The Culture Punch of Philosophy

24 Wednesday Jun 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Aristotle, Christendom, culture, Enlightenment, gods, History, literacy, nature, philosophy, Protestantism, rationality, reality, science, teleology

Fragment 224, Word count: 2,070.

Tags: history, reality, culture, gods, teleology, Christendom, Enlightenment, rationality, nature, science, literacy, Protestantism.

The Ancient Greek Reconceptualization

Ancient Greek philosophers re-conceived their culture’s system of reality as a whole by marginalizing supernatural personalities, notably the Olympian gods, in their explanations of the world. Those gods were not disembodied spirits, although disembodied spirits were also represented in the culture. The gods of Mount Olympus had bodies including the appetites of human bodies, but they were not ordinary flesh and blood since they had the power to change shape and appearance. They were in principle immortal and had individual and collective superpowers, but as personalities they were not so different from normally embodied persons. Humans who did extraordinary deeds caught the attention of the gods and sometimes inspired divine admiration and support and sometimes malice. Heroes were the favourites of certain gods.

There were materialist philosophers who denied the existence of gods, but for Plato, Aristotle, and others there were still important supernatural forces in the world, and those forces had the character of personality since they were teleological, with the future-directed orientation of caring ideality: attentive, inquisitive, judging, and thinking. Both Plato and Aristotle gave importance of the highest order to a god or gods in an obscure but conceivable dimension of the world: Aristotle’s first unmoved mover and Plato’s One and the Demiurge. These were still very god-centred views of life and the world, but the nature of deity was transformed from that in Homer. Aristotle’s god is pure intellect, thinking thinking about thinking, pure actuality without matter (potential, for Aristotle). Aristotle associated this deity with the “fixed stars” visible in a clear night sky, and his conception of cause/ effect in nature was still god-focused since the unmoved mover, located at the top of the layers of the spherical cosmos (with planet Earth at the bottom/ centre), was an ultimate cause of everything. Changes, impulses, or motions passed from Thinking at the top, down through the layers of fixed stars, planets, and finally into the sublunary world inhabited by humans. Also, in Aristotle’s view, every substance is defined by its own internal essential teleology or final cause, a destiny toward which it strives as if pulled or called from the future. Plato’s Demiurge is very much like pure intellect eternally contemplating the unchanging Ideal Forms, which each send out images of themselves in layers of decreasing accuracy and stability, down to the layer of ceaseless change familiar to ordinary experience. Plato’s divine One seems also to exist under another aspect as the Form of the Good.

Although Plato and Aristotle were not materialists, it is clear that the materialism of Stoicism and especially Epicureanism was meant to free people from fear of gods and enable individual self-possession. This was an important theme of ancient philosophy, and the rough rationalism of Plato and Aristotle was part of that effort. Socrates, teacher of Plato, was executed by the democratic polis Athens for offending the gods, so this was not a trivial pursuit. The philosophical effort was to transfigure gods from unruly personalities into transcendent metaphysical moorings or shorings for the barely stable world of ordinary experience. The gods of the philosophers were more natural regularities rather than capricious supernatural personalities, and that was the dawn of a less terrifying construct of fundamental reality, based on an intuition that traditional conceptions were over-complicated, over-personified, and mostly expressions of fear in the face of the vast mysteries of human existence.

The philosophical sects or schools of ancient Greece were very focused on particular teachers, each with special messages and a specific legacy of ideas, and although texts were written and the messages launched into the literate social milieux of aristocratic young men of the polis, the larger cultural uptake of these ideas was minimal. In the Hellenistic era Stoicism and Epicureanism did become somewhat unmoored from direct contact with the line of successors from a founding teacher, and attracted more interest among a wider public. Philosophical views became familiar and respected enough within the community of the comfortably literate to require some degree of homage from rival systems of ideas, including the new religion of Christianity. Early Christianity was deeply informed by especially Platonism and some Stoicism. Christian authors were outright hostile to Epicureanism, which asserted that if gods exist somewhere they have no interest in humans, and that rationally chosen pleasure is the primary good.

Early Modern Enlightenment

Descartes’ generation of early modern philosophers again re-conceived fundamental reality, banishing Aristotle’s substance-essences and final causes from inanimate objects and from nature at large. These Baroque era rationalists were still in the belly of Christendom’s very totalitarian hive-mind beast, which used lethal force to impose an orthodox metaphysics featuring prophets of a personal father-God in the sky, supported by writings from Plato and Aristotle. Augustine of Hippo was grounded in Platonism, and Thomas Aquinas had structured Aristotle into the fabric of the Christian system of reality. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and the drama of human subjectivity.

Nature

The rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’, completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny, leaving just strictly impersonal forces and structures. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive enough and far-reaching enough to provide an answer to a cultural instability and vacuum that had developed at the core of Old Regime Europe’s sense of reality. The roots of that instability probably lie in the horrific collective experience of a pandemic, the Black Death bubonic plague of the late 1340’s and early 1350’s which, over a period of half a decade of extreme trauma reduced the population of western Europe by half without otherwise harming the environment, infrastructure, material culture, or the distribution of wealth in the society.

Subjectivity

The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom, initiated by the personal and collective trauma of inexplicable disasters, enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment culture punch by creating a widespread readiness for new foundational ideas. What participants in the ‘Republic of Letters’ came to offer was a humanistic campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature inherently tainted and enslaved by original sin. Individual subjectivity was re-conceived as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though it was usually trained by legacy institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. There was a new assertion of universally distributed rationality as an individually innate human ability to judge what has value and what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous spread of proletarian literacy from around the time of Wycliffe in the 1380’s was crucial in fostering this increasing dignity and power of creative rationality at the individual level. The emerging spirit of Protestantism was also animated by a similar conception of the inherent power and dignity of the individual and became an inescapable cultural force defining and institutionalizing a literate subjectivity as the universal human norm.

