The Thrill of It

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom, embodiment, enchantment, History, magic, privilege, Romanticism, science, spirituality

Fragment 182, word count: 335.

tags: romanticism, science, spirituality, embodiment, history, privilege, enchantment, Christendom, magic,

With the explosion of mathematical science as an effective and prestigious ideology radiating from the Republic of Letters in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there emerged among culture-pods with long-established privilege and dominance, both religion based and military/ property based, a sharp sense of loss and nostalgia for the thrilling fear and wonder of pre-modern Christendom: a culture gripped in the drama of intervention by gods, angels, demons, witches, and sorcerers, all cashing out as supernatural justifications for established privilege and dominance. Romanticism was one expression of that sense of loss and nostalgia, an heroic effort to re-enchant the modernizing world by conflating deity and nature. It was an effort to rescue the concept of nature from scientific mechanization, insisting that nature is a single living divinity with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and powers far beyond those commonly perceived, power to overcome its own normal regularity.

Those efforts at re-enchantment, reviving the fear and thrill of Christendom, were futile and misdirected. Even in the absence of magic, deities, demons, or personified nature, the fact of any living subjectivity always enchants existence as a whole. The fact that spirituality is structured as a distinct body among other animate individuals with whom each fashions an apparently ordinary life does not erase its wonder and transcendence. Embodiment is the foundational structuring principle of spirituality. Sensation, so perception, is structured in the shape of the body. Deliberate personal interventions into a given exterior surroundings, making objective markings, are movements of a person’s body. The capabilities of body movements and their range of forces impose a shape on personal intentions to mark the objective world. Still, any subjectivity is a gaze from inside unique dreams at the spring of a personal self-injection into exterior surroundings. Enchantment radiates in that gaze itself, from the interiority at the source of every outward reach. Spirituality, the desperate living will, the knowing, questioning, learning, and creating will, is the enchantment, the mystery and wonder of existence.

Also:

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312).

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

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189).

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

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

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aristocracy, creativity, culture, drama, dystopia, Edmund Husserl, empathy, idealism, nature, phenomenology, Plato, politics, Romanticism, sensibility, time

Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

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

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

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

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

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

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

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

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

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

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

Wildcards

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

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

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

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

Identity and Idealism

08 Sunday Mar 2020

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

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cultural malaise, dystopia, existential idealism, hive mind, politics, religion, Romanticism, science, war

Fragment 161, word count: 653.

In terms of culturally mainstream frameworks of explanation, an exit from dystopia depends on finding a way past the grossly contradictory bifurcation currently embracing at the same time creationist monotheism and scientific materialism, monolithic science alongside myths of angels and demons, as conceptual frameworks for understanding the world and the ongoing improvisation of lives in the world. (Fragment 145: Desperately Seeking Reality.) There is strident institutional support for this historically embedded contradiction, even in the most educationally advanced societies. A religious orientation toward a commanding height blends seamlessly into a hive-mind political-state and into reverence for its war-ready collective drama. Any questioning of that inspires panic for social pragmatists. At the same time, science is the darling of capital accumulators, weapons developers, and advertising media device multipliers. Not a single person in higher boxes of organization charts is looking for a way beyond this cultural contradiction, not since the conservative backlash against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, movements which disputed the religious-political side of the contradiction based mainly (and regrettably) on an assertion of scientific materialism. It isn’t just that both scientific materialism and creationist monotheism disparage humanity/ personality (the first by conceiving only dead mechanism about which nothing matters in itself, and the second by conceiving human personality as a weak imperfect image of a disembodied original), but also that both are comprehensive systems of explanation that essentially contradict each other and yet have arranged for peaceful co-existence because each solves a fatal deficiency in the other. They tolerate and support each other because neither one is viable alone.

Both of these schools of explanation are dystopian by constructing hive minds on a nucleus of denigrated personality/ humanity. This is easy to see in the case of creationist monotheism with its counterintuitive concepts of sin and the self-denying path to salvation. Romanticism, fables strategically decontextualized from crucial givens of living reality, happily embraces the drama of mysterious ordeals and glorious rewards, and especially thrills on hidden higher powers, so all religion is inherently romantic. On the other side of the coin, the materialist insistence on strict exteriority expresses a distinctly romantic asceticism. Since the core of materialist ideology is a denigrating denial of subjective ideality, of the condition for there being anything that matters, it is incapable of sensing its own emotional underpinning in a Calvinist-inspired romance, asceticism as a heroically purifying gesture. That thread of self-denying asceticism binds scientific materialism to creationist monotheism with a force like a molecular bond, and pre-determines that the gravitas of science, faced with the hive-mind political-state demanding reverence for war, will pragmatically interpret the state as nature’s food chain manifested in human sociability. Science has declared the dystopia inevitable and made it far more lethal instead of questing for a way beyond it.

The only way to end war is to disband the collective identities that commit to and execute wars. That is not something that will be proposed or initiated by any government or corporation or any other collective entity which earnestly works at creating itself as a collective identity. This is something that can only be accomplished by individuals recognizing themselves as such through philosophical thinking. In our hive-minded dystopia, individualizing idealism is indispensable. Since creative novelty emerges from the particular drama that is the interiority of an individual’s living in the world, the modern idealism exploring this, described in Fragment 160 is a framework of orientation that enables individuals to separate viably from hive-minds. This idealism (call it Existential Idealism) leaps past the metaphysical denigration of what has been called human nature. It recognizes human existence/ personality as a transcendence of nature, if nature is conceived as it is in scientific materialism, and instead recognizes personality as an active supra-actuality in such a way that political rights derive entirely from that transcendent existence, existence as living ideality.

‘What Matters’ Idealism

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

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

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culture, human nature, idealism, metaphysics, nature, personality, Platonism, Romanticism

Fragment 142, word count: 291.

Metaphysics is part of the orientation within which we operate. Everybody has some metaphysical framework, learned with other culture at an early age. Religion, for example, is metaphysics, since it asserts specific ideas about existence as such. Without thinking about metaphysics you have a culturally imposed perception of everything. Thinking about metaphysics usually begins with wonder at the existence of the world-of-things. However, the world of things doesn’t matter in the least without the existence of some personality such as you, dear reader, engaged in experience of that world, having ideas about it. The existence of things is much easier to measure, map, describe, conceive, and confront than the life of ideas, but without ideality the world of things doesn’t matter. So, metaphysics that matters is an effort to clarify the problematic existence of ideas and ideality. There have been different versions of metaphysical idealism, ideas about the existence of ideas, from Platonism* to Romanticism**. Ideality takes a variety of forms: consciousness, questioning, wonder, caring (often desperate), searching, learning, knowing, judging, doubting, orientation, willful intention, agency, teleological bearing-into-futurity. ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. It is a striving toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, the very essence of creation. What is decisive is that all forms of ideality occur together in the living experience of an embodied personality. We know this from personal caring and interactions with other beings who express caring. Personalities produce coherent utterances and acts which are expressive of ideation in the forms of caring, knowledge, and intention, for example. Personality is known by a creatively expressive voice and willful teleology. This is the existence of the teleological vectors of ideality we know as personalities.

Embedded links:

* Fragment 93, April 20, 2016, The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7R)

** Fragment 91, February 20, 2016, Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God (URL: http://wp.me/p1QmhU-7E)

Life after Hive-Mind

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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craftsmanship, gratification, human nature, identity, macro-parasitism, nationality, nurture, patriarchy, personality, property, Romanticism, sovereignty, thinking, value, war

Posting 132, Word Count: 1,454.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of liberal influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; theatrical ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred and obscure “us against them” mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such things are not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story line, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda and censorship.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature as having no intrinsic need for sovereign authority is now an old idea, the real core of liberalism, and it always went against the conservative dogma, from religion, that everyone needs supervision structured within the symbols, pageantry, and authoritative superego of collective solidarity and belonging. The historical endurance of the state as sovereign authority shows that the enrichment of the idea of human nature from the Enlightenment was effectively smothered by that pre-existing culture. That pre-existing culture of authoritative supervision was an entrenchment in institutions of the traditional rights of the father, an overt expression of the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be parasitic on the weaker. These cultural assumptions grow from the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The Enlightenment and liberal conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices, and that is what accounts for the hive-mind efforts of modern states.

It is now clear, however, that there are multitudes of people with very elastic and insubstantial attachments to collective entities. For example, the globalization of capital has fostered an internationally educated and mobile professional and business class. Academics, engineers, medical practitioners, business and financial professionals are all educated in an international context and trained to have a cosmopolitan outlook, quite detached from any specifically national or territorial master narrative which is the normal core of hive-mind. Additionally, the loyalty and national belonging of the investor class generally evaporates instantly upon election of a socialist government, so is always largely a pretence. Yet, these groups and individuals conduct lives they find meaningful. They are not without a cultural framework of orientation, but it is more a culture of trophy property as primary value. A focus on possession of property always includes fear for the security of possession, requires protection by at least the readiness of force, and so includes a culture of reverence for intimidating strength and power, control of taxes, laws, and war, the organization of violence, all still core features of patriarchy. Obviously this property-based cosmopolitan framework still has a stake in maintaining the institutions of nation-state sovereignty, especially police, military, and intelligence agencies, but strictly as service providers, supplemented or replaced by private suppliers when convenient.

The cosmopolitan perspective of these factions shows that there are experiences of gratification, identity, and meaning, which make identification with a national collective completely unnecessary. Gratification from symbols and pageantry of collective identity, embedded in the narrative of national peril and exceptionalism, is not necessary for a meaningful life, as demonstrated by the contented lives of the masses of people with scant engagement with such things. Gratification from property possession is still part of traditional patriarchal culture, inextricably invested in organized force, and by far the most culturally dominant and celebrated gratification experience, but there are others. Nurturing children (or nurturing animals, even plants), socializing them into the linguistic community and having ongoing conversations with them as they develop is inherently gratifying. This nurturing sociability is an independent non-property based source of profound value, meaning, and sense of identity, in fact the most important source for most people, although studiously unrecognized as such. Still another realm of gratification experience is thinking, often in the form of ‘scribal’ ideality. Philosophers have frequently asserted that the greatest human pleasure, the most fun, is thinking. A great deal of human fulfillment is derived from following personal curiosity, learning, reading, writing, and synthesizing ideas, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity. This gratification is individually interior, the model of spiritual autonomy, although always with some important relationship with sociability, communication, and human interconnectedness. Yet again, craftsmanship is another source of value experience, expressing and performing creativity, knowledge, and skill in working with tools and materials, actualizing a previously conceived shape in observable objects. There can also be pleasure in experiencing any skillful power of the human body, but assigned donkey work is boring, dirty, sweaty, energy sucking, exhausting and that is why a ‘working’ class does not have an independent culture of value experience, whereas ‘homemakers’, certain kinds of scribes, and craftspeople certainly do.

The culture of property possession as primary value is part of a conception of human nature as a painful emptiness craving to be filled, a sucking pit of needs for definition and gratification from outside itself, a deficiency that grasps for acquisition, consumption, and competition; determined by biological and material laws. However, the importance of gratification from nurturing, from performance of creative craftsmanship, and from scribal ideality clearly refutes the claim that human nature is a consuming emptiness. The ubiquitous practice of nurture shows human nature as a fountain of empathy and compassionate caring. The intrinsic gratification in practicing craftsmanship shows creativity in projecting shapes from personally interior ideality into material actuality. Intellectual activity, a cultivation of ordinary thinking, is a fountain of personal curiosity, questions, directed impulses for relevant exploring, researching, learning, discovering, original conceptualizing, writing, reading, and synthesizing ideas. Every personality is a fountain of such goods, of spontaneous creation of curiosity, questioning, inspiration, and caring, a gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others. These self-sourced experiences of value are profound enough to build lives upon, and many people do exactly that. In this light, each personality is a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world. This recognition of human nature as self-creating from interior ideality eliminates the primacy of competition and conflict, as well as hierarchical rankings and trophy collections derived from competitions, crucial features of possession of property as primary value. It also means that individuals do not have any inherent dependence on experiences of belonging provided by hive-mind sovereign states or any similar collective entity.

