Why Politics isn’t Science

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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consciousness, curiosity, human nature, ideas, metaphysics, personality, politics, Power, science, teleology, transcendence

Posting 139, word count: 793.

Politics is the competition for power, for effective ownership and control of lives and property, but there is also a countervailing movement against power that is inherent in politics without being part of the competition for power. This countervailing force expresses the underdog side of the historical quarrel over transcendence. The dominant side of that quarrel is the idea of a cosmic teleological force to be feared and placated, an external sovereign transcendence who promotes local operatives to impose the universal structure of supremacy and hierarchy. That idea of transcendence is a sanctification of power, normally coupled with a depiction of ordinary embodied personalities as envious and grasping. These are in the background of every person’s upbringing. On the other side of the transcendence quarrel is the idea that the only transcendence is each embodied individual’s teleological processes, each individual’s ideas, ordinary consciousness itself, and that is the resistance to power.

There is a third option, a repudiation of any and all transcendence. Materialist science claims to assert this but presents its ultimate mystery of mass/ energy/ space/ time as a distinct sovereign transcendence, a dead one, inertial and entropic, with no trace of reason, a world that, in itself, absolutely doesn’t matter.

The reason that politics can never be science is precisely ideas and ideality. The past and present of political actuality, dominated by hierarchical power, do not determine the future because ideality is unpredictably creative and utters conceptions of change in social, economic, and political cultures. Such changes always face predictable efforts to stifle them by conservative factions dedicated to preserving systems of hierarchy by both lethal force and the grotesque ideas of sovereign transcendence cited above. The scientific attitude that everything is determined by inflexible law, and so must always remain much as it is (a metaphysical idea), is indistinguishable from the conservative effort. Science has no help to offer in our political predicament. However, realty as experienced has two foundational constituents. One is actuality and the other is ideality in the form of a multitude of embodied personalities fountaining ideas. Every individual is an idea, the self-thinking idea of a particular life in the world, a particular idea of freedom, and ideas are not intrinsically hierarchical. Ideality is the transcendent being of personality at the level of the embodied individual, and ideality can effectively override in actuality what may seem to be givens of nature. In our being as fountains of ideas, people impose original events on the brute fall-lines of nature. A fountain of ideas is an imposer of change, and not a passive receiver or victim of time. (Here is the teleological structure in the sense of the passage of time.) Materialist science is not equipped to conceive personalities as fountains of teleological ideas, but an understanding of politics must do so for the chance of improvement in our longstanding dystopia.

The Question

The foundational status of ideality in experience, that is, in the world that matters, lands us squarely in metaphysics rather than science, and the whole of metaphysics rests on a single question: What should we make of teleology? ‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘a poise within the anticipatory ideation of agency’. What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which we know as consciousness? It is standard to present teleology in a stripped-down form to make it seem consistent with a mechanistic stimulus-response model of behaviour, separating it from how it is encountered in ordinary experience, namely as embodied personality. However, teleology really is personality. There have been attempts to show that purposive action can be reduced to automatic mechanisms pre-set to be triggered by specific stimuli. Such attempts are thoroughly political because if people are mechanisms it doesn’t matter how they are treated since morality and empathy are inapplicable to machines. So, denying ordinary consciousness as transcendence, as a fountain of teleological ideas with a creative arc of developmental continuity, that is, as personality, has the intent and effect of legitimizing the deception and manipulation of groups and individuals by people in culture pods enacting a fetish for power and trophies.

Teleology isn’t as simple as programmes of specific pragmatic operation, but also includes various creative postures bearing into futurity including curiosity, wondering, seeking and discovering original ways to make sense of things, existential questioning, and expressing all this in a personal voice. As thinking beings who use ideality for freedom by anticipating and imposing the novelty of original ideas on brute actuality, we are all in an immediate position to know that the bleak conservative story of human nature as a pit of appetites and envy is false! Liberation comes simply from declining to believe the default cultural teachings because the truth is plainly different.

Did Science Make Philosophy Obsolete?

22 Thursday Nov 2018

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

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actuality, eternity, ideas, living, metaphysics, personality, religion, science, time, transcendence

Posting 137, Word Count: 501.

Before the scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world as a whole was perceived universally as personified, as a living Being. As such, intelligent teleology was thought to be the innermost reality of everything, of existence. That is religion, near enough. Remarkably, the eventful objective world was thought to be never-truly-real, a fleeting, deceptive, dreamlike, and unknowable shimmer, where everything soon becomes something else, always on the point of being different. Time itself was thought to be the genius of failure-to-be-real, and reality, properly identified, was conceived as eternal sameness, the One of Parmenides, a living, conscious, willing, and ideal, sameness. Metaphysics was the effort to identify features of that living ideality which could never change, subsisting without time, and so the stuff of absolute knowledge. In that effort, the transcendence of living intelligence, of personality, was conceived, for example, as logos, a rigidly structured willing that was eternally constant. However, such a removal of ideality from the eventful intervention of personality into actuality is a gross confusion and contradiction of ordinary experience. It completely misses the transcendence of ideality in its bearing toward newness, in the creative will to freedom in that intervention. Ideality is always experience for some personality, and personality is a kind of existence which must actively develop its identity by creating an oriented bearing into the non-actual next moment of embodied life in the world, a newness and incompleteness that can occur only as ideality, never something definite, always bearing into newness in the willing of freedom, and so within time as a technique of living existence. Since time requires some sort of presence of the non-actualities which are no-longer and not-yet, and the only presence other than actuality is ideality, and since ideality is always experience for some teleological personality, then time is a thing of personality and not of actuality.

Eternity is the world that doesn’t matter. Eternity is not transcendent or ultimate reality, and has no merit as the focus of metaphysics. The focus of metaphysics is transcendence, and the transcendent wonder is willful agency, teleology, which is ideality imposing novelty on nature by conceiving and imposing time. Since nature just falls, true becoming isn’t imposed on experience by material nature, but is imposed on material nature by personality in its willful agency.

