultural limits on how the wealthiest groups distributed empathy toward other breathing beings. The result is that now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the idea of progress, Better World Theory, is confused and seriously disputed. Developments in digital technology over the last half-century have given a new boost to STEM-based hopes for a better world, although weapons of mass destruction and climate change loom larger than ever and technology still doesn’t break down the cultural barriers to expanding empathy.

The reasons for intractable and extinction level problems in this age of mathematical science, which promotes itself as the means for solving all human problems, cannot be discovered by scientific research. Materialist science cannot settle the culture war between the core values of patriarchy from feudal Christendom along with other antique societies which similarly control strictly and sparsely licensed empathy, over against an emerging conception of culture and society based on a universality of empathy. Nostalgia for an imagined past along the lines of feudal Christendom is still widespread and a characteristic feature of fascism, a worse dystopia than what we have. From this perspective, what makes a society dystopian, a mortal danger to itself and others, is a poverty of empathy.

Populist Sense of Loss: Birthright and Patriarchy

The sense of loss that drives right-wing populism results from progress made in extending empathy, bringing with it some degree of dignity and equality, to previously denied people, and especially from the successes of feminism and its inexorable drift of values toward nurture and away from the masculine culture of dominance-derived pride. Right-wing populism is nostalgia for misogyny, racism, celebration of masculine strength, patriarchy, and terror of a supernatural masculine mind in the universe at large which decrees all those dystopian arrangements and certifies their eternal endurance.

There is also a populist rage against the elite status and honour of education and scholarship, of expertise, study, scribal skills and their culture, because they override the tradition of birthright. Birthright claims to be the decree of nature or the almighty creator, in which people are born to a certain social status as a man or as a person of the dominant race, a meaningful niche with a certain richness of rights, privileges, and dignities. In a world of education, there is no birthright. Everyone must accomplish what they can through effort and ingenuity. That has given women, racial minorities, and marginalized groups generally, a way to bypass birthright in dominant cultures.

The broadening of empathy is not an accomplishment of science or technology, and not likely to be helped by artificial intelligence. It is instead a product of the two culture engines identified as threats by the political right-wing: the culture of nurture and attachment cultivated mainly by women, and the scribal culture of broad literacy, inquiry, and scholarship. The posture of inquiry that is philosophy, for example, covering the whole of culture and experience, arises from a judgement, beginning from Socrates, that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions.

Early on in the twenty-first century, the political left-wing might be desperate in its struggle against advances by traditional patriarchy in a conservative, neoconservative, and neofascist onslaught, but in a long historical perspective the political right-wing is at least as desperate because people generally have become and continue to become more nurturing and to embrace nurturing ethics and values. Violence is less tolerated in many cultures than it was even one generation ago, although there are still forces striving mightily to legitimizing authoritarian patriarchy and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, brandishing and glorifying the tools of violence. The truth about individual human spirituality is that the potential for empathy is inherent and as near universal as we need for a better world.

Embedded links:

Fragment 165, July 5, 2020, The Genius of Ephemerality (word count: 595)

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

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

A Western Project

11 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Political Power, University

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Fragment 163, word count: 750.

What muted the traditional cultures of vicious racism and patriarchal misogyny for a time in the U.S.A. and much of Europe was the prestige and promise of intellectual culture. This was a legacy from world history, just as the racism and misogyny were, but there were special contributions from European history that establish it still as the exception in the history of the progress of ideas. The American colonies always had to compete against the senior societies in Europe which were eager to emphasize their vast superiority and authority. However, the continent that the colonizers had stolen was fertile, a treasure trove of resources, so with slave labour the colonies became rich and able to emulate and compete for leadership in the cultural achievements of the senior societies. The mutating of rigid European class culture on the new ground of the colonies, along with political institutions conceived in the intellectual fervour for social liberation underlying the great revolution in France 1789-99, helped enable a greater range of personal expression and commercial venturing in the USA. Universities in the USA advanced scholarly culture in all areas, especially engineering (drawing comparison to the Roman development of the cultural legacy from ancient Greece). By 1939 on the eve of World War II the American view of Europe can be seen in the classic movie from that year, The Wizard of Oz. Europe was Munchkin-land inhabited by little people in Medieval costumes, incapable of freeing themselves from the domination of fairy-tale witches and wizards. The child Dorothy in her healthy American innocence towers over the Munchkins, bound as they are by hereditary hierarchies and traditional folkways.