Now at last a large and moderately stable society with an historically complex culture and an emerging collective sense of needing to get better was embracing the long philosophical work of re-conceiving reality based on commonly observable relevant evidence rather than on fear of a profoundly personified nature, the work that had begun in the ancient world. There were layers and niches in this society’s sense of needing to get better, and conservative devotion to medieval fear-culture was still strong among the most privileged. However, the devastations of the Great Plague lingered for generations in popular discourse and the need for recovery into a more just arrangement of society was part of that discourse, especially among less privileged classes. Also, there was an increasing cultural recognition of the relatively low level of accomplishment by the society that was western Christendom relative to foreign societies beyond the borders and to societies of the past. Christendom understood itself to be a society at risk of being surrounded and overpowered because of certain cultural inferiorities. Since the Spanish conquest of Muslim Toledo in 1085 there had been a growing excitement among the intellectually curious in the community of advanced literacy. The discovery of ancient works of Aristotle and Islamic philosophers in the libraries of Toledo inspired a profound response, including large scale translation and distribution of these works within Christendom, and the organizing of a number of universities. In the niche of advanced literacy there was fervent engagement with the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical achievements of ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic intellectuals. The fall of Constantinople to Islamic Turkish forces in 1453 sent a shock of vulnerability through Western Christendom, but also sent scholarly refugees from Byzantium into Italy and beyond with books of intellectual treasures from ancient Rome.

The foundational culture-punch of philosophy was promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model it, and the Enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without disembodied teleology or any kind of external superego. ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures and communities.

The earlier political philosophers of the modernizing era, notably Machiavelli and Hobbes, made an effort to justify the sovereignty of the fiercest of the aristocracy without a need for divine or Church authorization. (Hobbes thought the primeval ‘state of nature’ was a war of all against all.) Even in later stages of the Enlightenment it was urgently dangerous to question the established practices or ideology of sovereignty. Philosophers of the later and more radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as ultimately justifying bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any justification for top-down social control in the name of rationality (sometimes falsely blamed on the Enlightenment). The materialist perspective began to undermine the religious metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of Christendom’s top-down parasite factions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies; instead conceiving a society of equals as a natural potential and possibly a pre-historic actuality that was unjustly hijacked by priests, aristocrats, and monarchs. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by finally bringing the human essence back from some faint hope of transcendent eternity, back into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with the same rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force).

There is a progressive enrichment of the individual as potential reader/writer throughout the history of literacy at the core of these cultural developments. In the earliest stages the individual was considered less important than the technology of letters, and the creative power of personal teleology was thought to reside in supernatural beings at large in the world outside and beyond human subjectivity. Such invisible power was thought to inhabit the concrete marks shaped as words and letters, making them speak. It was the work of a string of philosophers that very gradually had the effect of relocating the creative freedom of caring-ideality from supernatural entities, such as a remote deity, to ordinary individuals. Wycliffe’s views improved the status of the general reader/ writer substantially. By the era following the French Revolution of 1789-99, in a Euro-American culture struggling to come to terms with the rationalist Enlightenment, progressive pools of culture recognized the creative power to exist within the individual human who was assigning and interpreting meanings. The objective world had been simplified dramatically by removal of magical and supernatural entities and powers. The human individual was conceived as deep, complicated, powerful, and more important by far than the concrete marking systems, as useful as those might be.

The Dead Hand of Old Dystopias

12 Tuesday Aug 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Christendom, culture war, dystopia, Enlightenment, History, hive-minds, humanism, literacy, Lutheranism, philosophy, rationality, science, self-possession, war

Fragment 215, word count: 2,660.

Tags: history, war, dystopia, Christendom, hive-minds, science, Lutheranism, literacy, humanism, rationality, Enlightenment, culture war, philosophy, self-possession.

The re-militarized world that is the fever-dream of Putin, Xi, Modi, Netanyahu, Trump, Orban, and everybody involved with NATO, etc. is the worst kind of old-fashioned culture, a fetishistic nostalgia for a metaphysical and religious essentialism from old dystopias. It is the supremacy of “manly” dominance culture as described here. Whereas vast numbers of younger people in the post-Enlightenment cultural system and everywhere consider themselves citizens of the world, war between nation-states is being planned and equipped to drag humanity back into a feudal sensibility: polities self-identify as uniquely precious but under siege from dangerous disruptors within and without; adulation of the mighty and of an imagined almighty who promotes its earthly kindred spirits; confusion about intelligence itself such that the cosmos at large somehow expresses a super-intelligence that pre-determines how everything should be (yet not always how it is!) within some degree of negotiable treatment as rewards for formulaic pageantry of extravagant praise, fearful self-abasement, and symbolic sacrifice. There is always deep misogyny in this frame of mind. Such dystopias are internally stratified and viciously hierarchical based on ideas of different grades of value among human beings. Some kind of cruel religious faith-based orthodoxy is often declared foundational, sometimes fraudulent science taken as religious certainty. Preserving a parasitic hierarchy is always foundational.

This old culture of masculine dominance, once ubiquitous, constructed and spread a certain kind of human hive-mind featuring strict hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a core culture of violence with high value assigned to trophies of violence. It has been a common sense assumption that this style of tightly controlled cultured human clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment, and pageantry typical of religion, as just mentioned, is simply the inevitable working of nature, but that is false. These dystopian hierarchies of violence are the products of very particular and undesirable circumstances. With the gradual development of alternative cultures, those old dystopian hive-minds start breaking down. This has happened on several occasions in modern history.

Regression into old-fashioned dominance culture is being revived now because new cohorts of young people all over the world are moving to a different orientation in which the old religious and political/economic hive-minds don’t matter, or at least are not worth living and dying for. Our reactionary crop of despots wants to smother that new orientation in the crib. The current directions of cultural evolution that are breaking down old certainties, as also began on previous occasions in history, are not this time attributable to new philosophy. The flame-keepers of philosophy have recently kept away from questioning the existence of human hive-minds. However, collateral effects of the humanism that emerged historically from widespread personal literacy, combined with huge advances in communications technology, have enabled an ever-widening extension of empathy beyond previously typical subgroups. For example, the relatively unhindered television coverage of the American war in Viet Nam (1965-75) educated masses of non-combatants about the brutal indecency of war for perhaps the first time, resulting in a mass international anti-war movement. That has never been allowed to happen again, and the process of generational forgetting has been proceeding. However, the advent of live-streaming from smart phones has now, once again, made the indecency of war immediately and globally available.