Thinking of teleology in the narrow sense of goal-oriented movement, purposive action, or future-directed force, is too simple a representation of personality, the self-thinking idea. Of course, personality strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation and of teleology, but there is more. There is an effortful bearing into indefinite futurity within a broad learned and learning orientation involving both not-yet and no-longer, strict ideality making what sense we can of a largely indefinable situation, curious, caring, questioning. Personality is teleology, which must be ideality, the time-scape ideality of aspiration, expectation, intention, and desperate desire.

From a Hill in the Labyrinth of Ideas

28 Friday Sep 2018

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

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

Posting 134, Word Count: 442

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

Scientific Nihilism

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

Time-Scapes of Ideality

14 Friday Sep 2018

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

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actuality, Christendom, divinity, feudalism, freedom, fundamentalist patriarchy, History, ideality, metaphysics, nature, personality, politics, S.T.E.M., science, time

Posting 133, Word count: 1,601.

The global culture of intellectual inquiry is proud and happy to have finished the main task, content now with a post-heroic and workmanlike mopping up of loose ends and filling in little gaps. Any re-conceptualization of fundamental reality as a whole is next to unimaginable. The intellectual certainty of this era comes from faith in the comprehensive explaining power of science, universally celebrated. However, there is a problem, and the problem is politics in which ever increasing inequality warps and rips human interconnectedness, and violent conflict is threatening new extremes of catastrophic destruction and suffering because of weapons conceived and supplied by the community of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Science has proven itself unable to help in the creation of workable political systems that are able to treat everyone decently by cultivating everyone’s freedom.

The conceptual system of science excludes freedom from fundamental reality by excluding teleological ideality, which is to say, by excluding personality from fundamental reality, but without understanding personalities as points of freedom it is impossible to take politics beyond forms of imperialism and vicious factional conflict. The modern consensus still rests on the Hobbesian thesis, which asserts a rational need to submit to any effective sovereignty as the only way to dampen the war of all against all which lurks inherently in human nature as conceived since feudal Christendom.

Feudal Christendom

Euro-American modernity evolved from, and is still firmly in the cultural grip of a conservative longing for, feudal Christendom. Political conservatism is the surviving cultural remnant of, and nostalgia for, both the political ideology (patriarchy) and the religious metaphysics of feudal Christendom. The conservative devotion to symbols and pageantry of territorial states, along with the metaphysical assumptions of human nature as a continual grasping for definition and standing through competitions for property, are again remnants of feudal Christendom. Feudalism was a fundamentalist patriarchy, institutionalized sovereign rights of the father, expressing 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 comprehensively parasitic on the weaker. Those assumptions grew out of the traditional family in which the father was the strongest and women and children were assumed to lack even a minimum competence. Implicit in the conservative world view is a belief that feudal patriarchy is the social and political structure predetermined by God or nature. Science has defined itself and directed its questions in such a way as to avoid confrontation with either the political ideology of patriarchy, including its conception of human nature, or its sanctifying religious ideology featuring a supernatural force of angry patriarchal will and consciousness (personality) at large in the cosmos, appeased only by submissive flattery, just like embodied patriarchs only on a grander scale.

Most scientific investigators have some family background of religious affiliation and so have a culture-based tendency to think about transcendence in terms of cosmic intelligence, cosmic personality. Some reject that kind of transcendence as absurd, which it is, but on that basis dismiss the very idea of transcendence and of personality as a fundamental principle of reality. Others accept cosmic personality as the truth of transcendence, a supernatural reality distinct from the one described by science, and knowable only through unquestioning religious faith.

The conception of personality in feudal Christendom contains a stark contrast between divine personality and human personalty. Divine personality is transcendently creative and free, the one and only instance of transcendent free agency, whereas human nature, human personality, is a meagre and degraded imitation of that divinity, hardly comparable at all, inviting a reductionist interpretation in which human personality is merely the working out of mechanistic and ‘pre-set’ appetites, drives, and responses to stimuli. That interpretation is easily compatible with scientific principles. Although science stipulates a single fundamental principle of reality, namely the physical ‘nature’ of actuality, the need for two principles of reality is demonstrated by straightforward considerations, as presented in The World that Doesn’t Matter. The principles could be described as ‘the world that matters’ and ‘the world that doesn’t matter’. The world that matters becomes something that matters only because it includes personalities with free agency. Without them, with only the physical nature of actuality, nothing matters in the least. It has often been asserted that removing belief in the supernatural force of divine will and consciousness (personality) in the cosmos would eliminate meaning and purpose from the lives of humans. As stated, it is a false claim, but what is clearly true is that without some personalities in the world for whom the living of a life matters, meaning really does disappear utterly from reality. The world with personalities is fundamentally and essentially different from the world without us, and the presence of personality is what makes the difference. That is the first datum of metaphysics.

Feudal patriarchy was and is a construct of metaphysical ideas: a bleak conception of human nature, a sharply contrasting idea of divinity, earthly trophies interpreted as markers of standing in the divine consciousness, rights of the strongest to sovereign immunity. Getting past the dystopian political systems built from those conceptions will follow only from better metaphysics, and science is unable to touch such issues.