The entire conservative conception of the human predicament, featuring an intrinsic grasping emptiness of human nature, property possession as essential identity definition, inevitable competition and conflict for scarce goods, celebration of strength and violence, the necessity of a sovereign authority to dampen the lethality of conflict (civilization), and the rights of the strongest to be sovereign and parasitic, all supposedly pre-determined by natural law, is a bogus and toxic cultural legacy, a mythical metaphysics to make the world exciting for aspiring heroes in their romantic dreams of a cosmically ordained struggle for dominance. This old mythology is a dystopian nightmare for most people. The way out is cultivating the gratifying activities which express personality as a fountain of ideas for interventions-in-actuality. That creates the alternative experience, acquaintance with a human nature that can trust itself in the complete absence of authority or any vestige of patriarchy, in the absence of any controlling hive-minds projecting sovereignty of the strongest, with no need for the kind of identity and meaning assigned by a controlling collective. There is a far better life after re-orienting outside nationalist hive-minds and also outside any other rat race for symbolic markers of self-worth and identity. Hive-minds make war and are made for war.

Two Quick Notes on Culture

15 Friday Jun 2018

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

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change, context, culture, freedom, History, language, play, Romanticism, rules, time

Posting 129, Word Count: 430.

Language is a Playground

Speaking a particular language can be a kind of hive mind, but language is independent of patriarchal structures, and is always evolving from bottom up. New words, meanings, and expressions bubble up all the time without any input or influence from authorities. Teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley have fun playing around with language (I was like, “What-ever!”) and the English language embraces and incorporates the novelties. Philosophers are another example of people who frequently introduce new expressions. Any living language is changing constantly, just like living culture generally, if not artificially hampered and frozen by self-appointed authoritarian enforcement. Language has been adored by various philosophical theorists as a definitive model of a rigidly structured universe, governed by imperious rules, but in fact it is an open and inclusive play of expectation and surprise, imitation and originality, a barely-supervised playground. Novelty and surprise are essential to language, and the source of novelty is individual people exercising their creativity in play with others. New words, meanings, and expressions can and do bubble up because the orientation (thinking, sensibility) of every individual goes far beyond language, as geography goes beyond the streetcar tracks.

History and Culture

There has been a conservative meme equating history and culture, demanding that cultures be preserved as precious artifacts and sacred relics so that history or the ancestors are appropriately honoured, the lessons of history appreciated. However, learning from history is not the same as preserving culture. History as an idea is everything that happened in the past, but most of what happened does not deserve to be honoured, although the more history that can be generally known accurately, the better. Uncritically honouring the ancestors, the forefathers, a selectively edited look backward, is another conservative meme, but only a thoroughly romanticized, redacted, and glamorized interpretation of history would find the acts of the ancestors mostly worthy of honour. Communications of history must represent complex context, normally in books which report on large swaths of detailed records and memories, recognizing patterns of relevance and influence formed by individual lives, actions, and events. (the hermeneutical zoom) Historians are human and always work with incomplete and often biased records, and personally interpret those records through the lens of their own and their community’s biases. So, history, even as reported in a scholarly way, must be approached critically. Publicly installed monuments as a sort of historical record always separate some simple icon from its actual historical context, and so are always romanticized history, decontextualized. Living culture is changing constantly and needs to change.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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Christendom, dystopia, hive mind, legacy culture, mass media, Roman Empire, Romanticism, social construction, spooks, western history

tags: western history, hive mind, Christendom, Roman Empire, social construction, spooks, mass media, legacy culture, dystopia, romanticism

The social construction of hive mind is not new. The historical background of our modern hive minds is Christendom, the way European society conceived itself from, say, the year 800 until Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority in 1534. Christendom was a strenuous and effective attempt at constructing hive mind, based on collective terror of spooky spirit-world angels and demons. Europe was a largely rural-agrarian and illiterate society dominated by a centrally organized Church and a de-centralized military/ propertied aristocracy from the ranks of which emerged regional dynastic monarchies. The Church altar and pulpit were the mass media of Christendom and gave the Vatican an edge over other social elements in arranging uniformity of attitudes and loyalty across vast territories, in fact, a theocracy. The thoroughness of the hive mind engineered throughout Europe by ideologues and agents of Christendom, mainly within institutions connected to the Vatican, established an historically new standard of monumental collective commitment, uniformity, cohesion, and rigidity; a romanticized idea of hive solidarity that continues to plague subsequent societies. Roman Church orthodoxy was a superlatively elaborate and uniform message, having appropriated useful chunks of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism. Unquestioning assertion of the resulting construct was policed viciously by the inquisition from around 1184 and by military crusades for larger outbreaks of dissent, offering crusaders complete immunity, forgiveness of sins, and all the loot they could manage. The ongoing use of Latin as the language of Church institutions, including universities, is an indication of the small “r” romanticism at the foundation of that hive mind. As far as the Vatican was concerned, Christendom was still the Roman Empire, with all the traditional authority of the Roman Imperium, carrying the weight of Rome’s entire historical imprint on the world: material, military, intellectual, institutional, legal, and spiritual. Prior to Christendom, the Roman Empire was arguably the most effective hive mind in all of human experience, for centuries imposing a heavily armed Roman peace over the Mediterranean world system. The medieval Roman Church did its best to expand the ancient Imperial legacy. A case could be made that it was the grotesque scope and intensity of Christendom’s hive mind that gave Europe its aggressive edge in subsequent encounters with other world cultures.

In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of the theocratic hive mind was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious hive mind construction and the mind control managed by supervising institutions in contemporary societies. Spooks continue to be useful in the form of awesome personified abstractions commanding patriotism and fear such as the U.S.A., the British Crown and Commonwealth, China, the Dear Leader, Capitalism, Islam, IBM, Microsoft, or even the Free World. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations producing profits for investors. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Every employer expecting brand loyalty and competitive spirit is creating a hive that is structured as a cell within the superstructure of city, nation state, and international capitalism. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies; patterns downloaded from university collegiate culture. We are trained to hive mind from an early age.

