The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

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

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Enlightenment, History, Immanuel Kant, imperialism, interiority, Marxism, metaphysics, patriarchy, philosophy, politics, scribal ideality, transcendence

Posting 125, Word count: 1,799.

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

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

The Enlightenment

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Metaphysics

12 Friday Jan 2018

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

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creativity, freedom, idealism, Immanuel Kant, materialism, monotheism, philosophy, Plato, politics, spirituality, teleology, time, transcendence

Posting 121, word count: 1,312.

Metaphysics is part of the framework of orientation within which any individual operates. Everybody has some metaphysical framework or other, typically learned from ambient culture at an early age without recognizing that it might be questionable, thinkable. The way in which a person’s framework of orientation deals with the incongruity between subjectivity and objectivity is its metaphysics, as both subjectivity and objectivity have been asserted as a revelation of what is uniquely and exclusively real in the cosmic whole, and they are starkly different from one another.

Subjectivity is remarkable due to its ideality, the personally interior experience of living a particular bearing of sensitive teleology in a life in the world. Ideality is the source and origin of the idea of transcendence since only ideality (spirituality, intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creativity and so of freedom, stunningly beyond the insensitive lumps and structures of objectivity, and as such a clear transcendence of nature. This makes personal engagement in the passing of time, a tilting into and toward an openness of time to come, fundamental in subjectivity and in the transcendence of nature. With subjectivity there are no eternal necessities, no finality. Everything is a tentative construct for navigating into a non-actual futurity, a strict ideality guessed at but unknown, questing (desperately) for opportunities to construct shapes and works, interventions within lumpen actuality, along the way. The bearing-into-futurity of subjectivity is a questioning that changes continually with experience and learning. Its whole conceptual framework of reference markers can change from internal reconsideration. Since personal subjectivity is not publicly measurable it has been characterized as inward, and so inwardly we have an ever-questing orientation, a directionality of caring at some moment in an embodied life in the world, a directionality which is the spiritual construct, representing an increasingly remote personal no-longer or previousness, of an interpretive context (immediate expectation, readiness, and bearing of intervention) for present experience.

On the other side of metaphysics is a universalizing of objectivity (on the model of “medium sized dry goods”), a conception of hard-structure forms, enduring, definite, final (“real”), determinate, self-subsisting concrete material objects in configuration, energy field structures gliding in an eternally pre-determined fall shaped by mathematical necessities such as inertia and entropy, categorically excluding the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality. Overall, it is the timelessness of objectivity, the finality of objects and their entirely predetermined arc of changes, manifesting eternal mathematical necessities, that stands out in claims placing objectivity as exclusively and uniquely real.

Subjectivity, and so transcendent ideality, is multiple rather than unitary, occurring in separate embodied and mortal persons clustered and scattered over the surface of planet Earth (that we know of). The transcendence of ideality, given its identity with ordinary subjectivity, has been considered such a frightening political problem that the dominant conceptions of idealism (metaphysical claims placing ideality in some form as primary in reality as a whole) have just evaded admitting the identity of ideality and subjectivity! Plato’s Ideal Forms, for example, are a mythological mashup of materiality and ideality, taking ideas of types of objects as essentially united with the objects. Existing separately from any person’s life in the world is a feature of objects that Plato ascribed to Ideas. Abstraction is entirely an operation of individual intelligences, but in Platonism the abstract categories of things are ultimately causal in the existence of every ephemeral particular of objective actuality. This announces one of the jaw-dropping surprises in the history of formal metaphysics, that what seems the most obvious and common sense occurrence of transcendent ideality in ordinary embodied individuals has gone conspicuously undocumented.

Creationist monotheism is a metaphysical dualism in which the fundamental principle is a single disembodied ideality (intelligence) who created the objective material world in a unique episode of exuberant divine caprice. It is normally considered that, within this created material world, humans, as sensitively conscious intelligences, were created as images of the creator, fundamentally similar to the divinity in ideality as distinct from concrete materiality. In that version of dualism the divine principle of creation, and so ideality more generally, is, as it is in Plato, primary and dominant, making it idealist even though not a declared idealism. Again, however, it is extravagantly abstracted from the ordinary experience of transcendent temporal ideality in ordinary persons. It was always the sense of transcendence from the teleological consciousness of embodied individuals that inspired the idea of a senior transcendence at far cosmic horizons. There is no other direct experience of ideality.

Given the dramatic differences between subjectivity and objectivity, anyone’s metaphysical framework of orientation will be a conception of reality as a whole that either includes or excludes the creative teleology and questioning consciousness of ideality (spirituality) with its freedom and transcendence of nature. A strict metaphysical objectivism (materialism) can remain coherent only by denying transcendence completely. (One problem with that is the implausibility of deriving ethically sensitive intelligences from insensitive lumps.) A metaphysics of transcendent ideality can remain coherent without denying the existence of objects by accepting a dualism of multiple embodied subjectivities each living a particular life as spirituality intervening in brute actuality.

Can the World be an Idea?

Contrary to Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, for example, the world can’t be only and entirely an idea because ideas are features of a personal orientation of some embodied individual in a particular life in the world. It has been claimed that the world is an idea in the mind of God, but the idea of God goes far beyond a particular embodied life in the world, and so is not strictly coherent. The way in which the world is an idea is that what is known of the world is always the construct of personal experiences of the world. The world is an idea for any and every individual, and individuals have been sharing ideas about the world with one another and have constructed various cultural ideas of the world. In any individual’s life, the world is an idea, largely learned from some such ambient culture. However, to use Kantian terminology, the world “in itself” can’t be only and entirely an idea.

