Tag Archives: sociability

The World that Matters

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Fragment 177, word count: 450.

Tags: sociability, human attachment, war, caring, perception, knowing, collective identity, herd mind.

Recognizing the presence of a separately embodied intelligence, another caring, sensitive, knowledge-building, and future-opening agent, is a different order of perception from recognizing sand or a piece of wood. There is a kind of perceiving going on in the recognition of another future-inventing agent that requires something other than an empirical explanation. Recognition of caring is crucial in this perceiving and another person’s caring is not an arrangement of sense-data, not a visual impression nor any other sensory impression. Sensory perception cannot assemble an objective image of whatever questing sensibility is expressing the arc of its personal drama in its acts, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of open possibility. Sensibilities as creative shapers of actuality require a conception such as ideality or intentionality that distinguishes them from strictly perceivable actuality. There is an absolute dependence on inherently personal, interior, sources of knowing in the recognition of another sensibility, since familiarity with sensibility as such is entirely self-acquaintance. This is more like a rationalist sort of knowing. * You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your drama. We find in the presence of other caring agents a reflection and a variation of our own dramas of fear and delight, misery and ecstasy, and there is an irresistible sense of enlargement, of energy and exciting possibility, in this not being alone.

It isn’t long into a person’s life before the most important and interesting focus of awareness is an ambient collective of separately embodied intelligences: bodies expressing the spirituality, ideality, or intentionality that is caring sensitivity, searching curiosity, and ever-increasing knowledge in aid of the actualization of personally created intentions. Of course a person learns a sense of location within a structure of surfaces and objects, of food, shelter, and footings for power-projecting activities, but constellations of other people displaying caring intentionality always form the core and organizing pattern of the world that matters.

Hive Minds Make War

The reality that hive minds make war confronts us with the challenge of conceiving a way for people to express and enjoy the profound human talent for interpersonal attachment and social interconnectedness without constructing or participating in collective identities which prevent personal creativity from forming an identity grounded on spiritual autonomy and individual agency. We can be sure that the surrounding population of separately embodied idealities remains personally crucial even when an individual dismisses the misconceptions, prejudices, and superstitions which form the common currency of a human hive mind, herd mind, or collective identity. In the arc of human interconnectedness, the socio-cultural formation of herd identities, hive-mind identities, will become an artifact of the past.

 * Compare Avicenna’s “inner senses”, in particular: wahm. The sheep recognizes the wolf’s hostility. This is empathic recognition of an outside intelligence with conscious intent and emotional force in that intent. See p. 137 of:

Philosophy in the Islamic World: Volume 3 of: A History of Philosophy without any gaps, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2016), ISBN 978-0-19-957749-1.

Embedded links:

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

Fragment 112, August 2, 2017, Social Contract as Hive Mind (3) (word count: 390).

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

A Point of Dispute with Post-Modernist Theory

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

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

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Posting 118, word count: 1,656

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

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

Hume’s Phenomenology

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

Discourses Don’t Think (Only Individuals Think)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Postscript to Superego

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Anyone familiar with this blog will know that it is an ongoing meditation on thinking, the life of ideality or spirituality, and the potential for creative freedom present in the world through the agency of the individual person. Since every person is a self-thinking idea, then in that sense we are nothing but thinking. As the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world, the power to think is the really transcendent power, but thinking has vulnerabilities which normally result in a socially acquired self-blindness. Since interpretations of experience and the individual’s reach into futurity are typically colonized by an ambient social control structure, effective subjectively as a personal superego, there is another sense of thinking in which to think is to identify and disrupt that superego, using an original voice of curiosity to follow through on its own questions. Beyond the superego, thinking is the process by which consciousness comes to recognize and assert its creative freedom. Spirituality or intelligence is not any kind of substance, but instead, is a transcendent interiority, the interior of a person’s teleological time.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

The Social Contract as Superego

06 Monday Mar 2017

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

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

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

Romanticism to the Rescue

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

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

But I’m OK

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

Social Contract and Competitive Materialism

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

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

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

Thus Spoke Foucault … and Nietzsche

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

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

Sociability and Primary Process

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

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

Philosophical Thinking

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

Spirituality: An Idea Thinking Itself

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

Autonomy

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

Notes

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

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

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

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories going around (models for tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as material culture and typical ways of acting, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature and the supernatural, community, and individual subjective interiority. The social construction is the repeated, continually re-imitated activities in which people fit into processes of production and consumption, conversations, and crowds.

All institutional systems of reality have been top-down systems, that is, structured into metaphysical stories in which supernatural beings have decisive involvement. Systems of reality typically include a supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, for example, when language is considered as prior to voices, you have a top-down system. That orientation supports a comprehensive top-down conception of value and power, effectively blocking a true self-recognition of spirituality and stifling the autonomy, creativity, and self-possession of all individuals.

There is nothing inherently parasitic, disempowering, or repressive about human interconnectedness or about cultural forms to formalize that interconnectedness. It is our sociability (as otherwise isolated individual intelligences) which inclines us to welcome culture in as tokens of our connectedness to a collective of spiritual beings. However, culture has been made toxic by a particular historical contingency. Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on “sedentary” grass-eating mammals which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That process launched the cultural efforts to celebrate and glorify top-down human-on-human parasitism. It is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation. The historically special, and historically traceable, cultural and political force of the human-on-human macro-parasite faction has eluded recognition, for example by deconstructionists, who instead blame oppression on a tragic, unalterable, flaw in humanity. ‘We are all complicit and co-conspirators in our own oppression’ is just the default rhetoric of cultures still emerging (slowly but surely) from Christendom, a repetition of its declaration of original sin, an inherent vice which turns every individual against itself. Deconstructionists got “everything is political” right, but they completely missed the criminality (perpetrators and victims) in the operation of power. Culture, something everyone depends on, under these conditions becomes critically disabling for individuals.