Time-Scapes of Ideality

It is clear from these considerations that improvement in metaphysics is the only hope for building workable political arrangements because metaphysics can engage teleology and abstraction as fundamental reality, and teleology and abstraction are crucial to understanding freedom. (Teleology is what Aristotle called final cause.) Teleology is ideality (abstraction), rather than concrete materiality or actuality, because it anticipates conditions and objects which do not exist, but which might possibly be made to exist if certain actions are taken, if a certain agency is exercised through an increasingly remote and improbable future. This teleological ideality constitutes the special existence of, the living of, personality, subjectivity. In the brute actuality of nature, time is just inevitability, but for teleological personality time is a construct of opportunity for effective creation, free agency, because personality creates a time-scape of ideality from personal judgements about continuities and instabilities in the brute actuality of nature, judgments of probability and possibility, questions, negations, interests in certain pleasures and gratifications, in making an original mark, in making things right, empathic attachment to other personalities, impulses to nurture, to learn, to think, to teach, to arrange a sustainable life in the world. Within that time-scape of ideality which is a personality’s orientation and bearing in the world, the subject exercises agency by actively imposing (not always perfectly) its personal ideality on actuality, a power of embodiment. This recognition of human nature is opposed to, and far more realistic than, the conservative conception of a drive for self-definition through conflict. Everyone knows from the most immediate personal experience that the ideality of teleology exists in agency. This recognition of personality also removes the Christian/ Hobbesian absolute need for sovereignty. It means that individuals don’t need to submit to a sovereign or any other supervision to build stable human interconnections within which to develop mutually supportive free expression.

It is always problematic to bleed qualities of either side of the ideal/ actual dualism into the other side, to think of ideality as some kind of substance or thing, for example, no matter how ethereal. To sever personality from embodiment is to conceive it as a substance, a body, which it is not. Also, problems arise from attributing qualities of personal ideality, such as caring and planning, to the concrete world of brute actuality, to inanimate objects or nature at large. Such manoeuvres always create metaphysical monstrosities such as the idea of divinity as an omniscient cosmic consciousness, claims of divine favour for some particular political faction, for some established sovereignty or for a claimant to sovereignty, always resulting in dystopian political arrangements. For any hope of workable political systems able to treat everyone decently, it is crucial to have a strong metaphysics of freedom, to acknowledge both sides of the dualism and to keep the boundaries of the duality clear and distinct, with personality embodied in beings who breathe and have an individual voice.

Science banished personality entirely from basic reality, but personality is the transcendent fountain of freedom. The existence of personality, the being of a personal consciousness with expectations, aspirations, and agency, is the only reason anything matters, and ideality is the existence of personality. Science directs attention to predictability, and unfree materiality is absolutely predictable whereas the creative ideality of personality is not. Science cannot conceptualize freedom, creative unpredictability, and so cannot conceptualize the transcendence of ideality, spirituality. The scientific attitude fits perfectly with the politically conservative effort to stifle any evolutionary process of culture that might disrupt the feudal justifications for social hierarchy dominated by sovereign immunity, evolutionary processes that most certainly spring from the unpredictable creativity of ideality and override what may seem like the dictates of nature. This being the case, there is urgent need for another re-conceptualization of fundamental reality as a whole to upgrade, restore, and re-locate personality (spirituality, ideality) in the process of reality. Neither politics nor reality can be understood without the time-scapes of ideality which are personalities. Reality has a temporal dimension of ideality that transcends brute actuality. It is a growing, a building, a choosing to become, a moment by moment self-creation, as much as it is a falling or a pre-determined inevitability. However, there is no institutional preparation for any such thinking, certainly not in corporate, academic, or scholarly discourse.

Two Problems with the Science Story

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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artificial intelligence, capitalism, Enlightenment, hive mind, patriarchy, Power, science, spirituality

Posting 120, word count: 1,352

The story of science is an inspiring history about how, over a recent and well documented time period, humanity’s leading teams of theorists and researchers came to understand reality when they used the objective empiricism of scientific method to overcome superstitious belief in witchcraft and magic. Oddly, it is still considered proper and morally commendable to participate in a community of religious faith asserting the reality of angels, demons, miracles, and a cosmic moral judge decreeing rewards and brutal punishments after death. However, for the most part, events, that were once considered to be deliberately framed messages to humans from a supernatural universe of disembodied but personified (caring) entities with effective powers in our world, have been re-conceived in science as moments in merely concrete cause-effect sequences that can be understood and controlled by human intervention. The story science tells of itself suggests that this recent accomplishment of understanding reality has come to encompass everything including politics, social systems, and individual behaviour and experience, all of which are now claimed as substantially understood (and controllable by intervention) by experts in behavioural science, social and political science, psychology, and economics.

The scientific claim of understanding reality is used to legitimize all the economic, legal, military, and political institutions and practices of modern states, on the suggestion that educated individuals active in professions, business management, and government, all carry and act from this precious understanding, acquired as the core of higher education. Since key institutions of every nation license, regulate, and sponsor scientific research and have the resources to benefit from the most advanced discoveries, the impression is created that such institutions are themselves manifestations of the most profound understanding of reality, justified by humanity’s deepest knowledge.

However, there are two fatal problems with this story. Science claims to encompass the whole of reality, but it has no way of comprehending individual spirituality, the personal consciousness of creative freedom in time. Science can’t conceptualize intelligence as a particular, and each intelligence is a special particular, with a transcendent uniqueness in its teleology. All objective particulars fall completely under general laws, but the individual conception of time makes each intelligence a special particular, with temporal creativity giving each one a personally particular and transcendent indeterminacy. The ever-elaborating and always incomplete teleology of each individual creates a uniquely individual indeterminacy. So, while science is comfortable dealing with people as physical particulars and as statistical sets it fails completely in recognizing people as spiritual particulars, and that invalidates the universality and finality of all claims from behavioural science, social and political science, psychology, and economics. A better attempt at accumulating a store of wisdom about humanity as such would work to understand how to improve and empower individual creative freedom and self-possession.

The objective empiricism of science has an inescapable weakness, namely an obsessively blinkered gaze outward and a resulting inability to engage spirituality, the force of individual subjectivity. The scientific conceptual system does not prove the non-existence of creative individual spirituality, but rather begins with a constitutional refusal to conceive it. Scientific discourse rules out all claims about spirituality. On the scientific view, there is no such thing as transcendence, no transcendent spirituality, no individual spiritual interiority free of strict objective determinism. Science needs to measure, model, map, and visualize things without ever being able to question the questioning from which such operations fountain, because questioning is an act of subjective interiority, of spirituality. The gaze of science is strictly outward upon measurable objects, and the tool of mathematical measurement disqualifies science from any awareness or identification of the spirituality of subjective interiority.