After World War II, somewhat democratic institutions provided a basis for European countries toward the Atlantic coast, and the USA, to claim moral superiority. This began after WW I during which occurred the Communist Revolution in Russia and the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the 1920’s and 30’s. The claim to moral authority of the west rested on the contrast with fascist dictatorships and authoritarian communist regimes in the east. However, it wasn’t just political institutions that made European culture remarkable. It was the depth and complexity of intellectual culture which, of course, included science, and science became so ascendant that it is easy to assume that science was the main feature, but it wasn’t. Deeper than science was a sense of a western project of social and cultural progress expressing a spirit of personal autonomy, a cultural movement that had blossomed profoundly in the Enlightenment as well as in earlier manifestations such as the protestant reformation, and constituted the decisive contrast with authoritarian societies. As well as conceiving dramatic upgrades in the dignity of human nature, the spirit of science and the spirit of protestantism were both rejections of authority even when it claimed to express divine sovereignty. Science had to reject the very forceful authority of the Church in describing nature, astronomy, for example, and protestantism (justification by faith) confronted both religious and political authorities in claiming personal autonomy in the teeth of decrees made by high officials and councils of the Church. In public debate with Church authorities, Martin Luther was continually confronted with the question of how his individual wisdom could match the accumulated store from the whole history of the Church. Luther could well have quoted Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing.” It is a claim of the inherent dignity and power of individual innocence from mere existence as personality/ humanity. In this conception, inseparable from the culture of thinking philosophically, the individual person is an autonomous point and arc of creative agency with inherent power to re-conceptualize experience, and, as such, inherently greater than the cultural imprint of any collective identity, any human hive mind. This claim applies universally. The intellectual, scribal, culture of Europe, with the tradition of philosophy at the core, pioneered this experience of enlargement of the individual self in sharp contrast to other cultural conceptions, such as that of feudal Christendom. This is the inner attraction and variably successful accomplishment of liberal education in the western tradition. However, hive minds of vicious imperialist racism and patriarchal misogyny from feudal Christendom have not gone away, and remain active in many ways to subvert the project of universal autonomy. They are springs of anti-intellectualism and their resurgent influence has discredited the moral authority once claimed by western institutions. Considering history, though, the past is not the future.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

De-Culturing

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Political Power, Why thinking?

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Fragment 153, word count: 458.

The process of maturing into the activities of an adult member of society requires becoming increasingly cultured in a range of skills and knowledge. People go to schools and universities to acquire more and more culture in specific areas, and certain social factions claim superiority and authority because of especially cultured practices and attitudes. There is a single exception to the pursuit of more and higher culture: philosophy. Students in philosophy do acquire arcane culture in the history of ideas, linguistics, and logic, for example. However, the exceptional thing is that, since (“My wisdom is knowing I know nothing.”) Socrates, philosophy is also a matter of undertaking the difficult task of discovering how to be innocently original, how to de-culture, to become sensitive to the influences of culture on assumptions and patterns of thinking and to recognize the random arbitrariness of much cultural content. The method of systematic doubt and questioning described by Descartes is another familiar example, and his is just a particular presentation of a wider application of skepticism in philosophical thinking. This work is a serious de-culturing process, the same one required to negate the effects of colonization, which is hostile cultural influence asserting the superiority of one culturally constructed hive mind over others. There is extreme danger in cultural constructs that can be characterized as collective identity, human hive minds. Hive minds make war, and no anti-war effort will be effective without dealing with that reality. Philosophy is precisely a personal disengagement from hive mind influences, a mental operation for arranging to experience from the innocence of personal questioning and discovery. Regrettably, this has not prevented numerous philosophers from embracing and advocating for their chosen hive minds, partly because it has been difficult to recognize these collective identities as the dangerous cultural constructs they are rather than as parts of nature or inevitable projections of psychology. There is more to culture than hive mind construction and neither culture nor individual meaning and purpose requires hive mind constructs.