Legacy of Aristocratic Violence

A core culture of violence has always been a crucial element of aristocracy, out of whose ancient and medieval practices modern sovereign state governments developed. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from commercial culture, which imitates aristocracy by aspiring to the same luxuries, prestige, and level of abundant consumption, but without the overt use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence, and focus their efforts on protecting and preserving property, the treasured trophy of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing (just as swords worn on the hip were important to old-style aristocracy). The pre-existing aristocratic culture of earthly rewards, mainly clustered around the thrills of competitions, high consumption, trophy possessions, and badges of prestige, remains normative (even if aspirational) for most people due to pervasive cultural propaganda.

Claims to Virtue

Countries in the Euro-American cultural system, post-Christendom successor states, seem to maintain an unshakable conviction of their moral superiority, in spite of their actual record of behaviour, based, apparently, on a lingering self-identification as “Christian” nations and as such carriers of a culture of spiritual sensitivity. There is an unacknowledged assumption, again in spite of historical facts, that Christianity is peak-morality. Given the genocidal colonialism, slavery, and casual cruelty perpetrated by nations and religious institutions in this group, their claim to superior virtue is factually ridiculous, which makes it a phenomenon begging for identification and philosophical understanding. A more serious piece of cultural heritage that is also cited in the context of special spiritual sensitivity in the Euro-American cultural system is the Enlightenment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, featuring the rise of mathematical science and ushering in a far more secular attitude toward both the natural world and human affairs. The spiritual force of this culture was an upgrade in the conception of individual human dignity, now able and worthy to understand the hidden workings of things through scientific thinking, and so also with inherent rights to decent and honourable treatment simply as human beings. This was bolstered considerably by widespread personal literacy as promoted by protestantism and also by protestant emphasis on the interiority of individual spirituality.

Patriarchal racist imperialism somehow coexists with the legacy of the Enlightenment and of literary humanism beginning from remote ancient cultures. Over a long history, the culture of reading and writing inspired so many institutions, such as universities, such monumental products, and so many innovative personal initiatives that it took on a developmental momentum all its own, beyond the control of the pre-existing authorities of religious and aristocratic institutions. Energizing that arc of development, the spirit of protestantism called into question and actually rejected the mythical foundations of hierarchy and the gradients of status, precedence, and authority in the society that was Christendom. This was done in two stages: first the claim of direct interaction between individuals and deity without the Church as intermediary; and second, in the work of a string of philosophers with a Lutheran background, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, relocating the transcendent freedom of creative ideality from an imagined remote deity to ordinary individuals. This philosophical idealism was no longer Christian, but still a remarkable conception derived, by chance, as a cultural evolution from Christianity. The legacy of the Enlightenment completely contradicts and negates that of aristocratic violence culture and the authoritarian re-militarization now so popular. What is remarkable is how little this humanist culture of spiritual sensitivity has influenced the core of political or governing practice. The patriarchal culture of old aristocracy has always dominated political power, and the kind of spiritual sensitivity on offer from Christianity had already turned cruel as early as the creation of feudal Christendom involving the project of imposing coercive imperialism in cooperation with factions dedicated to gaining what can be gained through violence.

Backlash against Enlightenment Philosophy

In fact, a broad cultural suppression closely followed the European Enlightenment and the subsequent Revolution in France, 1789-99. There was a distinct internationalism as well as a rejection of class hierarchies in the spirit of the Revolution. That backlash included the famously repressive rigours of the Victorian era, 1837-1901. A huge effort mostly succeeded in marginalizing a tentative re-conception of individual human power and potential that was breaking down old cultural certainties. However, the effects of humanist literacy, rationalist science, and protestant individualism had been under development for centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, and had penetrated widely and deeply in the Euro-American cultural system, so this humanistic spirituality has survived to watch for opportunities to flourish. Another feature of the backlash, literary and artistic romanticism, emerged from fear that philosophical thinking, specifically the Enlightenment identification of rationality, notably by Kant and Fichte, as the primary process of personal interiority empowers all individuals so much that it discredits the traditional social hierarchy, disclosing civilization as an ugly regime of human-on-human parasitism. The romantic defence of traditional social hierarchy requires that primary process be irrationality. Romanticism reverted to something like the earlier view asserted by Hobbes (remotely Plato), as it “re-enchanted” the world with disembodied spirits and flourishes of magical thinking.

Mention should be made of tragic attempts at transformative social change in Russia beginning during the global war of 1914-18. This was another manifestation of philosophy taken seriously, but already incorporating a distinct whiff of romanticism. This time it was Hegelian idealism (Hegel being another Lutheran) made over into a materialist science of history: Marxism. The social changes made were flawed from the beginning by a lack of empathic humanity and by top-down control through brutal violence. Still, the efforts endured through most of the twentieth century. Marxist materialism and the Hegelian idealism it represented were alien ideologies to most people, and, if they were to become a foundational discourse by which power and economic production and distribution were understood as a matter of common culture, they had to be imposed by force and ideological re-education. There was a brutality about that effort and the imprint of the ideas has been shown by subsequent history to be shallow and transitory.

The Post-War Left-ing of the West

Some degree of influence from the Enlightenment legacy can be discerned in The New Deal launched in the United States just prior to the global war of 1939-45, launched in response to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which many at the time perceived as the final failure of capitalism. The European response to the depression was a rise in fascist authoritarian political movements. Wealthy people came to think that some form of fascism was necessary to save capitalism. Fascism is capitalism doing what it can to slow down and stop the momentum of its failure. Others saw capitalism as a lost cause and turned to Marxist communism as a way of getting something better. After the war there were two powerful democratizing forces working on western governments. One was the competition of capitalist societies against Communism. It may have been a stridently patriarchal interpretation of the political left-wing of the French Revolutionary National Assembly (filtered through Hegelian idealism translated into economic materialism), but it was still promising something like a government-managed disruption of the legacy class system, aiming for material equality and a classless society without dystopian hierarchies. As such, it was something of a manifestation of Enlightenment humanism. The second force resulted from involving the mass of ordinary citizens in the effort of total war. Achieving victory through great personal disruption and sacrifices, the general population expected a fair share of the wealth generated by the society. Voters demanded benefits and politics was forced to the left, introducing elements of socialism in the form of unemployment benefits, pensions, child care support, medical care. By the 1980’s the shine was off the communist countries and the current generation of adults hadn’t been part of the sacrifices of the last global war, and they forgot that they had been promised rewards for service to the nation: generational forgetting. In 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed, and so any vestige of a real competition was gone. After that politics was dragged back to the right by the never-relenting cultural mix from feudal Christendom: father-god religion and patriarchal dominance culture.