There can’t be a current debate on metaphysics (transcendence) because scientific materialism is universally assumed in the intellectual community. However, the influence of Abrahamic monotheism is still so strong culturally and politically that there is also a taboo against thinking about metaphysics because such thinking immediately comes into conflict with the ideological monopoly granted to entrenched religion by a kind of gentlemen’s agreement. This cultural accommodation is managed by a mental dissociation in which the most highly educated individuals assume both the truth of scientific materialism and the agency of angels and demons without allowing their thinking in one system to touch the other. You couldn’t make this up. The comfortable coexistence of scientific materialism and antique monotheism demonstrates the scientific inability to remain coherent when attempting to confront spirituality within its externalizing conceptual universe.

The reason why science has to ignore and live with antique beliefs about angels and demons is because of the second problem with the science story. Science is funded and owned by the patriarchal hive minds which make wars and by global corporations spinning money for investors by whatever means possible. Science was appropriated early on by the sovereign hive minds which are the end users of armed forces (the arms race, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, the ICBM, Napalm, Agent Orange) in association with captains of industry (global climate change; Bhopal, India), and those culture pods adore the bonding effects that antique religions have on people generally, the way orientation to a commanding height binds individuals to a hive mind. This military-industrial patriarchy has very strong motives to discourage and minimize streams of the history of ideas that deal with spirituality outside traditional monotheism and which, in doing so, disrupt orientation to a commanding height.

Although sovereign hive minds and corporate hive minds are not entirely compatible with one another, they each value the benefits of their symbiosis. Since both are expressions of the hyper-masculine ethos of patriarchy, celebrating competition, strength, champion heroes, and trophy properties, they have much in common. Corporations certainly support war and preparing for war because so much profit is involved, but corporations operate essentially as independent fiefdoms, like military-estate families in medieval times, in a modern version of global feudalism in which many resource-and-culture-based systems of power are ready and able to act as a law unto themselves without meaningful homage to the laws of any outside sovereignty. Money as capital is not permanently attached to any nation and as much as possible seeks out secret tax havens where the rule of law is light and lax. The people who operate in that world of corporate feudalism (even as investors) are also unattached emotionally to any sovereign state, and will go where money flows. There is a living romanticism in the libertarian masculinity at the core of the corporate hive mind, a thrilling story of dominance and exceptionalism. Sovereign states which openly declare themselves as such are a different kind of hive mind, with a territorial definition, drawing on a selectively edited history of their territory to craft a compelling story for the inhabitants to attached to emotionally. In the culture of global capitalism, by contrast, there is a shared story of the triumphant great man in a vicious dog-eat-dog world, and, ironically, an elaborate social and cultural support system for the people who immerse themselves in this story and win their way in. The support system is crucial because trophy property always demands the protection of organized violence, either as the armed forces of a sovereign state or as private armed security forces, currently proliferating.

The Politics of Knowledge

Given these two problems with science, any claim that science is politically impartial, neutral, or disinterested is absurd. The politics of knowledge is hardly complicated. Any science funded by such forces will specifically rule out any understanding of reality which might question the legitimacy of currently dominant institutions. The military-industrial patriarchy, the power structure which pays for scientific work, is threatened by any information that explores spirituality outside traditional monotheism because it is the only historical stream of thinking able to disrupt orientation to a commanding height. It has done so already, spectacularly, in the radical Enlightenment. The purpose of science is not to understand reality, but to strengthen the patriarchal systems of power and wealth already operating, or give a competitive edge to a particular power centre by producing new power for the paymasters. Here comes artificial intelligence.

What’s Spiritual about Thinking?

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

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

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

Posting 100

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

An Unheralded Rivalry

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

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

What is Thinking?

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

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

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

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

Elemental Embodiment and Spirituality

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

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

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

Thinking Off-Grid: Leaving the Metaphysics of Social Pragmatism

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

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

Notes

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

97, July 19, 2016, What is Thinking?

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

Embodiment and Two Spiritual Vulnerabilities

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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critical thinking, critique of modernity, culture, embodiment, freedom, intelligence, nature, philosophy, science, spirituality, time, transcendence

Taken together, the two previous postings present a couple of observations worth highlighting. The postings are: Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality (July 15, 2015, posting # 85), and Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest (November 4, 2015, posting # 86). The first observation, pointed to by the titles, is that (Blind-Spot) philosophy is both a spiritual quest and a critique of orientation. A quest begins in questions, and is a re-orientation process with questions as guides. As a spiritual quest, it is an intelligence’s search for what is most personal and most human, a self-consideration, and as a critique of orientation it is an intelligence’s questioning its situation within what is beyond itself. A spiritual quest is a gaze into a mirror and the critique of orientation is a gaze into surroundings (being in a life in the world). There is already a horizontal duality in this binocularity to the philosophical gaze: inward and outward, although there is no inward-seeing eye. The directionality of the gaze (outward) is so laden with what cannot be perceived, with subjective non-actualities such as futurity, aspirations, and lessons learned, that it points (in addition to some region of surroundings) back in a direction that can only be characterized as inward. The duality is all the more insistent because we are irritated or nagged by the sense of that inward direction as partial blindness, as obscurity and vulnerability, the sense that there should be an inward sensitivity to match the richness of our outward sensitivities. Since there is no simple gaze inward we are forced to devise or discover a spiritual mirror and we find it in the experience of time. Inwardly, instead of a particularity of instantaneous outline or substance, we have a directionality within time.