Just as any assertion of scientific knowledge must implicitly assert, as well as exemplify, a human nature competent to discover and understand scientific truths about nature, so any philosophical assertion must claim a human force of orientation competent, at the level of the embodied individual, to perform abstract reconceptualization of experience itself, of human existence itself, a general human competence to be free of hive mind influences. Being a person is bigger than being a citizen or member of any collective or cultural community. This is largely because of bogus ideas in cultures that bind collectives into hive minds. It is everybody’s duty as a person to enlarge the restrictive cultures, to make room for individuals to express the original creativity of innocent humanity.

There is more on hive mind here:

Fragment 106, May 10, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (1)

Fragment 107, May 18, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3)

Fragment 132, August 15, 2018, Life after Hive-Mind

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Being Human

24 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Narrative

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Fragment 151, word count: 367.

The historical rise and accomplishments of the political left-wing in opposition to perennial oligarchic dominance is what makes the Euro-American cultural system actually special. The rise and survival of the political left expresses an intuition that the nature of persons as supra-actual points and enduring arcs of purposeful ideality, self-orienting within a sensed, guessed, and unstable surroundings, is such that we have a self-sourced mission or project beyond becoming a satisfied or even ecstatic eating machine, work supplier in a production system, or follower of commands as the belonging of a hive. Two vectors of ancient philosophy which were already leaning left were, first, an effort to get rid of superstitious myths about capricious divine personalities such as the Olympian gods and demons; and second, to clarify the peculiar existence of the gaze of personal consciousness, opening onto, and questing into surroundings of shifting and drifting possibilities and impossibilities as the context and meaning of brute actualities. The cultural imperative for universal literacy, mass education, free-ranging research and philosophical enquiry, and democratic influence on institutions of sovereignty, all express a striving for open-ended individual empowerment, a sense that existing societies are all too small to contain or express the whole of any individual. This spirit of the left affirms that education should provide individuals with the means to understand and take a substantial measure of participation and control in the ongoing evolution of society and culture.

The dominant orientation in folk societies is backward-looking. In traditional societies time is an eternally recurring circle or wheel. What was done in the past is so revered that it is assigned the status of metaphysical template of what society should be and do forever. From the influence of thinking on the political left, modernity has a different conception of time in which both futurity and temporal anteriority are considered absolutely unique. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being because the past is recognized as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, oppression, monotony, poverty, and the conformity imposed by myths of an urgent need for strength in numbers, from which even the most advanced societies are still only beginning to emerge.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy is Possible

11 Thursday Jul 2019

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Fragment 150, word count: 428.

Philosophy as an interior act and process of self-directed reorientation is possible because of a personally interior fountain of spirituality: questions, intents, evaluations, abstractions and ideas which give structure and movement to experience. Ideas are always and only features of an individual person’s orientation and temporal bearing in the world, but everyone’s ideas are influenced and often imposed by an ambient culture. Every individual is colonized by the culture into which he or she is born. Agents of cultural communities strive to particularize, distinguish, and glorify their collective by stipulating key communal ideas to form a human sort of hive mind. The posture of philosophical questioning arises from recognizing that lived reality is mutable because ideas make up much of the structure of that reality, and that generally accepted cultural stipulations are often just superstitions and toxic misconceptions. Philosophy as an interior act and process is a personal assertion of spiritual individuality by moving beyond cultural stipulations. This builds from features of experience that would be just as they are without a person having learned to be part of a nation, a religious community, an ethnic group, a linguistic community, a socio-economic class, race, or gender; encountering the way personality lives beyond and beneath any cultural qualifiers and categories such as linguistic ethnicity, skin colour, body size and shape, age, giftedness, education, social status, or nationality. Here in Socratic innocence is a spiritual fountain positing non-actualities in the shape of time, anticipating the ever decreasing remoteness of multiple possibilities, variously probable occurrences presenting opportunities for acts of agency to improvise an embodied life in the world. In positing time as it does, personality creates teleology, freedom, and itself as active and effective ideality. Freedom is the power to posit. Rocks and rivers don’t posit anything, but only fall.