As presented in part 1, the context of these observations is this: There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

The Social Contract as Superego

06 Monday Mar 2017

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

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dystopian capitalism, Foucault, Freud, Hobbes, id, linguistic competence, Nietzsche, primary process, Romanticism, self-thinking idea, sociability, social contract, social pragmatism, spirituality, superego, The Matrix, thinking

Tags: social contract, superego, id, Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Hobbes, social pragmatism, romanticism, primary process, sociability, linguistic competence, spirituality, The Matrix, dystopian capitalism, thinking, self-thinking idea

Everybody is well aware of dystopian features of investor supremacist capitalism: corporate profiteering from environmental destruction, war, addictions, and rigged markets; broad injustices of stark inequality and brutal imperialism. However, to eliminate such problems through reform of institutions has proven to be vexedly complicated, to say the least, partly because there is nothing near a consensus on what effective reforms might look like.

Romanticism to the Rescue

An overriding cultural romanticism comes to the aid of this situation like a shining knight. Romanticism is the attitude that it is better to get lost in an artistically appealing story or image than to face the ugly political reality. “I can’t do anything about it, so thinking about it is a waste of time.” Romanticism includes a strong stream of nostalgia for an appealing image of the past, galant knights (heroic warriors, cowboys …) and damsels in distress, an image made appealing and profoundly deceptive by being decontextualized, oversimplified, and glamorized. Such romanticism motivates a lot of tourism to European castles, gardens, and museums. Romanticism includes the tragic view of the human situation: ugly political reality is inescapable so, since nothing can be done, enjoy the stories and images. Fixation on the past makes romanticism politically conservative, and conservatism is a kind of romanticism that appeals especially to the comfortably well-to-do, but remarkably, the dominant romanticism helps keep just about everyone from being too upset about the problems of capitalism. “At least this horrible arrangement produces opportunities for entertaining and monumental beauty”, and with romanticism beauty is truth, the essential value of anything is revealed in its beauty. Art is worth more than truth.

One side of the coin of romanticism is accepting that an ugly political reality is unalterable and so pointless to think about, and this is how everybody is brought up and educated to be socially pragmatic, to accomplish the best we can personally within social and economic arrangements as they exist, and the central message of that education is that the only alternative to conformity is self-destruction; that nobody could ever devise anything better than investor supremacist capitalism. The message is that arrangements are far from perfect or even fair, but the imperfection results from a flaw in human nature, competitive self-interest, and you can’t change nature. Nor can you change the organization of nature in a food chain, a hierarchical chain of command, the Great Chain of Being. The best you can do with the better impulses of human nature (ephemeral but recurring) is to soften some of nature’s worst brutality, which is what political and legal institutions are set up to do, especially in nominally democratic states. In effect, this seems to have made the utilitarian utopia a reality: the greatest happiness actually possible for the greatest number.

But I’m OK

So you might say, it doesn’t matter to me if investor-supremacist corporate culture controls my lifestyle and thinks of me as something like livestock, because I’m not living like livestock. I have a decent job and leisure to enjoy reading widely along with encountering a variety of cultural works. I enjoy life with my friends and family with whom I talk freely about anything. We talk about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, politics, religion, war, peace, morality, and human rights and fulfillment. I never miss an opportunity to vote. The retrograde cultural attitudes of some collective of the wealthiest does not hinder me in any decisive way. Without the current economic system and arrangements of civil law and administrative institutions I would be hunting and gathering in the woods, fighting off bandits, subsisting on a dirt farm, or herding goats, reindeer, or bison. I’m happy to support the way things are right now.

Social Contract and Competitive Materialism

This socially pragmatic outlook is as minimally metaphysical as possible, brandishing an ideology evolved for an era of science. Religiously dictated metaphysics-of-far-horizons is still strong as a romantic undercurrent, of course, but, if pressed, a pragmatic person will not insist on any particular religious transcendence as the justification for a sovereign society (authoritarian and starkly unequal), but instead will invoke something like an implicit social contract, a rationalist idea introduced into modernity by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) with the intention of avoiding religious metaphysics. The social contract idea works with the more scientistic kind of metaphysical assumptions that Hobbes held about human nature, what could be called the competitive materialist view: that human nature benefits dramatically from being repressed and controlled because, as naturally atomized personal lust for possessions, power, and adulation (praise, prestige, pageantry of status) it is innately too competitive to form the stable relationships involved in complex collective organization. In social contract ideology, there is an assumption that sovereign authority and force is an expression of the benign intent to impose humane rules on competitions for worldly goods, rules instituted so that nature (primordially brutal) can remain ecstatic and so motivating, but moderately restrained within a cultural framework of peace, complex co-operative stability and security, minimizing harm and maximizing the benefits of collaborative effort. On this view, restraining the primordial ecstatic brutality requires maintenance of authoritarian social structure, supervisory control of the majority of people by a sovereign institution with overwhelming power.

So, as an adolescent, it seems that you are offered the contract: accept the grim reality that decrees the necessity of sovereign authority, submit to supervision within the chain of official power, do your best within the incentives and rewards of the status quo, keeping your egoistic assertion and thinking within practicality as dictated by social norms and nature (as conclusively disclosed by science), and, in return, the institutional system will shield you from the worst ecstatic brutality of nature. It will help beautify the human condition for you. The social system accomplishes its promise with bread, circuses, and a sense of participation and belonging, a personal identity from having a defined place within the Great cosmic Chain of Being as it extends, as it must, into social structure. What the socially pragmatic person accepts in return for embracing the sovereign hierarchy worldview is the promise of employment to be rewarded through some degree of access to the consumer marketplace: tv, cars, homes, fun fads and fashions, drugs and alcohol, social media technology, tourism, dramatic stories and images, movies, music and dancing (all unevenly delivered), but even more important, a personal narrative of place and identity within an impressively idealized institutional and human structure.

Although there is no literal social contract (and never was one to launch civil society) the idea provides an easy and intuitive way for individuals to conceptualize their relationship to the broader structure of a complex society. There is a widely shared and rather wishful assumption by individuals that something binds the broader society to us just as our personal vulnerabilities and needs bind us to the society. So, in that sense, there is a virtual social contract, but it is a projection from individuals onto our surroundings rather than an offering to us from the civil society.* That act of projection is inseparable from accepting, internalizing, the society’s hierarchy of esteem and sovereign supervision as a personal guide or roadmap of thinking.

Thus Spoke Foucault … and Nietzsche

The socially pragmatic espousal of social contract ideology was recognized by Foucault, for example. Foucault’s post-modernist analysis of power combines Hobbes’ idea of the social contract with something like the idea of “the matrix” as depicted in the movie The Matrix (1999), if we take the situation in that movie to be a metaphor for the emotional control of masses of generally co-operative people by means of strategically crafted messages originating from an institutional entity which is minimally disclosed and yet which, by its messages, decisively influences certain crucial perceptions and opinions on a mass scale. (For example, in Medieval Europe that institution was the universal Church of Rome, and today it involves the high priests of investor-supremacist capitalism, something like the international collective of corporate and financial executives who protect capital wealth. In both cases nominally sovereign national governments are subordinate.) In Foucault’s view, everybody chooses voluntarily to participate in constructing the social grid of unequal power and wealth under supervisory direction from the minimally disclosed sovereign entity, and so to conduct personal thinking within the hierarchical conceptual patterns intrinsic to the social contract idea, and to accept the personal identity cashed out (literally) from competitions within the economic system.

Foucault’s thinking was much influenced by Nietzsche’s. However, Nietzsche launched a critique of the citizens of modernity (the last man) as abandoning the primordial ecstasy of life for the safety of herd-like forms of behaviour, internalizing the norms of bourgeois society (the social contract) to such an extent that it is nothing short of a prison, self-supervised internally by each individual. This personally internalized regime of supervision became known as the “superego” and was an important idea in the work of Sigmund Freud**. Nietzsche claimed that the degree of shelter taken within the safety of the superego was separating individuals from the ultimate source of vital ecstasy which is the primary process of personal subjectivity, something he called “id”. Nietzsche thought that primary subjective process is ecstatic will to power, and that the most urgent need of modern people was to revitalize ourselves by unleashing that primary process, our individually autonomous will to power. Interpreted as a response to Hobbes, Nietzsche’s message was that the social contract is killing us by blocking the sources of vitality within our personal subjectivity and replacing them with the specious safety of cookie cutter ambitions, expectations, and satisfactions, and in the process drifting us toward the nihilism of utter predictability. Nietzsche’s concept of primary process is pretty much identical to that of Hobbes, and of course immediately suggests the dystopia imagined by Hobbes: the war of all against all, the dominance of the strongest and a fascist adulation of masculine strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action: the blond beast. Fortunately, Nietzsche was just as wrong as Hobbes was about the specifics of primary process, even though he was right about the spiritual lethality of the superego. So, a re-thinking of primary process is crucial, and that means doing exactly what romanticism rejects, thinking philosophically.

Sociability and Primary Process

The most obvious thing wrong with social contract theory, which purports to explain the necessity of, and the marvellous benefits of, social hierarchy, sovereignty, and authority as the crucial enablers of organized society, is the hidden-in-plain-sight reality that civil and stable social relationships are mainly founded on the nurture and linguistic/ sociability culture practiced and taught by women in their caring for infants and children***. The building of sociability accomplished in that effort does far more to establish civil society than any overpowering hierarchy, and the basic human sociability that it expresses and builds from establishes that Hobbes and Nietzsche were profoundly mistaken about primary process, the basic subjective mechanism of human nature. Personal linguistic competence from long nurture and interconnectedness within small collectives, normally curated by mothers, is a sufficient foundation for the broader sociability and interconnectedness of complex society, unless the society is distorted by arrangements that violate the fundamental spirit of sociability. History reveals, partly in the intractable problems of capitalism, that the intent and culture of sovereignty is very far from benign, but instead is an institutional expression of top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism, to protect the special advantages of human macro-parasites, inseparable from the sovereign claim of ownership of individuals (the herder’s herds). That culture of sovereign macro-parasitism is the source of, rather than the remedy for, the persistent dystopian features of the most advanced societies. Sovereign force (or an agreement to accept it) certainly did not create civil society nor is it required for the ongoing stability of civil society. In the actual absence of a demonstrable divine right, no claim to sovereign supremacy has any legitimacy.

It is quite possible to separate participation in the productive processes of civil society (as a necessity for survival) from thinking within the social contract conceptual system, from limiting personal thinking to institutional norms as a road map of reality. You don’t have to think anything in particular about the fundamental human condition to participate rationally in co-operative systems of production, distribution, and consumption. Since the social contract is posited by the individual, it can be voluntarily un-posited. Any framework that individuals project onto our social surroundings can be questioned and dissolved to think differently about personal identity, sociability, and human relationships. It is quite possible to thrive economically at the same time as evading and even subverting the prevailing romanticism (both sides of its coin) which swaddles the pragmatism of living by the social contract. To move past romanticism means to question the premise that there is an unalterable political reality embedded in nature and especially in the primary process of human nature.

Philosophical Thinking

Romanticism is a rejection of philosophical questioning/ reconceptualization in favour of an emotional immersion in drama and beauty. Philosophical thinking is a personally creative reconceptualization of the human condition, but rethinking human nature and personal identity does not depend on the eventual result of reconceptualization. The essential autonomy of the act of thinking is already accomplished and experienced in any turning to personal subjectivity in a questioning search, in an openness to more than previously thought or suspected, a letting it be what it is, no matter what previous expectations and assumptions might have been, searching experience without preconception. Doing that is what is blocked by the romanticism of the social contract and by social pragmatism.