Critique of Modernity

Critique of culture is a crucial part of any spiritual quest just as it is of critique of orientation because the engagement of spirit or intelligence with nature (via embodiment) is heavily mediated by ambient culture which is historically rooted and largely arbitrary for the individual. An individual’s surroundings include a multitude of other embodied intelligences expressing a collectively shared orientation (a system of reality) acquired in childhood from the local culture. “System of reality” specifically denotes a culturally stipulated set of ideas and orientations. It is the set of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, the supernatural, community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the culture into which a person is born. Ideas about the supernatural often have a revered status in systems of reality, stipulated as the top-down power over the other elements. Recognizing culture as an accumulation of human creations distinct from nature and from fundamental humanity provides the basis for recognizing in history a variety of systems of reality, which often contradict one another and all of which must include important distortions and falsehoods. Critique of modernity, for example, is culture criticism, since modernity is not a manifestation of nature (such as winter) nor, as a late and special development, can it be a structure of enduring human nature.

Not only the Euro-American imperialist culture of modernity, but every culture, is tainted with superstitious legitimations of the injustices of human macro-parasitism, because there are spiritual vulnerabilities which universally give macro-parasitic cultures access to human hosts. There is no index culture to use as a standard of empathy in human interconnectedness or of the human grasp on reality. Tribal or aboriginal cultures are no better. Philosophy is nothing less than developing re-acquaintance with personal pre-cultural innocence, disconnecting from all the cultural biases, especially constructs of personal identity, self-definition (including gender), and stories of cosmic origins, purpose, and destiny. What you get down to, moving outside cultural influences, is a horizontal dualism: limited personal freedom within the non-actuality of time (which is to say, individual intelligence) confronting brute actuality, a relationship obviously vulnerable to the very active interference of tainted collective culture.

Spiritual Vulnerabilities

The second observation is that there are two spiritual vulnerabilities inherent in intelligences and our situation, both of which vulnerabilities are exploited culturally by macro-parasitic factions to establish and stabilize their regime of top-down human-on-human parasitism. (Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on a “sedentary” grass-eating mammal which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation.) It is incorrect to say that critical thinking would have no function without the distortions of reality (such as gods, demons, inherent human vice, the great food chain of being, fine art, monumental architecture, and good breeding) spun culturally by macro-parasitic factions to legitimate themselves. Even without that distorting cultural force, the inherent vulnerabilities (self-uncertainty and orientation to top-down subordination) would remain. Although both spiritual vulnerabilities are culturally re-enforced and exploited, they are not created out of nothing by cultural forces. They are inherent in the encounter between the non-actualities of subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature, and so pre-exist cultural influences. However, it would be wrong to characterize the inherent vulnerabilities in the situation of intelligences as any kind of inherent vice or fault, there is no trace of original sin there. Vulnerabilities are not vices. Vulnerabilities require a strengthening of individual autonomy, encouragement and support of individual expression and critical thinking, and not repression or punishment.

Spirituality

The spiritual vulnerability studied in Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest is existential self-uncertainty. The spiritual vulnerability studied in Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality is a tendency to accept without question the imprint of a whole complex of normal human circumstances as a top-down or child-to-parent orientation on a cosmic scale. There is a direct correspondence between the two spiritual vulnerabilities and the two directions of the philosophical gaze, with a spiritual vulnerability as both an inspiration and a challenge to overcome in each direction. For the spiritual quest itself there is the vulnerability of self-uncertainty, spiritual no-thing-ness, the necessity to self-create at every moment. The spiritual quest never arrives at the discovery of a definitive self. Instead of having any definitive self-particularity, we have precisely what we think of as spirituality: time and the freedom that comes with time and the teleology of creativity, constructed of interior non-actuality, accumulating orientation. The past never accomplishes a definitive self, which is, of course, inseparable from freedom. However, the inherent self-uncertainty is exploited as a vulnerability to having a culturally assigned identity imposed. Consequently, the spiritual quest has to include a critique of the culture of personal identity. Personal identity definitions assigned by culture have to be put aside so that innocent self-experience is encountered and liberated.

Horizontal Dualism

Outwardly, the vulnerability is the readiness or early conditioning to project a top-down parental-type orientation (personal subordination) onto the self-to-environment relation at large. In fact that readiness to project a top-down structure onto the self-to-environment relation spills over and invades self-uncertainty as well, so that it becomes a vulnerability to crediting personal intelligence (non-actuality, time, freedom) to some cosmic source intelligence or master intelligence. The posting Horizontal Dualism … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of spirit, based on its transcendent freedom and creative power, to superiority and mastery over nature. As just noted, spiritual mastery has usually been alienated from individuals and made more plausible as a mastery by being centralized and assigned to a cosmic master intelligence, leaving the individual as some sort of subordinate derivation or product of the vastness of the master intelligence, but, even as such, still claiming a share of mastery over local nature. Rejecting that (culturally re-enforced) alienation brings intelligence back to the scale of the individual which already makes it more horizontal with respect to nature.

Enlightenment rationalists moved western culture along the right path by pioneering scientific secularism to replace the imagined agency of disembodied spirits in religion and magic. They made the people of their future (made us of modernity) philosophical in an important sense by helping us be secular. People have largely become scientific instead of superstitious and that was once thought to be the crucial aspect of being philosophical: accepting strict causation, interpreting and perceiving strict causation in the events and structures of the surroundings. However, conceiving science as “universal laws” still retains the old top-down orientation. With science, we are still overawed by the splendours of nature as a self-subsisting matrix or grounding to which the individual intelligence is subordinate. (That gets interpreted politically so that the fact that cheetah prey on antelope is offered as a legitimation of capitalism.) Comparing the radically located individual intelligence to the scale of cosmic nature, which is by definition omnipresent, seems to show the individual as insignificant and again some sort of derivation or product, this time of the vastness of nature. Critique of Orientation … argues against the claim made historically on behalf of nature at large of all-embracing superiority and mastery. Something crucial is missing from that system of reality, and what is missing is the experience of subjective interiority and the fact that human life is played out by individuals in the (horizontal) encounter between non-actualities of personal subjectivity (spirituality) and the brute actualities of objective nature (conceptually mediated by culture via the human surroundings). The awesome creative freedom of individual intelligences is still edited out, censored, from the scientific system of reality. Innocent self-discovery (self-possession) as an autonomous intelligence with the creative power of time/ non-actuality/ freedom is the release from that cultural distortion and from the spiritual vulnerability exploited by that system of reality.