The systems of reality elaborated and declared by cultural institutions such as religions, economic production and exchange systems, and the military wings of sovereignty, are crucial for any individual’s orientation, and as such they top the list among bits of heritage which must be questioned in critical thinking. Anyone is able to re-orient, to engage in a process of self-directed re-orientation by which the official conceptualization of community, subjectivity, and nature (including the spiritual forces of non-earthly intelligences) are replaced with de-cultured conceptualizations recognizing that human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between the givens of nature and the myriad non-actualities of creative subjectivity, in the play of interior non-actualities against the brute actuality of nature.

The Ultimate Reality System Hack

For such a reorientation to be possible, there must be a framework of orientation that is independent of culturally supplied conceptions, and philosophical questioning (the spiritual quest, critique of orientation) brings it to light by exposing certain elemental features of experience. The elements of the philosophical frame of reference are personal embodiment, spirituality, and sociability. Sociability, the gratification each intelligence derives from engagement with others, is really part of spirituality. What enables the ultimate hack of false systems of reality is contemplation of personal embodiment because embodiment imposes needs, costs, and vulnerabilities, as well as powers and abilities, at the level of the individual. In doing that, personal embodiment defines spiritual individuality. Embodiment decrees individuality. De-cultured acquaintance with embodiment and spirituality (and with it sociability), and with the powers and vulnerabilities that come with them, situates a person for creative autonomy and a re-conceived interconnection with others.

Life for the individual person is the engagement of metaphysics with physics. There is nothing metaphysical about the natural world at large, the cosmic terrain. It is just plain old physics. Metaphysics is entirely interior to individuals, to us embodied spiritual beings. Metaphysics is our interiority, our spirituality. Conceptions of metaphysics emerge from thinking about time, and time has almost always been misconstrued in philosophy as a dimension of objects independent of intelligences. (What is to be made of temporal discontinuity: the fact that past and future do not actually exist?) Theories of a hidden mysterious substrate of material objects, such as a single infinite substance (Spinoza) which must remain the same even though objects change constantly into different objects, are an attempt to translate time (intelligence) into an occult structure of objects or substances, a way of dealing with time in terms of a ‘metaphysical’ structure within objects, separate from intelligences. However, time is the interiority of teleology, a metaphysical non-actuality. It is the dimension of individual freedom or spirituality, and can only be comprehended in terms of what is interior to intelligences, the bearings of questions, curiosity, projects, and lessons learned in any human gaze.

Religions also have a metaphysical misconception of the fabric of the cosmos, from an insistence that ethical or moral standards are inherent in it, laws based on divine decree and divine enforcement, a universal mechanism of justice: commands and judgments, record keeping, and an ultimate moral reckoning removed to some indefinite remoteness (for example, the karmic progression of reincarnation, or the final day of judgment, heaven and hell). Although even the religious conception of personal spirituality has to emphasize freedom so that moral acts and enforcement have some foundation in individual responsibility, that conception is dominated by the individual’s subordination to the universal (divine) system of moral reckoning, making the religious conception of spirituality hopelessly political: top-down, punitive, and repressive. The supposed cosmic source of our ethical sense is proposed as the essence of our spirituality, immediately locking us into unalterable subordination. It is a misconception which expresses the political agenda of the power-hoarding human parasite faction, projecting a mythical personification onto cosmic nature. Only embodied spiritual beings, ordinary persons, (not cosmic nature) make ethical judgments, and ethics is, again, entirely interior to individual intelligences. The real basis of morality in spirituality is not an occult connection to a cosmic order of justice but rather an individual power of empathy. Empathy is the moral compass. The lack of empathy is the lack of a moral compass.

Not recognizing the transcendence in personal subjective interiority (living in time) sets us up to accept all kinds of absurd superstitions about various (romantic) hidden entities, powers, or forces which are used as mechanisms of psychological manipulation to legitimate injustices of the status quo. The philosophical insight is that ordinary subjectivity itself is the miracle, and that it can be recognized as such even though it is misrepresented by official culture.

Effective Liberation

What is called Liberation Theology was inspired by a recognition of the institutionalized exploitation of indigenous people in “Latin” America, (which was a fully intended consequence of modern European imperialism) and it attempts to provide support from New Testament scripture for grass roots activism in aid of social justice. The immediate project was to restructure economic arrangements to accomplish a more equitable distribution of wealth, power, and choice, and with them dignity, and respect. Freedom was conceived as equitable distribution in the nexus of human goods. In that context, the inspiring idea of freedom cannot be realized without large-scale organizational change because it is inseparable from social structures and economic operations.

The point of posting 88, Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality (December 15, 2015) is that doing something consequential and decisive, achieving self-possession, does not depend on the overthrow of the economic order or on any other environmental change. Freedom doesn’t need to wait for historical or evolutionary change in economics, biology, or culture. It can be achieved individually at any time, but even though the philosophical reorientation is first, decisive, and indispensable, perhaps it is not the end of liberation. Since sociability is so crucial in our spirituality, a withering away of the human macro-parasite faction and its culture, and of human parasitism in general, would be the practical hope and the expected effect of a broad distribution of philosophical liberation.

Note: For a closer contemplation of embodiment see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

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

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

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

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

Embodiment and Spirituality

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

The rejection of such upward-orientation is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creating of time as accomplished by every individual intelligence. Time is freedom into which an intelligence projects itself creatively, a personal hyper-space of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. This is an unfamiliar idea, but time is the conception (opening) of freedom-from-nature and as such the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze (always into futurity) and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences. **

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

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

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

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

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

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

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.