Capitalism vs Communism

After the widespread failure of ancient religious myths that had convinced people generally that all things, including social, political, and economic hierarchies, were eternally predetermined by an all powerful deity, capitalism only looked acceptable to a wide range of people when the style of living it offered was contrasted against the austere and authoritarian Communism of the Soviet Union. In this way it was profoundly dependent on the existence of the USSR for legitimacy. For a few decades after the war of 1939-45 the capitalism of western nations became more of a consumer-supremacist system as the factions in control of investment felt obliged by that competition to improve the quality of life of the common run of citizens. The collapse of the USSR was the writing on the wall about the end of that kind of “liberal democracy”, and a return to an essentially investor-supremacist capitalism now called neoliberalism. Such capitalism is widely experienced as unacceptable, no longer a broadly appealing or satisfying system of social organization. In the US election in 2024 the most lethal nation on earth fell under the control of a confederacy of extremest anti-democratic ideologues of the political right-wing, heralding an age of romantic reality-denial, proclaiming an imaginary national crisis through pervasive propaganda via mass media, including social networking apps. Such is the situation in which masses of younger people struggle to feel free of the legacy of nationalist hive-minds eager to make war as a means of preserving old hierarchies.

The relationship between, on one side, an individually embodied knowing and deliberative agent (a dynamic time-plotting system of ideality), and on the other, the ambient culture in which the individual is educated and fostered into some normal orientation in the world; put another way: the ideas and dramas that specify an individual’s sense of place and direction, in relation to the culture carried and cultivated around that individual: this relationship has to be crucial for philosophical questioning. Human individuals derive joy and meaning from imitating people around them, soaking up culture like sponges. Within the general culture of ways of surviving in a particular surroundings, there are these limitlessly imposing political super-structures, culture-based structures of dependence and authority which bind clusters of people together by a shared sense of direction and rules of conduct, top-down arrangements of power and access to resources which seek emotional possession of the individual and benefit from the individual’s gifts, abilities, and energy. Immersion in such a hive-mind can enable individuals to commit acts of cruelty, brutality, and self-destruction that they would not contemplate as de-cultured individuals.

Every hive-mind is a complicated game with its own rules, many of which are arbitrary, its own structures of dramatic quests and challenges, ways of scoring and winning competitions to rise through the layers of esteem and power as set out in the rules. Statements about the world that cannot be verified or falsified by any normal means and yet are held to be true as a matter of popular culture, sometimes called ‘beliefs’, are better understood as rules of a particular hive-mind game. If you are in the game, you accept and play by these guides to orientation. Similarly, the rules of personal duty are hive-mind game specific, rules of a particular collective game. Release from collective identity must be based on recognition of important personal experience outside what is controlled by culturally ambient hive-minds. Self-possession is simple: orientation and gratification from the interior upwelling creative force of personality: curiosity, dreams, an inherent sense of beauty and pleasure, impulses to project shapes on the objective world in the context of supposings about futurity, non-linguistic ideation of personal futurity and the increasingly extended and personally specific context of prior experience. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjectivity.

Embedded links:

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

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

Existence as Drama-Cloud

13 Thursday Feb 2025

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

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anomalous existence, Augustine, Christianity, drama, Freud, Gnosticism, Hobbes, ideality, materiality, philosophy, Plato, primordial existence, religion, science, spirituality, time

Fragment 210, word count: 1,838.

Tags: time, gnosticism, Christianity, materiality, ideality, drama, science, Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Freud, anomalous existence, primordial existence

In any human assessment or general characterization of the overall situation in which we human individual’s find ourselves, the most consequential element is the concept of what is crucial and definitive of the human individual itself. Knowing with clarity the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self seems like it should be transparent, easy, and obvious. However, what is transparent in personal subjectivity is nothing obviously definitive but a vast complexity of fleeting impressions, recognitions, exertions, expectations, emotional colourings of wish and fear, attachments to others, realignments of direction, tentative plans at some point in arcs of enactment, a field of indefinite potential at some moment in ceaseless time, somehow always just new and emphatically incomplete, just arriving and adjusting a heading onward. This flowing cloud of complex potential is structured by drama, the stuff of personal ideality, a caring anticipation of future conditions and events, an anticipation that includes personal stakes and powers and uncertainty about personal harms and benefits. All this ideality occurs in a cloud-like cluster that has the dramatic structure of a living personal “I”, a monadic totality of personal dramas which constitute an individual’s embodied life in the world.

As a consequence of the difficult indefiniteness of felt subjectivity, conceptualizing the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement has been culturally influenced, and in starkly unequal societies the political force of that influence has been to denigrate the existence-status of us personal drama-clouds to excuse inequality. Denigrating conceptions of the normal human teleological cloud, strictly located as a particular by embodiment, have always been intended to justify the injustices of the hierarchical social structure, invoking some high-level measure of control in a fearfully unpredictable world. Imagining that the world at large and in detail is the deliberate act of a supernaturally powerful thinking and caring agency, often capricious, perhaps sometimes reactively malicious, means that acting in a way that pleases or placates that force of mysterious agency (according to specialist authorities) will have the effect of turning the world into a more benign environment for those who qualify.