The forces at the core of human life at the individual level are spiritual freedom and embodiment, constituting a strict individuality to spirituality in its embodiment. The encounter between the free non-actualities of the interior of intelligences and the brute, pre-determined, actuality of nature is an inseparable and shockingly fruitful dualism, essentially horizontal. To deny the dualism is either to deny spirituality or to deny embodiment, either of which is perverse and self-defeating. Effective freedom and the fulfillment of transcendence requires both.

Contrary to the prevailing Euro-American culture, which still includes important remnants of Christianity, there is no innate flaw or taint in human nature which reduces the individual to a destructive force in need of external control. Additionally, there is a global misidentification of transcendence as belonging to some other-world, an afterlife world, a future world of science and technology, or a supernatural ideal dimension, knowledge of which is reserved to a few selected gatekeepers. However, again contrary to prevailing culture, there is no such world to wait for, to escape to, or to expect rescue by. With no transcendent other-world there are no gatekeepers able to offer access to such a thing. This moment of being in a life in the world is it. There is transcendence here and now in personal creative freedom.

The inherent spiritual vulnerabilities would still challenge philosophical thinking even if there weren’t social inequalities which parasitic beneficiaries legitimize by means of culturally instituted (false) identifications of external transcendence, such as monumental high culture (instead of the transcendence of individual intelligence). It is still true that tainted culture exacerbates and institutionalizes the individuals’s spiritual confusion originating from the inherent vulnerabilities. Philosophical thinking is uniquely suited to overcome the influence of poisoned culture, and the existence of philosophy is evidence of a pre-cultural innocence. Something innocent in intelligence is drawn to the spiritual vulnerabilities as questionable, and strikes back against the confusion and diminishment around the vulnerabilities, and against the distortions and violations of reality that are institutionalized in culture. We are intelligent and embodied before we are cultured.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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cosmic personification, critique, intelligence, nature, non-actuality, philosophy, science, systems of reality, the cultural orientation grid, the supernatural, time

Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Strategic thinking, Transcendence

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bottom-up politics, community, creativity, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, history of ideas, individuality, intelligence, nature, philosophy, religion, science, subjectivity

Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

Modernity is a system of reality which, once again, profoundly misrepresents, undervalues, and under-appreciates individual intelligences simply as such, so the Enlightenment-era campaign to strengthen the dignity and autonomy of individuals (by recognizing our inherent rationality) was not sufficient. In fact, that campaign was undermined by the very materialism it used to get human nature back down to earth from the Christian kingdom of eternity in the sky, to subvert the claims of parasitic Old Regime social supervisors to be the appointed vicars of the God of eternity. History has shown that metaphysical determinism of any kind, including scientific materialism, ultimately justifies everything about the way things are, the entire status quo. The justifiers of top-down human parasitism have figured that out and use it strategically to legitimize their privileged advantages. In the triumph of science, the materialists and determinists have officially won the quarrel of ideas, and now confidently claim all the intellectual high ground, but that has not had the liberating political and social consequences promised by the eighteenth century radical materialists. Quite the reverse. The determinability of the human machine of scientific fables has inspired the parasite factions to exert utmost effort to control and program human behaviour generally. So yet again, it is necessary to re-conceptualize reality to increase the recognition of power and autonomy in individual embodied intelligences.

All institutional systems of reality that we know of have served the interest of human parasite factions in keeping the majority of people subordinate and vulnerable through distortions of self-identification within a culturally imposed system of reality, often dominated by religion, for example, and as such defining individuals as subordinate to invisible super-beings. Of the ‘three punch combination’ of the Enlightenment, presented in the previous posting (79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), the most important and effective punch was enriching the conceptualization of individual subjectivity by adding rationality to it, increasing the dignity of individuals universally, empowering and enhancing individuals by recognizing their inherent and autonomous intelligence. Crucially, that was not an isolated historical precedent. Martin Luther’s civilization-shaking breakthrough in the sixteenth century was also an empowerment of every individual as able to transcend doubt and uncertainty by taking an interior leap of faith, and in so doing ‘positing’ (to use the expression that Fichte applied to such creative acts) a system of reality, which in Luther’s case was the system of Christian reality. In addition, there is a Stoic background to Luther’s vision, but Luther’s conception of the individual’s power to posit a system of reality goes beyond the Stoic power to assent, or not, to the entire Logos of the world. It is also noteworthy that Luther’s re-conceptualization came in the wake of Wycliffe’s fourteenth century push for vernacular (proletarian) literacy, which was soon supercharged by the spread of printing technology. There is a deep and rich tradition here, an effective philosophical movement to enhance the recognition of individuals in the teeth of dominant cultures which exert every effort to do exactly the opposite. Since enhancing and enriching the understanding of individuality was the most important effort of the Enlightenment, but imperfectly achieved, it remains the most important objective in re-conceptualizing our system of reality.

Re-Thinking Transcendence

Re-conceptualizing our system of reality should begin, this time, by separating intelligences individually off from nature. Although it seems, at first, a difficult thing in our materialist system of reality to separate anything off from nature, it is easy in the case of intelligences because nothing more is needed than the clear distinction between strict actuality and non-actuality. Strict categorical actuality is nature. There are no non-actualities in nature, by definition, and yet there are countless non-actualities in any person’s experience, for example: futurity as a construct of aspirations for peace, pleasure, fun, and love, a construct of hopes and fears. Nature at large contains no non-actualities, and yet non-actualities are crucial features of the orientation or question-bearings of individual intelligences. Teleological time, for example, is a construct of non-actualities: mutually exclusive possibilities and hoped-for resolutions, contradictions and negations, regrets, bearings toward increasingly remote probabilities and ‘long-ago’s, and readiness to seize second chances. All this non-actuality is entirely interior to individual intelligences. Intelligences construct our non-actualities into appropriate anticipations or expectations of what is going to happen now, in the next moment, hour, day, in such a way as to insert into actuality (at considerable metabolic cost) our personally intended futurity of love, energy, dignity, and pleasure. Intelligences transcend nature because, in creating a personal situation out of a play of non-actualities, we use our non-actualities as the matrix of our freedom, something entirely alien to pre-determined nature.