We can say two things about a world with transcendent spirituality. First, it is not entirely pre-determined by anything. Its fate in detail is mutable, strictly indeterminate, with possibilities for novelty at any moment. Second, anyone’s ideas of the world, and any culturally transmitted ideas of the world, are also mutable, not etched into the blueprints of the cosmos, not final or essential elements of reality, but rather tentative abstractions, subject to revision or abandonment with the assimilation of more experience. Ideas of the world are typically cultural constructs originating from multiple contributions from various individuals’ experience and creative thinking.

The effective activity of creative transcendence at the level of the individual has important political consequences, especially in support of egalitarian and mutually nurturing systems of sociability, the opposite of patriarchy. It means that social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas. Ideas are openings into a mutable future. An authentic idealist metaphysics is a metaphysics in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of novelty created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics in which there is active transcendence with effects in brute actuality, a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come. Political conservatives either just deny transcendence completely and interpret the world as mere physics, entirely fated or random, or adhere to something like the Platonic or monotheistic idea of transcendence, a unique supernatural expression at some far horizon which determined how things will be forever.

Rudiments of Thinking

18 Saturday Nov 2017

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

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agency, David Hume, Gender culture, hive mind, metaphysics, patriarchy, philosophy, Plato's cave, self-possession, sovereignty, superego, thinking, Thomas Hobbes, transcendence

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

posting 119, word count 1,919.

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

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

Truth to the Masses

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

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

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

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

Hive Minds Make War

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

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

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

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

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

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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agency, consciousness, culture, embodiment, freedom, hive mind, identity, knowledge, philosophy, postmodernism, sociability, thinking, time, transcendence, universality

Posting 118, word count: 1,656

Post-modernist theory rejects the mental autonomy and creative agency of the individual that Enlightenment era philosophy introduced into modernity. It’s also the universality insisted upon by philosophical claims that post-modernists reject and deny. Implicit here is the post-modernist claim that individual identity is inseparable from an ambient cultural hive mind made up of specific ‘discourses’. That individuals can move their personal orientation beyond an ambient hive mind (cultural discourses), beyond an ethnic identity, and reorient into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally, and so engage in thinking with a peculiarly philosophical universality and autonomy, is rejected by post-modernists. The claimed necessity of ethnic identity is the theory behind a postmodernist imperative to refrain from criticizing cultures, to respect the peculiarities of all cultures because criticism is always from some ‘colonizing, imperialist, alien cultural perspective’. The fragmentations of identity politics follow. Without philosophical universality you can’t criticize patriarchy or patriarchal superego. This is our point of dispute.

It is not controversial that individual people universally share both consciousness and embodiment. The question is this: is there enough that is inherent in only consciousness and embodiment for an individual to have a viable identity able to enact an exit from hive minds? Part of the post-modernist claim is that there is no coherent person, subject, or agent without the input of particular cultural norms encountered and learned from ongoing interactions with other people within an ambient community. This claim has essential common ground with the claim of David Hume (1711-76) that there is no continuity of interior subjectivity.

Hume’s Phenomenology

Hume’s phenomenology of subjectivity as a “bundle of impressions and ideas” in which he could identify no enduring self or person, emerges when experience is pre-conceived as passively receptive and determined exclusively by the bombardment at every moment of a manifold of stimuli from surrounding objects and events. Such a pre-conception is typical of empiricists with their idea of consciousness as a “blank slate” that exists only as the sensory stimuli and afterimages that appear there. That model is inaccurate, however, because consciousness doesn’t work passively. A person comes to each moment as an agent, searching, reaching, and delving as an interpretation of a personal past. Such temporal depth and agency is exactly subjective continuity since responses to lessons learned enacted as a personal vectoring into futurity are acts of a subject. Knowing is nothing like a mental photocopy of facts, not the ability to recover an afterimage of words or images from a stack. When something is known it has been made a fixture of a person’s orientation, embedded in a personal sense of context and bearing, an overall sense of where you are, where you are coming from, and where headed: the personal context for making sense of anything sensed or perceived. Knowledge isn’t afterimages but instead a rich directionality of flight, a poise or bearing. Any consciousness is already agency expressing a subjectivity whose particular identity is formed very much by embodiment but also by spiritual individuality, an individual peculiarity of sensitivity, point of view, questioning, impulses to make a personal mark, individuality of voice. Embodiment gives us the personal identity of a particular shape and placement; mobility, experience of moving and shaping other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effort and effect. What persons have in common universally as consciousness and embodiment are dimensions of individual identity.

Discourses Don’t Think (Only Individuals Think)

When “thinking” is mentioned it might still suggest an outward gaze, an opening through sensitivity to objects in the surrounding world, maybe contemplated after the fact with retained impressions or from reading or hearing spoken reports. There is much to think about in the tumultuous, terrible, and wonderful world, from dinner to politics. However, there is also much to think about concerning thinking itself, the action of a personal sensibility that brings to any sensitivity all the context that gives it meaning and sense, a sensibility that delves sensations for confirmations of expectations and opportunities for personal aspirations. The directionality of any human gaze is so guided by 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) to what can only be characterized as a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Spiritual agency isn’t an object or a substance, has no completed outline or appearance, but it still has plenty of identity.