Gnostic Drama

There is a form of Gnosticism which tells that individual human spirits were exiled into time as a rebuke and as a final test by the highest supernatural power. This is not far off the standard Christian story of the great cosmic drama of existence (disgraced spirits struggling to regain presence with divinity). Augustine blames inherent human depravity on the original sin of Adam, but in the background is an assumption that it goes deeper and higher, that indeed it carries the taint of a rebellion by primordial beings, angels, against the highest power, before there even was a material world or a reason for it. In this conception, time is equated with materiality, plagued by decay and instability, so the exile of rebel angels is into materiality, the exact opposite of their original nature which is pure ideality. In this context ideality stands for eternal continuity, and materiality stands for ceaseless change and transformation: time. The gnostics who equated materiality with time held something like a Platonic idea of reality in which material objects are imperfect copies of imperfect copies of actually real things, such as Plato’s Ideas, and so lacked definite or stable being. They had only an attenuated claim to existence or reality, and time was the appearance of their flickering now this, now that, now nothing existence. Time was the dimension of this degraded reality, a low-end region of Being made of this indefinite nearly-existence, merely a piece of stage-setting for part of the great drama of existence which involved eternal beings, spirits. The individual subjects had a purely ideal existence prior to and independent of their hellish experience of materiality/ time in the world of actuality. The human individuals depicted here are victims of their own hubris and folly, as well as their horrible prison existence.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the people pioneering development of a mechanistic conception of the world at large, and people in his theory are atomic mechanisms driven by acquisitive and competitive self-interest but capable of a form of rationality in practical calculation of that self-interest (much of this via Plato). Although Hobbes was pioneering a secular conceptual system to replace the entrenched Christian ideology of inherent human evil and capricious divine grace, he continued the conception of human individuals as victims of their inherent flaws and inadequacies. His entire intent (like Machiavelli) was still to justify the main pillar of the political status quo: monarchy and aristocracy, under the concept Sovereignty. On this view, the individual personality is a dreamy vacuum of needs, wishes, and felt deficiencies, all striving to consume for pleasure but also to assemble an exterior avatar by taking possession of goods as trophies from the environment. Such activity inevitably brings it into conflict with other personalities in its vicinity. The striving to consume and the resulting conflicts determine the essential character of human existence on this view. Life is pervasively and inescapably violent because human nature glimpses fulfillment only by consumption and by winning the conflicts necessary to take the most desirable consumables. Competitions inevitably produce inequality, hierarchy, subordination, and human on human parasitism. Hobbes’ state of nature can be glimpsed in this metaphysics, the war of all against all, and inevitably it produces an ultimate champion to subordinate everyone else and impose his will as the sovereign giver of laws for orderly civil society. There have been different accounts of how someone qualifies to be the much needed superego. The religious view is that sovereigns are put in place by actualization of the divine plan. Hobbes, constructing a scientific account of sovereign-dominated society without an explicit appeal to divine intervention, saw the feudal champion being accepted rationally for the sake of peace and stability, an acceptance he thought amounted to a social contract. The political consequences of this belief system, in either the Christian or the scientific version, are viciously authoritarian, frankly based on brutal repressive force claiming to be justified by the evils of human nature.

Id and Superego

The whole tendency of a more scientific understanding of personal existence is captured in what might be called “the Freudian Model”. In the Freudian model of subjectivity the main vectors of force are the inherent id, lusts for ecstatic pleasure, sparkly things, power, and esteem (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, but on a scientific view interpreted as biologically compulsive drives), and the acquired superego, the representation of authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, clergy, police, and sovereign, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, on this theory, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego, no independent spiritual existence. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures and accepted norms of behaviour. The existence of an entity of ideality, a personality free in virtue of creativity, is dimmed to the vanishing point. This is another iteration of the pre-Lutheran vision of human nature driven by inherent lusts and constrained to orderly conduct only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

Personalities are victims of two forces on this conception. The scientific requirement is that everything be explainable in terms of inexorable laws of nature, so that in the case of the experience and activities of human individuals, every movement or development must originate outside the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self. The individual is depicted as a victim (a product) of externalities, either biological or environmental. No serious weight is admitted to exist in the genius or spirit of the individual.

Such denigrating political conceptions of us personal drama-clouds have catastrophic consequences. The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed (acquisitive and competitive) outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no basis for proud personal self-possession from culturally dominant conceptions. There is no recognition that individual spiritual personality is improvisational, often playful and unpredictable because it is creatively original. however, if we abandon graphic representations of superstitious wishes and terrors, and get back to innocent self-experience, things are very different.

The Drama-Cloud Anomaly

The most striking and important thing about the personal cloud of dramatic and willful engagement between self and not-self is how anomalous it is with respect to the vast proportion of its environmental setting, the surroundings within which it moves. Those surroundings are very largely shaped masses which move and transition without any intent to bring about some personally satisfying particular future state of affairs, so which move without hope, care, or drama to decide the direction of force in their movements. Nothing matters to those things and they don’t matter to themselves. They make up the world that, in itself, doesn’t matter. The entire tendency of the scientific mode of understanding is to eliminate the special elemental force status of the personal drama-cloud by re-describing its works as products of the common environmental forces which do not pre-conceive and move toward a personal future, forces with no elaborate futurity shaped by currently non-actual states and arrangements of things. The personal drama-clouds, however, are anomalously playful, suppositional, caring, and creative in acting on purposes within their futurity. This personal drama-existence is not inherently a victim, but instead has autonomous agency via the conception of personal futurity. There is no reason to think that different categories of people are importantly different from one another in respect to their caring conception of futurity. This power is universally definitive of personality, human individual existence.

So, gnostics were wrong about the identity of time and materiality. The conception of time is the superpower of us drama-clouds, of every “I” entity of ideality. Any personal conception of time is shaped almost entirely of non-actualities, suppositions, pretences that things had arrangements they have no longer, that things will have certain new arrangements at some specific not-yet. Such a personal conception of location in a world structured temporally empowers the drama-cloud “I” to improvise acts accordingly. Only ideality (spirituality, intelligence, humanity/ personality) strives toward a specifically pre-conceived not-yet or non-actuality, which is definitive of creativity and so of freedom. What gnostics had right was recognizing persons as metaphysically primordial beings, in the sense that their presence in the whole of existence makes existence matter, confers on that existence the only drama it can ever have. These beings involve all existence in the drama which makes it meaningful, originally with every individual.

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

19 Thursday Dec 2024

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity

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Fragment 209, Word count: 579.

tags: aristocracy, value culture, violence, science, religion, arts-washing, spirituality, time, ideality.

The culture of violence is a core element of aristocracy, out of whose practices in an earlier historical era emerged the forms of modern sovereign state governments. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from ‘bourgeois’ culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of consumption without the overt and personal use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations (true heirs of aristocracy) generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing. The culture of violence is inseparable from the aristocratic value culture of tangible rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive property wealth, trophy possessions, along with coercive power, and such a value culture still dominates popular aspirations and conceptions of personal success. A great deal of arts-washing has always been showcased to hide the viciousness of aristocratic venality and to manufacture an image of aristocratic glamour.

The Ultimate Left

Ultimately, the political left must be a spiritual alternative to the material treasures of violence-based wealth systems grounded in competitive property possession, but also to the great-spirit-in-the-sky religions of our dystopian past. The spiritual alternative is a matter of recognizing the anomalous existence of teleological orientation and bearing, ideality busily self-amending as an embodied “I” active in the creation and recreation of futurity. To say that intelligence is caring is to say that intelligence is an “I”, a personality, an embodied idiosyncratic caring. Caring expresses a very strict kind of particularity: of sensitivities in aid of felt dramas, of powers to recognize relevance and structural connections for interior model-world-construction as the framework and lens of perception within personal orientation, particularity of point of view, of quests and questions, of curiosity, of pleasures, of aesthetic gratifications, of energy, of the self-declaring voice. Perception is not an imprinting somehow made upon an innocent and passively receptive consciousness. It is an active intervention by an ideality, a reaching and taking hold, an interest-driven study that is performed in a vast echo-chamber of personal recollections and anticipations. The “I” of this discreet spiritual existence, this ideality, is appropriately followed by a name, indicative of a rich uniqueness: “I, Odysseus”.

Each such anomalous existence is one among a multitude of points and arcs of improvisational indeterminacy in existence, the existential opposite of a black hole, creating new reality all the time and experiencing value in creating. The inventive freedom of each individual ideality means that no form of social, economic, or cultural organization is strictly determined (say, by divine fiat or natural law) to be or remain as it has been. It follows from this that the scientific consensus on fundamental reality is decisively incomplete, and, as such, wrong, just as any previous religious consensus was. The fact of ideality’s metaphysical status as an anomaly (shining peak vs black hole) with respect to the brute actuality of nature, means that neither individually embodied instances of spirit nor their creations are subject to the two normal justifications for social hierarchies: decrees of capricious divine will and the deterministic laws that describe brute material actuality.

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

Fragment 205, February 3, 2024, Our Dystopian Past (word count: 1,543)

What Science Can’t Do

22 Thursday Aug 2024

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

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Fragment 208, word count: 366.

Actual Intelligence is Caring

Let it be said. Intelligence is caring, and more particularly, it is idiosyncratic caring, an individual’s caring. None of the machine-based operations currently misrepresented as artificial intelligence is even in the ballpark of actual intelligence, because none of it is in the ballpark of caring. Whatever those huge power-sucking arrays of servers are doing, it isn’t caring or anything like it.

Let’s stop pretending that science, technology such as AI, or STEM education will solve the worst problems plaguing humanity. Mathematical science, the knowledge culture that developed rapidly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, always promises the progressive change that will eliminate miseries of the past and present, but its track record contradicts that promise. 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. There has been lots of technological change here and there, much of it devoted to improving the lethality of violence on every scale, including weapons for mass religion, murder and catastrophic destruction of physical culture. The enduring prominence of violence in the intent of technological innovation proves an ongoing commitment by the funders of research-and-development to the preservation of extreme economic inequality, to there being haves and have-nots, to a profound alienation between “us” and “them”, a “them” who don’t matter. It is all part of the fabric of top-down human-on-human parasitism. It also proves an ongoing commitment to placing the highest value on things that can be won, hoarded, and guarded by violence: trophies, property, weapons, bunkers, and appearances that suggest a conquest over ordinary human limitations such as collective and personal mortality. This did not change in the historical transition from the overtly violence-based aristocracy which was embedded in religion, the previous knowledge culture, into the modern investor capitalist oligarchy. So, science and technology are not authentic foundations of progressive modernity but merely new means of parasitic concentration of wealth, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The authentic foundation of the struggling seed of modernity is mass literacy*, bringing with it a new personal experience of spiritual** power.

*Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

**Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

Our Dystopian Past

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Fragment 205, word count: 1,543.

tags: Christendom, modernity, literacy, justice, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, hive-mind, time, humanism.

The conception of social organization in feudal Christendom identified three Platonic functional groups stacked as a power pyramid. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and the lowest stratum. Baronial fighting families formed the next level up (a big step up) and were far fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land, natural resources, and often workers, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed, in theory, the high point of the pyramid. The clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. They also claimed to be God’s agents on Earth. The baronial aristocracy disputed this way of understanding things to some extent but could not maintain their position of parasitic dominance without the authority that came from the culture and organization of religion.

The two power-factions asserted the necessity of an eternal stability in the order of society. Both aristocracy (of which monarchy is just a feature) and the theocratic hierarchy of the Christian religion planned with fervent determination to keep the arrangement of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power exactly as they had arranged it for their own parasitic benefit. There was a Platonic influence here as well since Plato declared that reality was strictly unchanging. The passing of time was an illusion for Plato. However, there was a way in which some change and continuity were reconciled, and that was by something like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”. Seasons change, but in a continuously repeating cycle that expresses a circle, an eternally closed loop. The vast majority of the general population accepted metaphysical determinism in the social order and found it a theme of common discourse. They were taught by the parasitic power factions to be afraid and to feel dependent. Notwithstanding this intent and practical control, nothing like complete stability was ever realized. Medieval horizons* expanded profoundly, and yet, there were blind spots, directions in which horizons did not expand. The general parasitic hierarchy of society persisted and still does.

In Christendom the core ideas of religion included universally inherited guilt coupled with supernatural surveillance for the purpose of moral ledger-keeping on every person’s thoughts and deeds, all leading toward an inevitable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, that made the ever-looming prospect of death terrifying, and the Church proclaimed itself as essentially God-on-Earth, the only way out. Just as the coercive power of aristocracy resulted from its culture of violence, the power of the Church depended upon its monopolistic culture of sacred knowledge, the Revelation it claimed to possess concerning the Divine drama involving every individual’s fate after death. As for the aristocracy, their iconic form was as armed men on horses, claiming everything as their property and asserting that claim with practiced violence toward anyone unable to resist with equal violence. These are the cultural niches which conceived and put into practice the form of human organization which would mutate into the sovereign state. Sovereignty was focused on securing the ownership of private property by force but also on religious mystery-cult insistence on group belonging and conformity (communal hive-mind). Patriarchs of religious pageantry were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still cultivated the scribal culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable in their role as advisers and administrators for aristocrats, keeping records of contracts, costs, products, properties, distributions, income, and consumption. However, in monastic libraries and after 1088 in increasing numbers of universities, they also kept alive surviving vestiges of ancient pagan literary culture. The rediscovered texts of philosophy, science, and mathematics from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Islamic east were recognized as profoundly more complex and advanced than anything native to Western Christendom, containing knowledge and courses of thought that opened vast horizons.

Although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with top-down imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and proximate people, from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. Time as experienced in the process of personal writing untethered from commonplace conversations opens in the direction of discoveries and creative opportunities and as such is progressive (modern) and starkly different from the cyclical repetitive time as normally represented in traditional conservative community discourse. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces the assumption of stable continuity. Humanism, as an exploration of the independent voice untethered from common discourse, is the expression of the individualistic experience that develops from moving through that portal. Ultimately, the humanist project of self-cultivation through reading and writing, expresses a claim about the fundamentals of human living, including individual freedom and creativity. It points toward a philosophy of living spirit that has never been articulated. (Although Existentialism could be a humanism in this sense. Thank you, Sartre.) Individualism was always the core of Humanism, based on the privacy of the written voice. This individualism was created by literacy, and so was not an invention of the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had an ancient flowering long before the Enlightenment and before the also famous Renaissance flourish.

By contrast with medieval and old regime devotion to stability, the idea of progress is what defines modernity, and it emerged from the experience of literacy. This culturally transmitted idea of progress includes the certainty that justice requires progressive change in the ordering of society, that justice is impossible without a different organization of property, status, knowledge, and power. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being as well as for justice because the past has been revealed as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, violent oppression, misogyny, tribalism, monotony, poverty, and conformity imposed by fear-based myths of safety in numbers. To various degrees in different places, those dystopian conditions are still normal, but now often recognized as reasons for improvement. Modernity has embraced the idea of future justice through progressive change in the social order, but it has no clear vision of how to overcome the forces that benefit from established injustice. The French Revolution** of 1789-99 was a major effort at government by and for the majority but it was subverted and descended into the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of Napoleon. Marxism was another major effort at justice through equality, but it became a cult of inevitability about the laws of history, highly dependent on a central sovereign power exercising death-grip control by violence, and so could never approach genuine equality. The conservative backlash against these essays in general justice that failed has almost discredited the very idea of progress.

Humanist Individualism: The Third Way

Humanism does not present itself as an authoritative edifice of knowledge, even though it specifically contradicts both religion and mechanistic science, which certainly do. Humanism celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality, but it doesn’t assert an original conception of human existence in nature that advances an individual-sourced power that can overcome the objections of mechanistic theory from science and deterministic religious conceptions such as original sin, Karma, or divine command and judgment. Humanism has declared human freedom and originality by practicing those powers via individual self-cultivation in the medium of literature, reading, and writing. It thrives because the mechanistic vision derived from science is fatally counterintuitive as a representation of living as experienced by a person. Materialist/ mathematical science misses the self-aware agency that explodes from the conception of time as a personal opening. Religions also lose credibility by separating personality, the restlessly unfinished and incompletely defined existence as experienced by a person, from ordinary embodiment and then aggrandizing it to infinity. In doing that, religions cast strictly embodied personality as inferior, secondary, and derivative in relation to some wildly speculative and implausible original. Both of those authoritative systems in effect leave the ordinary self-experience of the individual out of their picture. So, even now, in this age of knowledge, what it is to be a living human person is profoundly misconceived, and the result is dystopian society. Humanism, though, is still developing, and the way we people of modernity know and live in time has the project of progress inherent in it.

* Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.

** The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, written by Robert Darnton, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books (2023), ISBN: 978-0-713-99656-2.

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Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

Between Spirit and Dystopia

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caring, knowledge, nature, politics, religion, science, self-possession, spiritual simulation, spirituality, transcendence

Fragment 202, word count: 1,379.

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

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

Phenomenology of Spirit: Anomalous Existence

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

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

Roots of Dystopia Now

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

Hive-Mind Reality Distortion

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

Bonfire of Vanities

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

The World of One and Many

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Fragment 198, word count: 604.

Tags: nature, science, sensibility, sensitivity, caring, thinking, agency, knowing, metaphysics, Hegel.

The world is organized by two very different sets of principles. One is a system of “laws of nature” as described by empirical/ mathematical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy. This system of nature appears to be universal and immutable and presents itself in a vast natural world-structure including enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. The other set of organizing principles is a scattered multiplicity of separate and distinct points, namely the set of busily gazing sensibilities, each encountering and personalizing parts of the natural world, each curious and needy and learning to make sense of its surroundings which it must come to know to situate and orient its personal agency. The personalizing and coming to know is the world organizing activity of sensibilities. Through careful attention to specific qualities among the contents of strictly personal sensitivities, each sensibility organizes an idea of a world that surrounds it, a sense of enduring objects in cycles of predictable change. What is crucial to sensibility is a semi-reliable set of known place-markers for an effective orientation of agency for an unstoppable and dangerously indeterminate future.

It has been speculated that the world of objective nature would be incomplete or insubstantial if not for knowing sensibilities who each personally organize from their sensitivities an idea of the world and then live with and build that idea by sensitively touching fragments of objective nature against it. There is speculation (Hegel) that nature calls sensibilities into existence in the course of perfecting itself, so that it can know itself, reflect and appreciate the awesome grandeur of its intricate existence. Sensibilities mirror nature, certainly, and are often struck by nature’s beauty. The speculation suggests that mirroring the world of nature, knowing its details and its evasions of being known, is the purpose and fulfillment of the existence of sensibilities. However, sensibility is not fulfilled or completed by knowledge severed from the drama and caring in its personal purposes. Sensibilities are very bad mirrors of the objective world since the personal idea of the world that any sensibility organizes to live through is unavoidably very different and largely remote from objective nature. Each sensibility organizes its idea of the world according to its personal principle of caring, with the result that relatively few objects or patterns are noticed or remembered. Any personal idea of the world needs helpfully simplified schematic impressions, abstractions, generalizations, variously structured forms of ideality. (search circle)