This is an individual intelligence resisting and overcoming the brute particularity of nature by what we call living, building personal expressions, being in a life. Since time as experienced requires an elaborate structure of non-actualities identifiable only in the interior bearings of a personal gaze, consideration of time immediately requires a plunge into the interiority of individual intelligences and as such beyond the conceptual reach of materialism. So, considerations of teleology, time, and freedom, or, uniting all three, intelligences, stand as fatal problems for materialist reductionism. In a world of complete and perfect determinism (perfectly actual particularity) time collapses into a meaningless infinitesimal instant. Only teleological freedom dilates time (interior to particular intelligences) with conceptions of a life’s possibilities, each judged with degrees of improbability and personal costs (embodiment).

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

It is long past time to develop the tradition of enhancing the recognition of individuals universally, and this time it should be done by re-conceptualizing the individual intelligence as the ultimate transcendence in its power to create non-actualities, that is, to create non-actualities that re-configure actuality, to create effective or instrumental non-actualities. The crucial distinction is not between Being and Nothingness (a non-actuality), or between Being and time (another non-actuality), but instead something prior to both, the distinction between actuality and non-actuality. Non-actuality expresses creativity, and as such is not pre-determinable from any actuality. This is the duality that finally breaks the mystical visions of monism, whether materialist or idealist. What is gained from this duality is a recognition of a profound individual freedom, which many people purport to treasure. It is not clear that anything of comparable importance is gained from monism, including the materialist monism of science.

Top-down Systems of Reality

It seems that in the culturally conditioned conceptual pattern of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe it was impossible to separate teleology, freedom, and creativity from the idea of the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, a superhuman divine intelligence. It was impossible to conceive teleology, freedom, and creativity as strictly limited to the scale of individual embodied people, and so localized, limited, plural, and distributed as animal bodies are distributed. Apparently it seemed to the radical philosophers of that time and system of reality that in order to eradicate the superstition of an omnipotent super-parent which effectively legitimized the supremacy of human parasites, it was necessary to abandon transcendence entirely, and so to embrace just nature and total determinism. However, the whole social and political point of their work was an assertion of individual autonomy and freedom of thought, and so, in their determinist materialism, they defeated themselves.

Always, the main barrier to recognizing individual intelligences as autonomous eruptions of transcendent freedom has been the pre-supposition that the powers of intelligences are gifts from some origin greater than the individual: a deity, or a cosmic logos or force of libidinal vitality, or just the pre-determined course of natural law. However, those are all assumptions mandated culturally by an overall top-down structure in systems of reality, and a critical re-thinking of experience reveals that individual intelligences are, in our interiority of non-actualities, independent and autonomous sources of creativity. The non-actualities created spontaneously by individual intelligences are not mysteriously injected from outside, are not expressions of an occult cosmic teleology, vital libidinal force in nature, or a disembodied super-intelligence. They are just what they seem to be: creations of particular embodied intelligences. It is undeniable that intelligences are sponges of the creations of other intelligences, of culture, and that many non-actualities are manipulated by culture and imitated by individuals, and so originate from outside in that sense. However, culture is entirely the product of the creativity of previous multitudes of individual intelligences.

The Pluralism of Freedom

The currently standard conception of freedom is well represented by the Freudian model described in the previous posting cited above. On that model, it makes no sense to say that freedom comes from individual nature (biology manifested as the compulsive drives of id) or from individual ego-personality (merely a pattern of balance among external forces), but only as something from the superego, something arranged socially and culturally, a quality of the constraints and opportunities visited upon individuals by institutions of sovereignty, deity, and economics. Freedom defined in that way is a sort of revokable parental indulgence like borrowing the family car, which isn’t an impressive freedom. The considerations of actuality and non-actuality presented above uncover a different freedom, a freedom that is inalienable from individual intelligences. On this re-conceptualized system of reality, freedom is an inherent feature of any individual intelligence, and, most important of all, such freedom suddenly establishes a bottom-up reality.

Currently, what might seem like an uneasy co-existence of Medieval Christian and modern scientific systems of reality is in fact the co-operation of two systems that have much in common. There is an easy transition from monotheism to science, since both are examples of top-down visions, both conceiving a cosmic force or set of forces determining everything in every particular detail. Scientific materialism replaces the omnipotent god with omnipotent universal laws. Asserting the transcendent freedom of individuals-as-such departs decisively from the exclusivity of science for understanding events, but not only that. It also departs decisively from the whole historically dominant tradition of top-down metaphysics which includes both religions and science. Top-down metaphysics is an abstraction from social subjugation, which, in a most vicious circle, is ideologically mutated into a distorted vision of transcendence and then used to legitimize the worldly subjugation. Departing from the exclusivity of science will challenge those committed to modern visions of reality. Departing from the exclusivity of religion will sorely try others. However, this recognition of transcendence in individuals is implicit in the evolution through Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Wycliffe, to Luther, to the radical Enlightenment, and to Kant and Fichte, not to mention the immediate personal experience of intelligence.

We have to re-conceptualize the prevailing system of reality so that intelligences do not disappear as we currently do into pre-determined nature or into other-worldly eternity, but instead stand as autonomous and creative forces at the level of every individual. Separating intelligences off from nature, without removing ourselves to a metaphysical cloud of eternity, changes conceptions of both nature and community, the other pillars of cultural reality. It changes the concept of nature by removing nature as the be-all and end-all explanation and justification of the entire status quo, specifically by removing from nature the ultimate sources of individual behaviour and force, such as from a biologically determined will-to-power which makes individuals little more than missiles of self-gratification. Nature remains as the sum total of the strictly and categorically actual, distinct from all non-actualities such as past and future.