A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity which includes a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring (a marker of spirituality). Each spirituality is characterized by its own interiority of such temporally structured non-actuality, bearing into the openness and freedom of an indeterminate future with the force of curiosity, questioning, accumulated discoveries, an impulse to self-declare, to make a personal mark, and of empathic sociability. Personal acts of caring both express and keep constructing the most personal newness and incompleteness. In that way time is a structure of caring which uses impressions of entropy physics (of embodiment and its working: muscle knowledge and kinaesthetic-metabolic knowledge) in a construction of expectation and directionality.

For such a sensibility, time is something about now, specifically the personal context-in-flight brought to bear upon now as the portal to creating a personal future. The sense of time to come, of passing into time to come, is a glimpse of the freedom of ideality, of the ongoing (never finished) self-construction of sensibility. In a certain sense we exist entirely in our spiritual reach into not-yet in the context of lessons interpreted from no-longer. Only spirituality (intelligence) strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, and that is the essence of creativity. Teleology of creation is another identifier of spirituality, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive gestures or voice. Consciousness, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea-of-a-life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself through the world, is a fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating openness in an otherwise inertial and entropic world. In such a world, consciousness can recognize its temporal bearing as transcendent in its outreaching sensitivity, its caring and curiosity, its ever renewing ideality, its freedom and power of embodied intervention within the shape of brute actuality. In the strictly inertial and entropic world, this very limited freedom is shockingly transcendent.

The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of nature, transcending its own embodied particularity by always tilting into an indefinite beyond-itself, projecting active construction and expression from interior non-actuality. Nothing defies particularity outside spiritual creativity, and the peculiarity of spirituality is in being both particular and utterly beyond particularity. Evading particularity means asserting spirituality, making sure that a manifest expression is actualized, enacted, but of a kind that includes incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion. Instead of having any definitive personal particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality, namely freedom, time to come as freedom into which a possible future extension of self, of life, is projected, a personal metaphysical non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. Time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by enacting interconnections with others. The flight of ideality creates a special sensitivity to other fountains of unforeseeable possibilities, other conscious agents. In such sociability we have: empathy, the comfort of companionship and sharing, co-operative bonding, community, ethics, morality, culture, and conversation.

The agency inherent in consciousness, particularized and empowered by embodiment and yet made transcendently open and creatively indefinite by spirituality, establishes that personhood, viable identity, is not fundamentally a construct of cultural norms. We can judge and criticize patriarchy, patriarchal superego, and any other cultural norms from the perspective of the inherent agency of individual consciousness which is always outside a hive mind orientation. Not only that, but the personal transcendence in spirituality is a guiding beacon in a process of thinking that judges (and discards) culturally assigned labels, categories, and evaluations of personal identity which contradict and deny personal transcendence. We still have an inherent sensitivity to other conscious agents and good reasons to re-invent empathic interconnections.

There certainly is a requirement of sociability, and we construct our sociability initially by learning, conforming to, and using the norms of interaction on display around us. Individuals imitate and twist the norms of interaction we encounter. The imitation of such norms of identity is pragmatic role-playing, constructing a sort of costume or mask which can become habitual and obsessive and yet always removable in principle. The original agency is not replaced or destroyed. The identity markers assigned by culture depend on the inherent agent to make them work, are in fact parasitic on the inherent agent, and agency remains when an individual moves personal orientation beyond a cultural hive mind or ethnic identity and reorients philosophically into a human intelligence or spirituality that has crucial commonalities with all other individual intelligences universally.

Spirituality, Time, and Ideas

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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

Found Buried in the History of Philosophy

25 Thursday May 2017

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

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dualism, freedom, History, hive mind, Immanuel Kant, philosophy, religion, spirituality, thinking, transcendence

tags: transcendence, spirituality, dualism, hive mind, philosophy, history, religion, thinking, freedom, Immanuel Kant

A thing to be found in the history of philosophy, a thing which has been carefully avoided, is the fact that the thinking of a series of people who did philosophical work progressed through a slow development from ancient times and finally became confident in a fundamental breakthrough, the essentials of which are present in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) along with plenty of contradictory and distracting material. The breakthrough is substantially this: the message of personal spirituality is not subordination to an eternal and infinite disembodied spirituality (caring), but instead is individual creative autonomy, an active transcendence at the level of the embodied individual: transcendent individualism.

The Transcendence of Local Spirituality

Philosophical spirituality is not obscure. It is your personal experience, intelligence, or consciousness, but the word “consciousness” implies something impossibly passive, and impossibly “here and now”. Without there, there is no here. Without then, there is no now. The there and the then are always brought to the here and now spiritually by a person’s intelligence intervening in the here and now. Ordinary mental intervention that includes perception of here and now must also include ideation, abstraction, memory, caring, lessons learned, expectations, and aspirations in effortful progress within the sense of the passage of time. It is creative activity, a thought or idea of temporal opening that is thinking itself into the world. Philosophy is (often) a descriptive exploration of that local and temporal spirituality, a recognition of its transcendence in spite of its everyday familiarity. This transcendence is orientation (existence as intelligence) within a continuous newness, with invention, creation, and the openness of alternative and devised possibilities, which is more or less the ordinary sense of being alive, of consciousness. By contrast, in the world of materialism, without transcendence, there may be cycles and variations on similar kinds of events but all within a world that is fundamentally formed and bounded, completed, closed, in something like an unalterable Great Chain of Being. The difference is between a closed world of determinism or an open world of ongoing creation. Normal experience always includes openness, but an openness that must assert itself against the world’s tendency to go closed. The transcendence of the opening is always part of a dualism with closed determinism as its surroundings. That transcendence is the only way in which everything does not have to be as it is. The loss of transcendence carries the implication that everything has to be just what it is. So, philosophical spirituality is a recognition of transcendence at the level of individual embodied intelligence.

What is Religious Spirituality?

This highlights the fact that there are two main contesting concepts of spirituality: the religious and the philosophical. Among religions, there is a widespread assumption that spirituality is inseparably connected to a guilty conscience supposedly inherent in every human, and, from that guilt, a reaching out in surrender to a higher being for forgiveness, healing, and release from the taint and disgrace of being-part-of this world of trouble and strife. The guilty conscience and certain events are considered to be deliberate messages to humans from a supernatural parallel universe containing personified entities of caring with effective power over our world. Those entities and their world cannot be known otherwise, so the behaviour of humans toward them demands belief without evidence, faith in the legends of their mysterious power, and demonstrations of fear decreed by those legends. (faith, fear, guilt, surrender, transcendence of disembodied intelligence) The mystical version is an overwhelming sense of release from guilty individuality through spiritual uptake into the absolute, primordial, and eternal unity of everything. Almost everybody is brought up under the influence of some religion or other, emphasizing obedience to divinely proclaimed rules, with guilt and punishment for disobedience; but hardly anybody learns anything about philosophy as a different (breakthrough) encounter with spirituality.

The problem now is that, culturally, we lost a sense of transcendence during the nineteenth century in an onslaught of scientific materialism, which also had a decisive, and in some ways helpful, role in Enlightenment politics, having gone a long way to undermine the political power of institutions deriving their credibility from the religious story of transcendence. However, we are still wallowing in the metaphysical slough of pre-Kantian materialist determinism. The credibility of the old religious transcendence has been in steady and terminal decline, but is still clung to desperately by many people who remain unaware of any alternative, and who recoil from nihilist materialism. In its combination of scientific denial of transcendence and a clinging to discredited religious conceptions of transcendence, the cultural hive mind that is made available to us in the Euro-American cultural system of the early twenty-first century is debilitating and toxic. What is required now from philosophy is a metaphysics of transcendence in personal spirituality, but that metaphysics has existed for a long time already as the spirituality and transcendence of ordinary consciousness.

What’s Spiritual about Thinking?

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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Enlightenment, Equality, humanism, philosophy, religion, science, social pragmatism, spirituality, thinking, time metaphysics, transcendence

Posting 100

Tags: philosophy, humanism, spirituality, transcendence, thinking, time metaphysics, social pragmatism, religion, science, equality, enlightenment

An Unheralded Rivalry

There is a long history of rivalry between alternative conceptions of human spirituality, which may come as a surprise to anyone who takes for granted that religion owns the patents on spirituality. From ancient times philosophy was an alternative discourse of spirituality that tended toward emphasizing the primacy of the embodied individual, the thinker of questions. Humanist rationalism was (and can be) a guide to transcendent spirituality in startling contrast to religious conceptions. Perhaps especially as conceived by Epicureans, it was a personal, and so bottom-up spirituality, recognizing spirituality as an individual power.

In this age of science, spirituality is an elephant in the room. Most scientists as individuals have to put up with a certain discourse of spirituality because it is deeply entangled with conceptions of respectability, of morality and conventional respect for law and the social order, involving a degree of peer pressure to practice some antique religion as a personal declaration of social orthodoxy, of pragmatic support for the social contract. Spirituality is supposed to be the heart of the antique religions, but any discourse of spirituality is strictly incompatible with science. (There are large cash prizes on offer for people who help reduce this awkwardness by making plausible suggestions for reconciling science and religion.) Personal spirituality is identified as a sense of wonder and connection with the awesome scale of the cosmos, somehow connected to moral debt, guilt, and moral sentiment, and is commonly thought of as a portal to acquaintance with higher reality, deity, the awesomely sacred, first and divine things, at least to the extent that such acquaintance is possible for us flawed and meagre humans. Perhaps it is surprising that the discourse of spirituality can be separated from its entanglement with grand scale divinity, morality, law, and social order, without disappearing, but it can be, even though for both science and the great antique religions, such a metaphysics is inconceivable.

What is Thinking?

The fundamental question of the relevant philosophy here is “What is thinking?” from an intuition that personal thinking operations are the whole reality of spirituality. Such philosophy is an exploration of the spirituality of thinking, both in getting from moment to moment in life and in questioning assumptions that pave the familiar thought-paths of socially pragmatic life and expectation. The most ordinary orientation or bearing from this moment to the next is a thinking operation. It is a spiritual creation of freedom through the personal construction of a temporal path into a mutable future of possibilities and increasingly remote probabilities that have no actual existence as such. Past and future do not exist in the brute actuality of nature. They exist only, but emphatically, within the orientation of individual persons. There is an ongoing accumulation of complexity in a person’s bearing or vector of orientation, as curiosity, questioning, and inspiration engage and grapple with nature, culture, and other intelligences. There is always the inward quest to sustain a life, holding and modifying a bearing of flight in building that life. Re-orienting toward the next moment is done, therefore, with reference to the whole past of an embodied life, which does not exist in the actuality of nature, and so with reference to much more than outward markers.