As bad as sensibilities are at mirroring the brute actuality of nature, we do manage, in orienting ourselves for ongoing personal agency and expression, to organize our creative ideality into a world we recognize as hugely not-self, and in doing so we manifest what we are as more than objects in nature, as supra-objective particulars existing as neighbours of the hard not-self, the uncaring and unquestioning natural world. Although nature seems to subsist independently of sensibilities, it must be kept in mind that “I think, therefore I am!” highlights that the only certainty of knowledge we have is our own personal existence as a world organizing principle. Thinking is caring and questioning, the ever-questing focus of personal caring. It is caring and questioning so specifically that the focus of attention passes from relevant detail to relevant detail, revising and filling out a precisely pointed future-ward movement. Our certainty of the world of nature is based on the certainty of our personal existence as a caring world builder. The objective world of nature is, after all, an idea, a structure organized by sensibility for the purposes of living and enjoying what it is to be living.

Context

Fragment 3, September 21, 2011, Encountering Subjectivity (word count: 788)

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

Fragment 86, November 4, 2015, Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (word count: 2,321)

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

Culture War

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Fragment 190, word count: 896.

tags: metaphysics, existence, deity, science, politics, dystopia, capitalism, gratification, culture, spirituality.

There are two opposing explanations for the existence of something instead of nothing. There is existence as intentional act of intervention, OR as non-intentional mere occurrence. In other words, the something that is our world is either a willful intervention by some pre-supposing ideality, the effective personal expression of some monad of caring, knowing, and anticipating intentionality, OR an inexplicable random cascading instability, perhaps manifesting a fundamental and eternally given nature which makes all particular occurrences pre-determined, but which itself, having no prior matrix, is perfectly random. Each of these explanations is a particular statement of metaphysics. The metaphysics of existence as an intentional act of intervention, in a variety of versions, was ubiquitous in human societies for ages, for example in feudal Christendom, and it always joined forces with the culture of patriarchal dominance which exploits and makes concrete the idea of deity by violently imposing the will of the strongest on everyone within reach (sovereign exceptionalism), and by instituting worshipful cult collectives with the softer attractions of grand cosmic visions and close personal belonging. In opposition to explanation by divine intervention, the mere occurrence explanation dawned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the boutique metaphysics of mathematical materialism in the scientific Enlightenment. It began a process of removing wind from the sails of sovereigns and the social structuring around sovereignty. In the current state of modern civilization there remain these same two institutional proponents of metaphysical ideology, each supporting one of the two existential possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Religious institutions champion the deliberate interventionist side, and institutions of science and scientific education champion random occurrence, near enough. This is the shape of our civilization’s foundational culture war. Yet these two have come to an effective peace accord based on the fact that both support the (ready-to-detonate) capitalist incentive and reward system: consumption as identity-defining trophy. Science explains this system as the inevitable working of animal nature, and Christianity explains it as the inscrutable Divine plan in action. Notwithstanding their differences, both sides developed metaphysics on the model of a law-giver, divine law on one side, natural law on the other, and laws always apply top-down (unalterably) to things understood as unalterable building blocks of reality, all tidy and settled in a hierarchical chain of Being extending down into economic and political structure, social roles and relationships, and even into gender and race categories. It is a vision of existence as rigidly pre-structured and is the ideological matrix of the right-wing politics of winner-take-all inequality.

Both bastions of metaphysics are able to embrace the capitalist incentive and reward system because each misconstrues something crucial about the reality it holds dearest. Religious institutions attach themselves to the overriding reality of creative teleological interventions, the power of spirituality for spontaneously expressive novelty, so much so that they project spiritual teleology outward as the great cosmic parent hidden inside all existence, literally deifying it and proclaiming it the origin of everything. By doing that they reduce individual human-scale spirituality to ignorance, vanity, and misery. On the other side, science attaches itself to knowability, the overt public availability of material objectivity. Nothing real is hidden on this view. True reality can be lit up, measured and mapped, identified and specified, depended on as unalterably definite. Science focuses so much on material objectivity that it disappears human experience into mere mechanism. Each of these entrenched metaphysical doctrines so drastically discounts the importance of the other that actual human spirituality is distorted grotesquely by both. Dystopia follows from the denigration of individual-scale human spirituality from which certain factions gain power and benefits. Setting aside the grotesque exclusivity of the sides in this culture war, we are left with ordinary human scale experience which absolutely depends on both novel teleological creativity at the level of individual persons, and with the stability and clear discernibility of some material objectivity. We have no direct experience of deliberative interventions at a cosmic level, but we have no end of experience of them in our everyday social interactions.

Getting beyond the all-destroying capitalist incentive and reward imperative to consume requires getting beyond the outrageous denigration of individual-level spirituality in metaphysical culture. It demands nothing more than a dualistic synthesis of the opposing metaphysical visions in a new configuration: recognition of random occurrence at the cosmic level and of creative novelty, foresight, learning, and personal expression, which is to say, spontaneous spirituality, at the level of the individual person. Removing the genius of agency in our scenario from some top-down imposer of laws, and relocating it instead to ground level where everyone breaths and talks and carries on living day to day, provides a profound equality of persons. The fact is that a standard practice of creativity as personal expression is the most gratifying and self-affirming of experiences. This is the ultimate grounding for democracy because every individual brings an inherent personal fountain of gratification that bypasses the competitive market economics of trade and barter. This is a metaphysics more congruent with a leftist politics of universal dignity, equality, and mutual support. The left has always been weakened by the lack of a strong and special metaphysical foundation, and so the authentic culture war between left and right politics has not yet even really started.

Context:

Fragment 180, August 28, 2021, Existence and New Reality (word count: 505)

Fragment 173, January 30, 2021, Absolute Incompleteness (word count: 202)

Fragment 171, December 9, 2020, Science and Empathy in Defining Dystopia (word count: 779)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

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

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

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).

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Tag Archives: science

The Culture Punch of Philosophy

The Dead Hand of Old Dystopias

Existence as Drama-Cloud

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

What Science Can’t Do

Our Dystopian Past

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Between Spirit and Dystopia

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The World of One and Many

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Culture War

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The Thrill of It

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