Spirituality: An Idea Thinking Itself

What is essential to the primary process of individual subjectivity is the ideality or spirituality necessary for the projection of creative interventions from personal interiority into the brute actuality of nature through acts of the body. Spirituality is not about moral ledger keeping nor about personal individuality being an illusion which masks an eternal and universal essence, origin, and destiny. Rather, it is about autonomous creative freedom at the level of the embodied individual, within a surrounding actuality which otherwise stands as the antithesis of freedom. The world of brute actuality is very different from our common sense impressions of it because as individuals we project past and future, which are spiritual non-actualities, onto an actuality that exists without past or future. Freedom is made possible by that creation of temporality, the idea of a mutable future partly pre-figured by an increasingly remote past, created subjectively in the service of constructing a sustainable embodied life-flight into a receptive future. As spirituality, your identity is an idea thinking itself, which is to say a directional bearing and force of creativity largely defined by a particular embodied past and a projected personal future of interventions into local actuality, both past and future being strict non-actualities and so your ideas. It is about constructing a sense of expectation in flight, including expectations about the range of free discretionary intervention. That is your own idea of yourself because ideality, thinking or spirituality, can exist only at the level of the embodied individual. This is not a Platonic idea, eternally unchanging, inactive, and as such remote from mundane events and appearances. There is no creativity or freedom in that conception. The primary process is maintaining spirituality, which is to say unceasing newness and incompleteness, transcendent temporality. This reality of human nature puts creative thinking at the core, exactly what is ruled out by the social contract.

Autonomy

To think is to assert an autonomous spirituality as a self-creating idea. In primary process you recognize your primordial autonomy of curiosity, questioning, of encountering, opening, and intervening in actuality, of creative re-conceptualization. Actuality is still actuality, but there is more than actuality. You are autonomous spiritually, even though not metabolically. Individual autonomy was at the core of what Enlightenment rationalists meant by “rationality” as primary process. However, this thinking is not a rule-governed procedure and is not restricted to language, numbers, or mathematical figures. You don’t need supervision or doctrine about this. To think is to embrace spiritual autonomy. It certainly does not negate sociability, because it must recognize equal autonomy in everybody.

Notes

* This brings to mind Kant’s categorical imperative, but the categorical imperative does not remove creative judgement from the individual and is not a blanket submission to existing norms.

** Please see posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality.

*** Please see posting 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy?

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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culture, embodiment, gender, metaphysics, philosophical liberation, Romanticism, sociability, spirituality, time, transcendence

No one can, by looting property or by any other kind of violence, get beyond the control of the macro-parasitic capitalist faction and its structures of cultural influence, because violence and property are the operating mechanisms of the parasite faction itself. The most important and valuable personal possessions aren’t property anyway but rather the system of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, transcendence (the supernatural), community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the ambient culture into which a person is born, and presented as reality. Getting beyond the control of a dominant faction has to be done by getting beyond the cultural system of reality which legitimates the parasites and their operations. Specifically, it is necessary to get beyond the top-down orientation of popular systems of reality, because that orientation enables the use of those systems as ideological legitimations of macro-parasitism. For example, the fact that cheetahs prey on antelope is cited (since Darwin) as proof that human-on-human macro-parasitism is decreed by the laws of cosmic nature. However, every Great Chain of Being that serves as a food chain is a political construct to legitimate predatory behaviour and institutions. To re-orient freely, you have to disconnect from the message built into culturally assigned personal identity that you are a product, creature, construct, or function of the ambient cultural system, of your ethnic and religious background and your relation to the economic system. That involves going beyond the stories and formulaic word groupings in common currency.

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

Any survey of human behaviour at large finds striking uniformity, and that is often used against the idea of individual autonomy and creativity. However, there is widespread uniformity because culture provides circumstantial compulsions. All of that cultural uniformity is founded on a fascination that individual intelligences have with other intelligences. The most interesting thing to any individual intelligence is other intelligences, and it is undeniable that individuals are almost helpless and completely unviable without the support and nurturing of a surrounding group of people. It could be argued that the mutual attraction of intelligences is the ultimate spiritual vulnerability, because we are very often ready to put up with great discomfort and un-fulfillment to maintain our interconnection with others. One thread of romanticism holds that, due to the dependence of individuals on the support of other humans, the most important thing, the crucial thing, is that individuals be provided culturally with a sense of belonging and social attachment, no matter if that sense is based on outright falsehoods and deceptions. Because we are spiritual beings in the uncertain process of self-creation, and because we are uncertain of our spirituality, we begin by accepting the stories going around ambient culture, including the assignment of personal identity in terms of ethnicity, family, religion, nationality, gender-role, sexual orientation, job aptitudes, or trophies won, until we recognize that, along with belonging, they impose a sense of personal diminishment and a disabling false finality. That leads to a philosophical questioning of the ambient cultural system of reality, and of personal orientation within that reality, especially upon recognizing that top-down concepts of subjectivity, spirituality, and identity which produce personal diminishment and false finality also maintain control by the macro-parasite faction.

Embodiment and Spirituality

The incongruence between personal embodiment and spirituality has always been an important inspiration for philosophical questioning (in addition to the two vulnerabilities described in the previous posting). The challenging nature of the embodiment – spirituality duality is already expressed in ancient Orphic philosophy: a story about spirituality exiled and cast down from divinity, and imprisoned in matter by embodiment. That ancient story illustrates a longstanding approach to spirituality as the reach for “something higher”, as an inherent sense of relation between personal spirituality and a universal divinity. In fact, the inspiration to search for “something higher” is nothing other than the sense of unknowing or uncertainty about personal spirituality (what is personally “higher” in relation to dead matter), for example, the search for how personal aspirations and accumulated lessons learned are present invisibly (which is the immediate presence of “something higher”). The same impulse that goads the quest for the “higher” (non-apparent) presence of personal bearings or directionality is full enough of hopes and fears to fixate on the most grandiose possibility of the “something higher” in the form of deity, a non-apparent cosmic master intelligence or spirituality.

The rejection of such upward-orientation is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creating of time as accomplished by every individual intelligence. Time is freedom into which an intelligence projects itself creatively, a personal hyper-space of ‘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. This is an unfamiliar idea, but time is the conception (opening) of freedom-from-nature and as such the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze (always into futurity) and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. 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, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences. **

There are several ways in which it is correct (but also misleading) to say that there is no spiritual self. The basic nature of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself, to project its 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 spirituality or intelligence: a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and freedom. What time as a personal mirror shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of spirit is precisely the same thing as the immateriality of time. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with 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 somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

The only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of embodiment. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom, the non-particularity of intelligence is the non-particularity of freedom, and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body. We have a tendency to overemphasize our particularity based on the finality of bodies, since bodies are measurable in great detail, mappable, chartable, locatable, and so we are very clear about our presence as a body-particular, up to a point (another vulnerability). We are much less clear about spirituality since it is a no-thing-ness, only a directionality pointing out away from itself. So, under the influence of cultural teachings, we underrepresent the never-yet-particularity of personal spirituality (intelligence) in our self-identification. That is why the emphasis here is on identity as spirituality with its creative freedom. The realms of experience most expressive of embodiment are, first, placement (being here), then, effortful mobility within, and effortful mobilization of, brute actuality, grounded in a person’s accumulated sense of the metabolic cost-shape of the world, and third, communication and interconnection with other people which, surprisingly enough, cannot be done strictly spiritually, but instead require gestures of the body. Embodiment defines a strict spiritual individuality.

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

The no-thing-ness of spirituality is not a void to be filled from outside itself, but instead is a gusher of curiosity, questions, projections of marks and patterns, and expeditions of discovery and creation. That is why the proponents of macro-parasitic patriarchy would like to appropriate spirituality as a masculine quality. There is an historical attempt to connect mentality, specifically rational thinking, with masculinity, coupled with an attempt to associate femininity with embodiment. However, there are possibly more metaphorical congruences of spirituality with aspects of female sexual biology, based on spirituality as no-thing-ness, an absence, labyrinthine, creative, undefined and as such free. The positivism of embodiment surely is more congenial as representing a certain dominant style of masculinity. Not much should be made of any such metaphors, no metaphysical conclusions please, especially since far too much has been made of them historically. Spirituality is gender neutral, and metaphysics is not gendered.

It is obvious that no individual’s re-orientation beyond the dominant culture is going to cause the institutions of macro-parasitism to vanish, so that pay-off is strictly off the table. Getting past the typical top-down orientation does not objectively negate the power of the entrenched macro-parasitic faction and their decisive influence on culture-at-large. So, it is fair to ask what is achieved by getting past looking up to sovereignty, divinity, tradition, institutions, ethnicity, the language community, or anything like that. The process of philosophical liberation, the re-orientation accomplished by a critique of common reality, leads back to a new recognition of personal spirituality, to embracing spiritual individuality as defined by embodiment, and nullifying the typical alienation of autonomous creativity. The only pay-off is life as a spiritual being than which there is none greater or higher, embodied among others, conscious of the transcendent freedom of individual intelligences as distinct from the unfreedom of inertial nature, without guilt from any mythical inherent flaw, original sin, or from interpreting the will to live itself as a fatal weakness. The immediate result of going beyond culturally assigned definitions of personal identity is taking on the burden of spiritual no-thing-ness, which is the project of self-creation at every moment, engagement in a personal creative process. That has to be the new way to enjoy engaging with the surrounding cluster of other spiritual beings, all relating to one another using our precious embodiment.

** An earlier iteration of this paragraph can be found in posting 74, June 7, 2014, The Use and Abuse of Spirituality.

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy

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bottom-up reality, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, idealism, Immanuel Kant, intelligence, Johann Fichte, Martin Luther, materialism, Romanticism, subjectivity, the great chain of being

Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Reality

We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by the awesome vista of the starry night sky as experienced from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to the ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also by our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local parts of the vast environment, and on our bodily contact with its solid structures. Those are important but contingent and incidental circumstances of intelligence, and individuals are quite capable of maturing beyond their influence as complete models of reality. Conceiving the cosmos as the Great Chain of Being (which is always a top-down chain of command) is not a feature of human nature nor necessitated by human nature. It is circumstantial and cultural. What is far more important for a mature orientation within elemental reality is that human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of our individual subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. As long as we are caught in impressions of the Great Chain of Command, we are vulnerable to a certain sort of macro-parasitic fraud. Factions which assert their seniority, divine inspiration, natural, or even merely cultural superiority can take control of vast numbers of subordinated people by claiming to represent the great cosmic chain of command.

The Keystone of Romanticism

The nub of philosophical Romanticism is a clash between ancient and perennial top-down visions of cosmic reality (such as the Christian doctrine of an omnipotent God, or Plato’s ideal forms) and the local experience of individual creative freedom, as evident especially in artists and art. By the time of the early work of Johann Fichte (1762-1814) the line of philosophical thinking about individual freedom that went from ancient humanists (Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic) to Luther and then to Kant should have been profound enough, finally, to support and enlarge the egalitarian forces launched previously in the radial Enlightenment. The recognition of individual freedom should have been ready to subvert and overturn the age-old top-down conceptions which always alienate creative freedom from individuals. Instead, Romanticism actually subverted that line of progress and just revived Medieval fables of exceptionalism, hierarchy, and The Great Chain of Being. The position of Romanticism in the history of ideas reveals that the top-down orientation of all codified and institutional systems of reality has been the crucial barrier to progress, the tragedy of ideas.

From Novalis

Romanticism always includes a conviction that there are forces, or a reality, that is higher than (and very different from) the ordinary everyday work-a-day world, and that the higher ‘something’ is difficult to recognize or to perceive, if not invisible (occult). It includes a declaration of the active presence of a force of spirit (disembodied intelligence). (It can do this either seriously or ironically.) In romanticism lower is fragmented and higher is progressively more unified, all the way up to a total-oneness at the cosmic level. The higher reality is one spirit, free of causation (the magic idealism of Novalis), but not merely random. Events are the caprice of a discretionary intelligence. Dreams, after all, are free of internal causal chains but not free of personal relevance associations.

Can Rationalists Dream?

Romanticism was a reaction against a misrepresentation of Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics comment on rationalism as if it were a campaign for a total focus on humdrum practicality, utility, and efficiency in all human affairs. In fact, the radical Enlightenment rationalists were campaigning for rationality as a way to improve dramatically the claim to autonomy and dignity of every individual. Rationality was their shield for every individual against the established and oppressive ideology of a universal taint in human nature itself, original sin, which benefits from authoritarian control. Efficiency and utility are top-down administrative and economic ideas which were quite foreign to radical Enlightenment philosophers, who were riding the coat-tails of the new cultural wave of scientific ideas with the hope of achieving their own social, political, and cultural improvements. Spinoza and his interpreters were rationalists and not romantics, and yet conceived the Enlightenment. Rationalists dreamed of an equal society in which all people would have rights and freedoms in a bottom-up political system operating to improve the lives of all. That is their radicalism. They embraced the scientific metaphysics of materialism as a potentially bottom-up vision of reality in opposition to Christian spiritualism, which was profoundly influenced by Plato’s idealism and which justified authoritarian control as divine command.

Failing to recognize that Enlightenment rationalism’s main intent and effect was to empower and enhance the dignity of individuals universally, romantics saw in rationalism only disenchantment, formalism, the tyranny of brute material actuality and determinism, including “laws of thought”. Searching for reasons to reject such things, romantic philosophers were inspired by the early work of Johann Fichte which places emphasis on the creativity of individual subjectivity, the personal “I”. Fichte created his innovation out of an insistence on making Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Fichte’s entry point into philosophy) consistent by eliminating the idea of an ultimate external reality, an objective “thing-in-itself”. To Fichte’s way of thinking there was no reason, on Kant’s own basic principles, for supposing that there was a thing-in-itself, although the thing-in-itself was apparently crucial for Kant’s overall vision. In the absence of acquaintance with a thing-in-itself the individual subjective “I” must perform a creative act in which it “posits” (conjectures, pretends, considers, day-dreams) its entire world, including itself.

Note on Idealism

Romanticism is an idealism, since the most fundamental character of the cosmos, on this view, is intelligence. Idealism comes from recognition of the interiority of intelligence (discretionary non-actualities), in contrast to materialism, which rejects such interiority, and restricts existence (ontology) exclusively to what is exterior to intelligence, the strict actualities of physics, pre-determined, measurable, nature. So any philosophical idealism is some model of the interiority of intelligence, and a recognition of interiority of intelligences as elemental or non-reducible. Recognizing the interiority of intelligence gives any position an aspect of idealism.

Kant vs Fichte: A Bottom-Up Re-Conceptualization

Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (noumena) retained the old top-down orientation, in spite of his recognition of individual freedom. His main emphasis was on scientific knowledge, on the importance of, and difficulty of, achieving acquaintance with what was external to and vastly more elemental than individual intelligence. However, Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. (The atomic materialism of Democritus is another contender, as suggested above, and so is Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was, of course, Christian, which is an assertion of a top-down supernatural model of reality. More on this later.) The main importance of Fichte’s vision is his unprecedented re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Fichte.

Fichte and Luther: The Personal Power to Posit a Reality

Fichte’s concept of subjective interiority, the personal “I”, in its creative act of “positing” itself and the cosmos, is doing something comparable to Luther’s more Stoic and more strictly personal “leap of faith”. Both are subjective and deliberate acts of creativity going beyond acts which can be guided completely by previously acquired knowledge, direct acquaintance, or rational calculations. Both Fichte’s and Luther’s creative acts are assertions of a particular intelligence, acts of self-declaration, self-definition, or self-creation, with both the intent and effect of projecting the peculiar power and freedom of that intelligence. Both acts are projections outward into nature and culture of inwardness, of the freedom of an intelligence. However, Fichte’s idea of a subjectivity “positing” dreams leaps well beyond the sort of creativity required by Luther’s leap of faith. There is still a leap, an assertion and a projection of the freedom of an intelligence, but in Fichte’s conception the projection has far more shape, content, and self-sufficiency. It is not just Luther’s act of embracing or assenting to reports of a divine plan supposedly revealed to some distant source and passed along. Fichte’s subjectivity is its own transcendent source. The freedom of Fichte’s subjectivity is richer by far than Luther’s at the same time as being rooted solidly in Luther’s vision. That is the basis for claiming that, in spite of problems, early Romanticism represents a philosophical advance in conceiving subjectivity and its creative freedom.

For the “I” to posit a world, as it does according to Fichte, is not to create an actual world (which would be a thing-in-itself) but rather to create a subjective non-actuality, interior to a particular intelligence (with the unbounded malleability or mutability of such interiority). Romantic philosophers recognized the difference between objective actuality (thing-in-itself) and subjective non-actuality, and they recognized that culture is mainly a construct of non-actuality, that is, orientations which are internal to individual subjectivities. However, they could not accept that individual subjective non-actuality is the matrix of real creative freedom. What prevented them from recognizing that truth of freedom was their (romantic) inability to get past the age-old top-down conception of reality. Anything profoundly original had to come from “on-high” somehow. So the problem for romantics was how to reconcile their top-down conception of reality with their subjective idealism. The easiest way out is to universalize and unify subjectivity and posit a single top-down omnipotent subjectivity, thus to conceive everything as a play of ideas in that divine subjectivity, and that is pretty much what romantic philosophers did. Considering this from another perspective, the problem with dismissing the thing-in-itself is that it seems to license dismissal of other-intelligences-in-themselves also. That would leave a single absolute subjectivity as the entirety of existence, and, in fact, that seems to be the way Fichte’s thinking developed. Such an absolute subjectivity or intelligence is a variant of the concept of God.

Romanticism began with an assertion of individual freedom by Fichte, who picked up and developed the radical Enlightenment thread of empowering and enhancing individuals in his early work on the all-positing I. The Fichtean “I” is the reality of freedom. That in itself is congruent with Enlightenment rationalism up to a point, but of course it cannot accept materialism and determinism as conceived by Spinoza and his fans. So, even though the Romantics were reacting against (a misrepresentation of) Enlightenment rationalism, they were also building on the main feature of that rationalism, up to a point.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, published by State University of New York Press (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3272-6.

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.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.

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.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

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