The way-of-being of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself (evading thingness), to project self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and creative freedom. What time as a personal past and future shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of the spiritual is precisely the same as the immateriality of time in lessons learned, aspirations, and anticipations. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with, intervening in, brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images or symbols somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

So what is Spiritual about Thinking? Is it Transcendent enough?

The essential identity of everyone as an individual is an active process of creative orientation, a personal interiority of spiritual non-actuality, as just described, intervening continuously in brute actuality as a particular embodiment. The non-actuality of the particular temporal depth in which any individual is oriented, what has often been called inwardness or interiority, grounds the meaning of spirituality here, but there is much more. The crucial spiritual reality is the freedom-within-an-unfinished-world which is created by that play of non-actuality, and the personally fulfilling creative power it manifests. So, these features, non-actuality, creative power creating a life, freedom, and mutability within an otherwise determined and determinate nature, cash out as transcendent spirituality. Even though this spirituality is separated from entanglements with grand scale divinity, and divinely dictated morality, law, guilt, and social order, the transcendence does not disappear.

Elemental Embodiment and Spirituality

In our spirituality we have: the subjective non-actualities of anticipation, aspiration, and evaluation, modelling futurity as an openness; a personal force of aspirational directionality, bearing, or ever-rebuilding orientation; the freedom of newness and incompleteness; empathic recognition of separate spiritual beings and a resulting sociability. We have the gusher of questions, curiosity, impulses to mark the environment and construct interconnections with others.

In the sociability of spirituality we have: empathy, recognition of the opportunity to multiply the openness of spirituality by co-operative bonding, community, conversation, the comfort of companionship and sharing.

In our experience of elemental embodiment we have: the personal identity of individual shape and placement; mobility, mobilization and shaping of other objects; gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, often in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities; ingestion, experience of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which models nature as a cost-shape of effortful and effective work.

Thinking Off-Grid: Leaving the Metaphysics of Social Pragmatism

What normally stands in the way of discovering this reality of spirituality in personal thinking operations is a certain culturally supplied roadmap of thinking, a trained orientation into social pragmatism, which effectively prevents us from questioning much of anything. Social pragmatism, into which every child is trained in school, is a roadmap of thinking, packaged in a judgment from crypto-metaphysics that you, as an individual, are incapable of thinking critically about the justifications or origins of social authority because you are flawed by unworthy intentions, and also low on nature’s food chain due to inherently limited competence. (“Who do you think you are?”) At the boundary of the socially pragmatic roadmap of thinking is the warning: “Here be Dragons”. The message is that questioning the framework of social authority is pure futility because there is no coherent alternative to arrangements as you find them, so that nothing can come of such thinking but an abyss of nihilism and despair. Part of social pragmatism is the assertion that “the good” is conferred entirely by the social arrangements of the status quo: you merit the amount of goods (including freedom) you win in competitions within the economic system, and so no good can come of thinking critically about the justifications of social and cultural authority. With that context, social pragmatism is not only a roadmap of thinking, but also a restricting conception of thinking itself as pragmatic logic, collecting data for solving the menu of problems intrinsic to the place you occupy on the economic food chain. However, from the initial condition of social pragmatism, there are experiences which occasion the discovery of the creative thinking involved with re-conceptualization, questioning fundamental assumptions, a kind of thinking more often identified as philosophical. A person goes from ordinary thinking within a socially pragmatic framework, designing and executing interventions into social actuality, to questioning the fundamental metaphysics of the framework itself. Somehow a line is crossed, the line formed by assumptions of not being competent to think and of belonging at a certain place on the hierarchical food chain. Somehow the metaphysics of inherent human flaw and inevitable cosmic chain becomes questionable and inoperative. This metaphysics of being flawed and chained is left behind and there is a crossing out into a condition of thinking which is not even supposed to be there, where the metaphysics of flaw and chain is completely absent, but where discovering creative freedom in the personal spirituality of thinking refutes entirely the prediction of nihilism and incoherence. The whole reality of spirituality and metaphysics is in this thinking. There is a fountain of good here, the spontaneous creation from within of curiosity, questioning, and inspiration, the gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others.

Oddly then, the only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of subjective embodiment. The non-particularity of the thinking self is the non-particularity of freedom. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body.

Notes

Thinking as creative re-conceptualization was described in two previous postings:

97, July 19, 2016, What is Thinking?

98, August 17, 2016, Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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creativity, freedom, history of philosophy, logic, mysticism, philosophy, spirituality, thinking, time, transcendence

Tags: thinking, creativity, freedom, philosophy, spirituality, transcendence, mysticism, logic, history of philosophy

The School of Athens

In the centre of the fresco “The School of Athens” (by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, painted between 1509 and 1511 in the Vatican, Apostolic Palace) Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right are gesturing their disagreement, each pointing to what he takes to be the most important focus of philosophical curiosity and thinking, and in doing so setting the agenda of western thinking generally for a couple of thousand years. Plato points skyward, asserting his metaphysics, which features the cosmic dominance of otherworldly and timeless Ideal Forms, anticipating Christian spirituality. Aristotle has his hand extended horizontally, palm open and facing downward, indicating that it is more important to understand the concrete world as encountered in ordinary living, anticipating science. Regrettably, they were both wrong. The focus revealed in the key question What is thinking? is the power of spirituality on a strictly personal-scale.