The observation that transcendence is not external to individuals but instead is internal to every intelligence is not new. Fichte, for example, can be cited as someone who declared it, but the idea is common. We read such things as, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The problem is that nobody seems able to remain true to that idea, apparently because of the ingrained top-down structure of historical systems of reality. There is always a drift away from ordinary individuals toward some metaphysical cosmic force or intelligence, an absolute I or a vital creative dimension to all existence, which concludes by once again rendering the ordinary individual-as-such completely unfree and alienated from the origin of agency and creativity. This also becomes an excuse for embracing the tragic or Romantic-nihilist view of life, the view that injustice is an essential part of the cosmic process so that no one is accountable and nothing can be done about it (for example, in Foucault following Nietzsche).

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

Both actual and potential forms of community are re-modelled when individual intelligences are recognized as autonomously creative. Separating intelligences off from nature to recognize the creative freedom of individuals creates a far different potential for empathic interconnectedness as the foundation of community. The animalistic/ instinctual urges become individually manageable and non-lethally pleasurable, put into proportion by the pleasures of expressing an ever-developing personal creative process, as well as by the exciting enlargement that individuals experience in sustainable attachments with others. The need for ownership-type superegos structured into social organization disappears entirely. In this light the existing society is revealed as structures of top-down human-on-human parasitism, sustained by cultural distortions obscuring and legitimizing the entrenched parasitism. Recognizing the parasitic impulse in the fabric of all hierarchical institutions and systems of subordination, especially those of sovereign states and commercial corporations (power and wealth), reveals immediately that messages within ambient culture about the preciousness of civilization as a matrix of high values and personal elevation or fulfillment are all malign manipulations, against which the only defence is identification of points of reference prior to and independent of cultural programming. That defence is a philosophical thinking which establishes for each individual a transcendent self-possession within a bottom-up system of reality, emphasizing everybody’s personal predicament of being in a life, with the unceasing urgencies of building that life laboriously in an embodied particularity made elastic and indefinite by the creative powers of an individual intelligence.

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

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.

Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Nature

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determinism, drives, freedom, intelligence, motivation, nature, philosophy, questions, science, Thomas C. McEvilley

It has been normal in philosophy and science for human motivation and behaviour to be conceived and explained in terms of supra-individual forces, sometimes called drives. Drives are a kind of compulsion, often only semi-conscious or even unconscious. Compulsions for food, sex, shiny baubles, or power are common examples. Drives are impersonal and generic, even though, as in Plato’s conception of a three-part subjectivity (consisting of appetites, competitive spirit, and contemplative (passive) rationality) individuals display a distinct personal prominence of some over others. In any case, motivating drives are not creations of an individual intelligence, but instead derive from something outside and prior to the individual. In modern culture, such appetites or desires are assumed to derive from biological structures, to be ‘hard wired’ and so manifestations of a general human nature which is ultimately inseparable from the rest of what might be called the laws of nature. There are debates about a hierarchy of drives, about which is more powerful, the drive for pleasure, for power (the will to power), or for meaning (echoing Plato’s three-part structure). Drives for power or meaning are less plausibly derived from simple biological mechanisms, but they have been interpreted as expressing some physically based compulsion toward general self-interest (more or less rational), self-gratification, self-preservation, or self-advantage. In that vision, intelligence or rationality is conceived as a biological mediating mechanism translating the primordial compulsion into actions adjusted to a particular environment.

The idea that human behaviour and motivation are explainable in terms of impersonal compulsions comes from visions of determinism, usually materialist or economic determinism, which is to say, conceptual systems which ignore or reject profound individual freedom. The impulse of determinists is to complete a picture of the total world in terms of pre-determined laws of motion, and so human motivation and behaviour have to be kept as simple as possible to be fitted into that picture. However, there is a clash, a mis-match or discontinuity, between the conception of human behaviour as determined by impersonal drives, and the identification of humans as performers of certain acts of thinking, such as a kind of philosophical thinking. For example, it was a basic understanding of the nature of philosophy, as early as the Iron Age, that it was individual intelligence contemplating its own interiority. That historical observation is documented in The Shape of Ancient Thought*, by Thomas C. McEvilley, most explicitly in the chapters on Plotinus, especially starting around page 558. Ordinary knowledge comes from an outward gaze (science), but ultimate knowledge is the same as profound self-knowledge and comes from thinking inwardness. The subsection “Knowing the One for Plotinus” (p. 560) includes references to Aristotle’s idea of “thought thinking itself”. Identification of that philosophical act as characteristic of human individuals, an inclination to explore self-identification in the way required by that conception of philosophy, reveals humans as a sort of entity that can and does contemplate and question its own self-identification, from a basic curiosity.

That clash highlights the need for a paradigm shift in human self-identification: the difference between thinking of behaviour and motivation in terms of drives (instinctive, biological, or metaphysical) as conceived by Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Freud; as opposed to conceiving behaviour and motivation in terms of an individual’s questions that set bearings for personal orientation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness” that illustrates the difference. Roughly, any person will learn best what he or she is already wondering about from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. The pre-linguistic nature of curiosity, wonder, or questioning means that it includes features that are often semi-conscious or sporadically conscious. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be, but can be re-awakened or re-discovered. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Doubt is an instance of this king of wondering, and doubt is often non-linguistic and distinctly individual, definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Each person’s wondering or questioning process could be seen as a peculiar creative force that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia. Questions are creations of a particular intelligence, and intelligence is the matrix of questions, of wonder, curiosity, a particularity of exploration. Having a question, an orientation that is sensed as peculiarly incomplete and so searching for something more or less indefinite but not entirely out-of-reach, is already the realization of freedom and self-direction. To have a question or a doubt is already to act autonomously.

* The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036.

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Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation