Fragment 206, word count: 1,076.

tags: writing, history of philosophy, spirituality, culture, hive-mind, self-possession, value.

It is very common in philosophical work to find critiques of any account of reality that comes as a cultural package, as widely shared culturally orthodox conceptions of reality. Such cultural packages include justifications for the existing social hierarchies and forms of exchange, of inequalities of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The canonical values of such an orthodoxy will be the values and treasures declared and embraced by factions which are most esteemed at the top of the hierarchy. The carriers of a culturally packaged reality typically form a collective with a sense of unity and identity, held together by competition for and imitation of certain styles of living, by a shared superego abstracted from exemplars of the life-best-lived, groups with most power, property, public attention and approval, awards, celebrated talents, and evident good fortune. The collective drama of inequality is rooted in orthodox conceptions of weaknesses and dangerous powers in the individual human spirit. Such culturally orthodox conceptions of reality are fetishistic in the sense that it is considered transgressive to doubt or question them.

Here are eleven examples of such philosophical critiques.

Socrates went to the Athenian marketplace to question people, and his intent was to show that ordinary assumptions about justice and virtue were far from well founded and often incoherent.

Plato extended Socrates’ identification of popular illusions to include all change and the experience of time itself. From the metaphor of the cultural community as a cave fixated on shadows, we learn that Plato thought that perceiving reality as it truly is would be a vision of the eternal.

Diogenes of Sinope, arguably the original Cynic, lived according to ‘nature’ in contrast to normal people, whose culturally formed style of living he declared an oppressive fantasy imposed on human nature.

Martin Luther is an example of profound self-possession and alienation from orthodox assumptions about fundamental reality as represented in Roman Christian orthodoxy.

Descartes carried through a rigorous inventory of everything that can be doubted about normal assumptions, but that people usually avoid thinking about.

Spinoza, like Plato, thought that properly perceived reality would be “under the aspect of eternity”. Since this is far from the norm, then normal perceiving involves some profound illusions about reality.

David Hume found rational grounds for scepticism about material substance, cause-effect, and the continuity of objects and of the subjective person. He concluded that, because of our psychological nature we soon forget our philosophical rationality and revert to ‘common sense’ habits of assuming we know what we really don’t know.

J.J. Rousseau did a critique of his contemporary culture, a critique of up-to-date arts and sciences in the tradition of “the bonfire of the vanities” and in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Rousseau’s critique was launched in opposition to the ‘man of the world’ style of living promoted by Voltaire, the life of wealth, privilege, consciousness of social superiority and exclusive group membership, consumption and patronage of the arts and sciences.

Kant figured out that individuals are self-legislating, and so not fundamentally in need of any exterior sovereign. That was a peculiarly philosophical discovery with profound political and social implications firmly rooted in the Lutheran tradition. Just as Luther conceived the individual as independent of the mediation of the Church, so Kant followed by showing the individual independent of the state or any other externally imposed superego.

Nietzsche wrote explicitly about common human herd mentality and the necessity of breaking out of it to do anything creative.

Wittgenstein saw his philosophical work as a way of “getting the fly out of the fly-bottle”. For Wittgenstein, the fly in the fly bottle was people caught in philosophical problems, snared by “language on holiday”. However, it isn’t just the vanishingly small population of philosophers who get themselves caught in the fly bottle. Culturally orthodox ways of conceiving reality also can do the same for all users of a common discourse.

A Graphically Projected Language Model of Thinking

Something that emphatically enables an exceptional perspective outside collective orthodoxy  is the personal use of writing in the process of developing and expressing judgements and ways of understanding reality. Of the examples listed, only Socrates seems not to have been a writer, although he was likely literate. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and available people, untethered from the common discourse. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces an assumption of inevitability about the way things are.

The experience of breaking free from common discourse itself involves the acquisition of some uncommon knowledge, such as knowledge of the power of community discourse to impose collectively shared conceptions of what is thinkable and what is unquestionable in community orientation, as well as knowledge that the community orientation is capable of hiding reality, including the reality of human existence itself. Philosophers often speak from knowing that the sense of reality which is normal and normative for speakers of any given language is largely supplied by ambient culture and carried in the meaning structure of the language as used in ordinary conversations. This is knowing that there are cultural hives of false reality, and that human collectives construct themselves as such hives in part to shelter from the potential terror of not knowing the most profound truths of existence, in part to fabricate a human unit larger and stronger than the embodied individual in the face of the cosmic vastness, but also to preserve certain dystopian injustices from which powerful factions benefit.

As the examples show, a philosophical sensibility often includes recognition of a personal discordance with the orientation stipulated by a culture-hive, and a sense of curiosity about encountering existence in a way beyond cultural influences. This is acquaintance with an individual spiritual power that is completely at odds with a top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. It is an experience of profound self-possession and creative power, and as such discovery of a human spirit not confined as cultural orthodoxy stipulates. Such knowledge is transcendently important, bringing gratification that is non-competitive, non-imitative, and adventuresome.

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Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.