The intense spiritual effort known as mysticism is based on a conviction that there are profound spiritual features of the human situation which remain generally unrecognized either because they are metaphysically remote from the ordinary circumstances of human living (as in the metaphysics of Plato, for example), or else they are somehow hidden in plain sight, occupying an unidentified blind spot in human perception, especially as that perception is guided by normal cultural influences. Part of the claim and program of any mysticism, of course, is that those unrecognized features can (and should!) be disclosed and explored with certain special techniques. In the case of philosophical thinking on the question What is thinking?, the techniques available are familiar enough: questioning, self-questioning, and re-conceptualization. However, even such philosophical thinking can carry a whiff of mysticism in acknowledging a shocking strangeness lurking within the ordinary, a strangeness concerning human spirituality, and that appropriate acquaintance with spirituality has a transforming effect on experience generally.

Existenz*

To say that spirituality is personally ‘interior’ is to say nothing more than that it is not an actuality among things, but is still the marker of what is most local for any particular person. In the work of Martin Luther, such subjective interiority was called inwardness. In Stoicism, as well as in the work of Luther and Immanuel Kant, freedom was recognized as an important reality but entirely limited to that personal inwardness, and everything overt and public was conceived as completely pre-determined either by divine plan (logos for Stoics) or by material cause/ effect, so by God or nature. However, all of those ways of thinking were guided in what they conceived by ideas of cosmic hierarchy, in which the power of the almighty eternal was so comprehensive that no ephemeral and finite force could divert it in any way. Such ideas of cosmic hierarchy are unjustified.

The creative freedom that is personal spirituality is not a formless nothing, and is much more than passive consciousness ‘of’ something. It is teleological time: an interventionist bearing into actuality conceived as open futurity shaped by the personal specifics of anticipation, aspiration, and evaluation, including pre-actual anticipations of alternative discretionary interventions. Freedom has the form of time as open futurity constructed of non-actual and increasingly remote possibilities and probabilities, incorporating lessons learned, all in continuity with the most local actuality of embodiment. That the actuality of the present state of affairs categorically and specifically excludes and negates the actuality of all other states of affairs (temporal discontinuity), means that the existence of other states, which is required for the existence of time, can only be existence as non-actualities ‘interior to’ some living person. This spiritual ‘interiority’ is an individual’s ever-present embodied orientation in a time-structure of non-actuality (the non-actual future, the non-actual past). As freedom-empowering non-actuality, teleological time is the form of transcendent spirituality. A very elaborated orientation and directionality of interventionist bearing is certainly ‘in here’, continuously self-building with a streaming force of original questioning, creativity, and basic sociability, along with variably intense anxiety, desperation, and gratification. Power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in this spirituality at the level of the embodied individual.

That Whiff of Mysticism

The idea of metaphysical transcendence (effective non-actuality or immateriality), of course, contains a whiff of mysticism, suggesting ideas about what is supernatural, typically conceived as divinity, and about how humans should bring ourselves into an appropriate relationship to the supernatural. However, what is encountered in recognizing the personally interior non-actualities in freedom and time, although transcendent, is emphatically embodied, not all-knowing or all-powerful, and certainly lacks universal jurisdiction, so is not divine in any usual sense. This transcendence suggests a scattered multitude of equals instead of “something than which nothing can be greater”. Here there is nothing to be known about how to evade oppressive astral powers on the path up to divinity, no divine messages or powers in letters, words, numbers, events or images, nor anything else that could be cultish. This is transcendent spirituality without the dissolving of personal individuality which is typical of mysticism. There are no glimpses here of an almighty provider, legislator, and enforcer. This transcendence involves no debt, and so no guilt or gratitude, and has no involvement of any kind with disembodied intelligent entities. This transcendence is without the “all is one” or cosmic consciousness, without the supreme-source or cosmic moral ledger keeping and final day of reckoning. There is only this whiff of personal creative freedom which is not a thing. Perhaps the surprise is that spirituality and transcendence are still recognizable as such without the more grandiose features of mysticism.

Still, the personal use of thinking (on the question: What is thinking?) as a gateway to the experience of spirituality carries a distinct whiff of mysticism. For one thing, there is the recognition that working up a theory of spirituality is insufficient. In this thinking, the task at hand is not the construction of conceptual or abstract knowledge, but instead a personal experience, an encounter with and recognition of ‘interior’ non-actuality as transcendent spirituality. It is more a re-orientation to a grounding in that transcendence than any word-based knowledge or model-building. This is a personal and practical re-orientation as opposed to critiquing and tweaking the logic of theories and intervening in theoretical puzzles, which quite properly make up the important substance of academic work. This is personal in ways that theory never is. Nobody does this for money, but for intrinsic value, just as with mysticism. This alone is enough to put such thinking at the outer fringe of philosophy, where it should be unable to cast an unwelcome light on institutional philosophy, already considered fringy enough with respect to scientific knowledge.

Thinking and Time

To think is, sometimes, to question (doubt) in a way that is profoundly different from requesting information from a catalogue, such as people do with internet search engines or in the student – teacher interaction. This different kind of questioning or curiosity is not something with definite linguistic form. It is to have personal orientation progress outside previously habitual markers, categories, rules, and boundaries. It is a sense of unknowing and vigilant curiosity which specifically rejects established patterns. Questioning is a dissolving or failing of previously stable elements of subjective orientation: expectations of identities and relationships. They dissolve frequently in the process of an individual’s developing orientation. To think is to be vigilant to that dissolving, and so to unleash the gushing interior stream of alternative possible reconstructions: new and incompatible ‘propositions’ to be considered. This thinking as the movement between questioning and re-conceptualization is done in the context of both a person’s interventionist bearing, and the simultaneously expanding overall orientation at this moment of flight into actuality toward the openness of futurity. So, thinking is re-making the provisional stability of futurity, the personal specifics of anticipating, aspiring, evaluating, planning and executing interventions: re-conceptualization. There is no modelling or representation of this mental operation in logic theory, neither in inductive or deductive logic. The whole spirit of formal logic is to be coldly rule-governed and determinate, but re-conceptualization is indeterminate and warm, which is to say, creative. The active presence of a scattered multiplicity of embodied spiritualities, intervening as individuals into local actuality, makes the whole world indefinite, indeterminate, not yet a completed particular. Time is the incompleteness of everything. Thinking is a way of being in an indeterminate world, a world of possibility, a way of making such a world. This isn’t psychology, but rather the metaphysics of time.

Descartes was Right

If there is to be an event of questioning (thinking on the way to re-conceptualization) there must be an oriented bearing of intervention, anticipation, aspiration, evaluation, and so a thinking subject in flight between past and future. The inseparable combination of the temporality of thinking and the subjectivity of time establishes that Descartes was right about “Cogito, ergo sum.”.

Missing Spirituality

In an era when the decline of spiritual ideologies from antique religions is no longer seriously lamented, potentially clearing the field for better guides, the vacuum was filled instead by the modern ideology of competitive materialism, celebrated relentlessly in mass media and aided and encouraged by science in its role as dominant intellectual discourse. Thoroughly secular people still inclined to have spirituality in their lives, and there are many, often do so by involvement with the arts, cultivating appreciation of art and beauty. It is a positive thing that there are still so many determined to keep a sense of spirituality alive. However, ascribing spirituality to beauty directs attention outward toward some eternally mysterious source, remote and unattainable. Contemplation and appreciation of art and beauty, as a way of being spiritual, invokes a kind of Platonic idealism in which beauty represents a transcendent world which is otherwise inaccessible, almost perfectly alien to individuals. In such a context, the human connection to spirituality is occasional, passive, unreliable, and dependent on treasured properties for possession of which the most wealthy compete. This is a misconception of transcendence. The top-down metaphysical orientation re-enforces the hierarchy that is typical of arts culture, largely overlapping the hierarchy of competitive materialism.

The promise of philosophy reclaiming the metaphysical question of transcendence as its historically essential issue, even with its whiff of mysticism, is to open a more appropriate experience and discourse of spirituality. Regrettably, reputable philosophy has made itself as science-like and un-spiritual as possible, and so unavailable as a source of spiritual discourse. However, there is plenty of spiritual discourse in the history of philosophy, some of it cited above. Spiritually relevant philosophy comes of personally making something important of the question: What is thinking? What thinks is spirituality, a flight of creativity and so of indeterminacy, projecting creativity into actuality. Such a conception of spirituality upsets the Platonic-scientific sense of the world (including the social world) as a rigidly furnished bundle of structures waiting to be discovered, with all essences already finished and in place, and so where everything is as it must always be. As an act of creation, thinking is the reality of freedom at the level of the embodied individual, and keeps open the indeterminacy and incompleteness of the self and the world. Emphasizing thinking as spiritual power also shifts the sense of human wellbeing in a way that upsets the ideology of competitive materialism. Thinking itself is the best and essential achievement, self-conferred. Tapping the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence), and bringing creations into the world is the way to fulfillment for both individuals and collectives.

Note:

* Some observations in this posting are responses to points made in:

What is Existenz Philosophy, written by Hannah Arendt, published in Partisan Review 8/1 (Winter 1946): pp. 34-56.

What is Thinking?

19 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence, University, Why thinking?

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Aristotle, freedom, intentionality, Martin Heidegger, moral reckoning, phenomenology, philosophy, Pierre Hadot, questioning, Sarah Bakewell, spirituality, thinking, transcendence, wonder

Tags: philosophy, thinking, questioning, wonder, spirituality, freedom, transcendence, moral reckoning, phenomenology, intentionality, Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, Sarah Bakewell, Pierre Hadot.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) wrote* that philosophy is grounded in a specific question (What is Being?), and guided by a related question (What are beings?). For Heidegger, then, philosophy is a matter of those particular questions, a matter of specific questioning. However, Heidegger’s grounding and guiding questions express the “thing” or object bias of phenomenology (“To the things!”), which was based on a claim known as the principle of intentionality: consciousness is always “of something”. As a gateway into philosophy, phenomenology has an exceptionally good thing about it: it is a program of personal thinking, rather than theory that you have to remember. In doing phenomenology, you don’t have to remember anything but that you are re-evaluating your experience by practicing a novel mindfulness (initially non-verbal), eventually writing about the process. It begins with an effort to clear out of perception all the clutter of previously learned assumptions, conceptions, and theories. Phenomenology does not claim to pass on knowledge of eternal reality. The question of objective reality is suspended, bracketed off. What seems to happen is itself the object of interest. However, a problem with phenomenology is the conception of human spirituality or intelligence as “consciousness”. Consciousness, by definition, is passive and nothing but receptive. To assert the classic claim of intentionality – consciousness is always “of something” – just asserts the definition of consciousness. However, consciousness is not a stand-alone autonomous event, but rather is an aspect of a more complex spiritual flight and engagement. The more fundamental questions that ground and guide philosophy concern spirituality rather than phenomenological “things”.