Certainly there is the brute actuality of rocks and rivers, but there are also active occurrences of supra-actuality, separate embodied points and arcs of intervention  imposing locally invented novelty onto the shape of the fall lines of actuality. Any politics conceived for a strong nurture of freedom must recognize this spontaneous creativity, novelty, and indeterminacy within brute actuality, a conception of transcendence at the level of the embodied individual. Philosophy as the interior act and process of a particular supra-actuality calls up the perspective of sentient being simply as such, of teleological being, living personality in the most general sense. In removing itself spiritually from culturally structured collectives, in finding the way to be most alone, this interior act must embrace the most universal empathy.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Birth of the Left

22 Wednesday May 2019

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Fragment 148, word count: 628.

As long as the ubiquitous metaphysics in the European cultural system was creationist monotheism, there was a blanket sanctification for the rights and privileges (ultimately sovereignty) of the strongest, since they are evidently favoured by deity and typically partnered with priestly institutions dedicated to studying and proclaiming divine messages. However, that blanket sanctification was disrupted beginning as early as the later fourteenth century, gradually building toward the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789-99. Over those four centuries there was a convergence between two distinct philosophical streams in the developing culture of western Christendom, one stream focused on the nature and movement of objects and the other on the status and dignity of the subjective personality of individual humans relative to divine personality. The object-focused stream was mechanistic materialism (anti-Aristotelian) inspired by Lucretius (ancient Roman Epicurean materialist rediscovered in the Renaissance) via Spinoza (1632-1677). Such scientific materialism was used to undercut claims of the divine right of kings, aristocracy, and Church to dominate society, but it also re-conceived human nature as being inclined to rationality, with the inherent ability to reason mathematically and logically, to question, recognize relevant evidence, investigate and judge reality. In other words, it recognized humans as competent to acquire scientific knowledge of the natural world. This was a profound upgrade in human dignity compared with the Christian teaching of hopeless inherent sinfulness since the Fall from Grace. There was a serious effort in this philosophical stream to make human rationality consistent with a mechanistic universe. (Materialism always stumbles over an awkwardness to accommodate conscious ideality, intelligence.) The other stream was also a major upgrade to general human dignity. It was a stream of thinking about human spirituality, expressed in an early form in the remarkable work of John Wycliffe (1320s-1384), concerning the individual self-sufficiency to read and understand the Biblical word of God. This developed as the spirit of Protestantism, ascribing to individuals the inherent nobility to engage with deity directly, without interceding saints or priestly sacraments empowered by the institutional Church, along with the innate power to take a mental leap to faith (Luther), which is to posit conceptions of reality. Both of these streams of thought had philosophical force, and their combined history accounts for why the political left-wing is the party of philosophy: because the convergence of these streams of philosophical thinking came to conceive human nature as having the inherent dignity of rationality and creative self-possession, in the spirit of protestantism but also extending beyond religion into secular politics. Even the protestant stream contains an implicit politics: with God exercising sovereignty directly within every individual’s intelligence, there is no justification for any military commander-in-chief to exercise sovereignty as a local expression of divine will.

Democracy is an expression of the political left-wing, an assertion (against the age-old dominance of the strongest) of the rights to political self-determination of the most numerous class of people who must sell labour for wages to survive because they possess little or nothing. It is leftist to derive inherent and inalienable rights from mere sentient existence, from the inherent dignity of life prior to any possession of property. Based on this philosophical convergence, developed over a long troubled history, there is no metaphysical justification for any claim that a collective can own anyone, or that anyone can own anyone, even on the grounds of being the strongest. No one has a metaphysical obligation or duty to submit to or be subject to the commands of a collective or individual, no matter how gifted. There is no metaphysical commanding height. The crucial freedom is the freedom to disbelieve the bogus metaphysics that sustains the dystopia: that rights belong to the strongest.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

A City of Plato’s Kings

04 Saturday May 2019

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Fragment 147, word count: 872.

Plato, in the Republic, claimed that humans come as three different kinds, and only the rarest kind is capable of philosophical thinking. Now, a couple of thousand years later, it is no longer plausible that some humans are different from others in that particular way. Plato was all about hierarchical categories, and he designed a political system suited to controlling a city made up of three distinct and unequal kinds of humans. Theorists in the Church hierarchy of feudal Christendom were proud that the institutions of their vast society actualized Plato’s design, with themselves as philosophers in ultimate control, confident in Plato’s claim that philosophical thought is the guiding treasure of any society. Political conservatism is still a remnant of, and nostalgia for, the political ideology and religious metaphysics (creationist monotheism) of feudal Christendom. However, since we no longer accept Plato’s division of humans into types, it follows from the manifest existence of philosophical thinking that it is something important which all humans might do. It could even be argued that everyone begins life as a philosopher. The goal of education, then, should be to reawaken the spirit of philosophy. Before anyone is a tinker, tailor, professional, or capitalist he or she should be abled as an adult, competent to digest diverse and conflicting information into an overall sense of orientation that serves the personal construction of a sustainable life. That is already pretty close to being a philosopher. So, what political institutions would be suitable for an entire population of philosophers? Such a population would eliminate the reasons given for the use of ‘noble’ lies (propaganda) as a technique of governing. They wouldn’t be taken in by lies.

The spirit of enquiry that we now associate with science was philosophy first. Science is a sub-category, natural philosophy, but the broad enquiry of philosophy covers the whole of culture and experience. This posture of enquiry arises from an implicit judgement that generally accepted cultural assertions are poorly supported by evidence and are often mere superstitions or misconceptions. The quest for philosophical awareness is a quest to recognize and move beyond such assumptions and assertions, to know that reality is mutable because ideas make up much of the structure of reality. Science is now considered an accumulation of reliable knowledge, but philosophy, even with its rich historical arc of ideas, remains mainly a spirit of enquiry, of incredulity, questioning, and of the importance of ongoing conceptual research.

We don’t admire philosophers for their scholarship, but for their original re-conceptualizations of experience. That fact expresses a human freedom to re-conceptualize experience comprehensively at the level of the embodied individual, a profound unpredictability in the creativity of human nature. Moreover, philosophy is not only about understanding reality. Understanding has always been in aid of ethical living, and arranging the best political institutions for the expression of human nature and ability, especially emphasizing the ongoing impulse to philosophize, to question and search for alternative ways of conceiving. It is a philosophical act (central in Epicureanism) to resist a dystopian society (any asserting a dystopian metaphysics that denigrates human nature) by re-directing energy toward recognizing the powers of personally interior ideality. That recognition displaces legacy metaphysics, both creationist monotheism or scientific materialism which perversely denigrate the nature of ordinary personalities. Science dismisses the creative freedom of personality as mere illusion, and Christianity dismissed the world of concrete matter as trivial staging for the great drama of salvation from inherent guilt. The point of thinking as a philosophical act is not knowledge in the ordinary sense, certainly not absolute knowledge of eternal necessities, such as mathematics, that removes the knower from engaged subjectivity. Instead it is to enact a personal reorientation to enable empathic agency, from full recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, ordinary consciousness. Philosophy works by thinking, acts of ideation, and soon finds its way to thinking about thinking and discovering the transcendence of ideality in its creative freedom*, untethered as it is from brute actuality by its temporality. Personality experiences its creativity, its ideality, as freedom because it encompasses in advance, from within itself, alternative possibilities for personal agency in mutating reality.

Political institutions are a test of truth because dystopian societies always rest on false metaphysics that either deny or misconceive ordinary ideality. Ideality is individually created freedom, and as such, transcendence at the level of the embodied individual. Freedom to philosophize comes from disbelieving the bullshit cultural metaphysics that sustains a dystopia. From the fact that it includes such thinking, we learn about human nature that it is innocently independent of social and cultural authority and control. In a society made up entirely of philosophers there would be no cultural background of metaphysics that denigrated human individuality, say by reducing personality to responses programmed by an immutable nature. There would be no dismissal of either ideality or actuality. The whole frontier economy of trophies from contests of strength would also be meaningless. Everyone would self-create personal identity and much of their own value experience because awareness of an interior fountain would be universal. It would be a society in which everyone recognized in all, individually, the creative freedom of ideality, and the dignity of its transcendence.

Embedded link:

Fragment 144, March 28, 2019, The Freedom of Ideality (word count: 442) (URL: https://wp.me/p1QmhU-b7)

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Underdog in the Transcendence Quarrel

13 Thursday Dec 2018

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

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Posting 138, word count: 560.

In the year 1277 the Bishop of Paris published a condemnation of 219 propositions being taught in philosophy classes at the University of Paris faculty of arts. In that condemnation the arts masters “are specifically proscribed from asserting “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy”…” *. Apparently the Bishop and his intelligence analysts recognized this proposition as an existential threat.

It may not appear so at first glance, but the proposition “that there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy” was and is incendiary for mainstream ideology. It denies the primacy of property possession, for example, along with the validity of the rights, trophies, and glamour of the strongest. It also asserts the underdog side in an ancient quarrel that was crucial for any Christian Bishop.

From ancient times there has been an ongoing quarrel over transcendence. On one side is the idea of an external sovereign transcendence to be feared and placated, a cosmic teleological force who chooses local agents to impose the universal pattern of sovereign dominance and hierarchy. On the other side of this quarrel is the idea that the only real transcendence is in each and every individual’s teleological processes simply as such. A case can be made that the transition from religion to philosophy is the movement from the first to the second. The mental movement that is philosophical thinking reaches a eureka! of self-recognition as a thinking being, as ideality, with a very special sort of absolute self-sufficiency in thinking. Martin Luther is an example of someone with a clear sense of absolute autonomy as a thinking being (in spite of his belief that the specifics of divine predestination cannot be known). For philosophy to be possible it is necessary for an individual to evade the default enculturation of a personal value-identity assigned by an ambient hive mind, and the norms of social pragmatism based on trust of authority, a superego, sovereignty. The act of philosophical self-recognition is always an individual’s questioning, searching on a principle of relevance intrinsic to a sense of wonder. The philosophical answer is the questioning itself: self-recognition as the sort of being who questions spontaneously, a fountain of original ideality. The way of being of personality is fundamental because that way of being selects and shapes any possible experience.

Thinking, Waking, Self-Possession

Fichte asked: How can an act of thinking wake you from pragmatic getting along to the discovery of yourself as ideality, a creative subject rather than an object? ** A related question is this: Is there some specific thinking that can reliably bring a person to self-consciousness as creative teleological ideality, or is it always just luck or an accident?

Having to make an effort to think about thinking means that pre-philosophical thinking activity is often performed un-self-consciously. To think about thinking is to direct a certain unsatisfied curiosity at curiosity itself. It is to question both questioning and intuitions of what is relevant at a certain moment, and to consider the spiritual condition of readiness-to-recognize something new, how something is learned, to wonder about acts of changing the sensed framework of orientation by which effort is exerted teleologically in a chosen direction. It is to wonder at the teleological structure of the sense of the passing of time.

Notes:

* The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, written by Jonathan Lyons, Published by Bloomsbury Press (2009), ISBN: 978-1596914599. (p. 195).

** Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4. (p. 42).

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.