To paraphrase Aristotle, philosophy is spirituality thinking about spirituality, dissatisfied with the imperfection of its self-possession, doing what it can to re-conceptualize the transcendence of its existence as spirituality, its freedom and non-actuality. Seen this way, philosophy is a specific spiritual quest, an embodied spirituality questing to overcome the self-alienation that is peculiarly typical of spirituality (of Existenz), with intent to arrive at a new but still primordial self-acquaintance. So, maybe Heidegger got the philosophical questions wrong. A strong candidate for the grounding and guiding question of philosophy might be: What is thinking?

The Blind-Spot is Spirituality

In an age of science, spirituality is the blind-spot. The philosophical identification of spirituality is different, but not entirely different, from the religious. Moral reckoning is not as central to spirituality as conceived philosophically: mechanisms of moral ledgering and payout as retribution or reward can be absent completely. The philosophical sense of spirituality is the engagement with brute actuality of non-actualities such as anticipation, evaluation, aspiration, and deliberation over pre-actual alternative possible interventions in actuality. The philosophical response to recognizing the transcendent freedom of spirituality (accomplished by its power of creating those non-actualities) is not gratitude or any other kind of answerability, as if to a top-down super-provider, but instead is creative curiosity, questioning, a wondering that is an active bearing into actuality. When that curiosity expresses itself, or could be fairly represented, as the question “What is thinking?”, then this spirituality bears toward self-acquaintance. In aid of self-acquaintance it can abandon common and familiar categories and boundaries designating itself and go on without them, before trial-applying some novel fixations of a new orientation to this spiritual force-point of non-actuality, and of this spiritual self to its surroundings things.

So, thinking is an exercise of elemental spirituality. It is a readiness, inside the bearing of an actively enlarging orientation, to evade familiar concepts, categories and boundaries, to dissolve them with questioning, and to form a novel, more inclusive, synthesis of experience from within and outside those boundaries and categories. Questioning is always some degree of a dissolving force against previously fixed categories and boundaries. To conceptualize is to place and posture yourself within an opening with some particularity of shape, arrangement of contents, and inclusion of remote presences. Thinking includes creating novel conceptualizations and re-orienting within novel conceptualizations. Thinking is vigilance inside a question, inside the innocent unknowing of curiosity, listening with the ear of curiosity, so to speak, but with not just an ear but a radar which projects a stream of novel possible orientations, to find what might work as a newly shaped opening.

Anyone encountering philosophy confronts the question: do I have to learn the theories of every philosopher in history to get it? The quick answer is: certainly not! Philosophy is a way of being spiritual, of thinking (as in phenomenology), rather than some collection of words-of-wisdom or nuggets-of-knowledge. It is not the secrets of eternity passed personally from teacher to student like a mantra, preserved by being hidden from the common crowd in obscure terminology. Philosophy is the exact opposite of anything cultish because it insists on personal autonomy of thinking. However, university programs do a poor job of coaching thinking. In the academic context, thinking is limited to (misrepresented as) formal logic, learning to evaluate the validity of arguments. In the Anglo-empiricist tradition thinking is inseparable from language and so the only way to think about thinking is to study the formalities and rules of language, and especially the rules of logic embedded within language. You study the current debate on certain issues, or the history of debate on traditional issues: the ideas, claims, and arguments of noteworthy and influential philosophers from the past, things you have to remember so that your memory can be tested and declared worthy or unworthy in yet another moral reckoning. However, it soon becomes apparent that the core of philosophy is not the conceptual system of any particular tradition, or of all taken together, but is instead some mental process accessible to anyone more or less spontaneously, and not well represented by formal logic. There is no indispensable philosopher, or any other reliable introduction, when it comes to the mental process peculiar to philosophy.

Notes

*Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, written by Martin Heidegger (Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same), Translated from German by David Farrell Krell, Published by Harper One, An imprint of Harper Collins Publishers (1991), (Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979-87) ISBN 978-0-06-063841-2. (See the question on p. 68, Volume One).

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada (2016), ISBN 978-0-345-81095-3.
This is an up-to-date and absorbing introduction to the ideas and historical milieu of existentialism and phenomenology.

What Is Ancient Philosophy?, written by Pierre Hadot, translated by Michael Chase, published by Belknap Press; (2002), ISBN: 0674007336.
This is an especially approachable gateway into philosophy, moving emphasis to how thinking was cultivated as a spiritual way of life.

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

creativity, freedom, individuality, intelligence, metaphysics, philosophy, spirituality, subjectivity, time

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

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Tag Archives: philosophy

The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left!

Welcome to Metaphysics

Rudiments of Thinking

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

Spirituality, Time, and Ideas

Found Buried in the History of Philosophy

Philosophy with a Whiff of Mysticism

What is Thinking?

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics