A Pitch for Horizontal Idealism

25 Friday Mar 2016

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

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caring, culture, embodiment, empiricism, European imperialism, freedom, genocide, idealism, Immanuel Kant, knowledge, orientation, politics, rationalism, realism, Roy Bhaskar, self-possession, spirituality, time, Truth and reconciliation Commission of Canada

topics: spirituality, embodiment, knowledge, freedom, orientation, time, caring, self-possession, culture, European imperialism, genocide, politics, realism, idealism, empiricism, rationalism, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Roy Bhaskar, Immanuel Kant

Imperialist Culture and Self-Possession

If you are trying to replace one culture with another, then you are engaged in a culture war or possibly even cultural genocide, as attempted, for example, by the Canadian program of residential schools for children of indigenous communities, which, for more than a century, institutionalized a fierce effort to replace First Nations culture with imperialist European culture. (The December 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified the residential schools, officially, as a program of cultural genocide.) However, if, as an individual, you develop the mental skill of moving beyond the influence of all cultures (because they all carry forms of imperialism), the skill of moving into the self-possession of elemental embodiment and spirituality, then that is philosophical or spiritual self-possession. Unmediated acquaintance with embodied spirituality is not an ideology, but it certainly displaces whatever ideology was imposed by ambient culture as its sanctioned orientation within certain pillars of reality: conceptions of nature, transcendence, community, and individual subjectivity. Self-possession is the issue because communities such as sovereign nations, religions, schools, sport teams, and families regularly claim rights of possession over individuals, including the right to define a person’s identity and value; to enforce obedience, reverence, and a suspension of distrust; and even the right to decide an individual’s life and death. In that way communities express a human-on-human macro-parasite culture which sanctifies the pre-conditioning of individuals to accept exploitation. Imperialism is always macro-parasitism. The cultural genocide perpetrated by European imperialism (not just in Canada) is an especially obvious expression of such culture. There is in capitalism, offspring of European global imperialism, an intrinsically oppressively macro-parasitism and a continuous stream of propaganda to justify itself. Ideological pillars of reality are crucial parts of the pre-conditioning by which macro-parasite culture is preserved. Social conformity requirements in every community limit the opportunities for individual creativity just as much as laws of nature do. The counter-movement of spiritual self-possession first re-orients the sense of subjectivity as a personally transcendent interiority, and in doing that transforms an individual’s sense of community and of nature too, especially time. The embodied spirituality discoverable by re-orienting to innocent personal experience is not the guilt-ridden permanent child-nature declared by culture-bound Christianity and other religions, for example. There is no inherent subordination.

It Isn’t a Question of Knowledge

The personal movement outside culture, into the elemental self-possession of embodied spirituality, is not about knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ is a concept most comfortable in the company of realists, and is normally conceived as a perfect imprint, projection, or constructed model of objective reality, of nature. The idea “knowledge” assumes a rigidity and finality of objects (on the model of Platonic Ideas!), including social and political arrangements, because only a rigidly structured world could be known definitively. Such realism is a denial of the contribution of spiritual freedom and creativity in the world, a dismissal of individual (Stoic) interiority. Realism is an assertion that spirituality, the creative construction by an intelligence of its own teleological orientation, can be excluded from a description of reality without distorting the representation of reality. (For example, Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism declares that ontology is independent of epistemology.) There is an affinity between philosophical realism and empiricism because empiricists, still expressing the influence of anti-individualism in historical British Calvinism, intend to minimize the creative contributions of spirituality in the personal construction of orientation, and consequently they take “sense data” to be a direct representation or imprint of rigidly real objects. There is a corresponding affinity between rationalism and idealism, because idealism privileges effective spirituality, as rationalism does. Somewhat ironically, the most influential rationalists were materialists, exploring materialism as a politically bottom-up metaphysics in the context of their crucial recognition that conceptions of reality are political to the core. Rationalism has a tradition of expressing a primary interest in freedom, which is unavoidably political. That includes a tradition of being anti-authoritarian, in contrast to the technically non-political conservatism of empiricism.

Knowledge, Orientation, and Personal Incompleteness (Freedom)

The importance of philosophy as a spiritual quest is eliminated when the goal and object is knowledge. Since pragmatism, the aspiration and accomplishment of philosophical thinking is not limited by ideas of knowledge, and in this blog the emphasis is on self-directed re-orientation, on cultivating a personal orientation more supportive and empowering of freedom and self-creation. The point is to occupy the living incompleteness and newness that is spirituality, the personal bearing into an indeterminate and non-actual futurity. This is urgent as the only way to move decisively beyond the power of human macro-parasites and their pre-conditioning of individuals to be defined and exploited as belongings and creatures of hierarchical collectives. It is the only way to be rid of toxic misconceptions embedded in culture, and, consequently, the way to relate to other individual spiritualities on the basis of empathy and mutual recognition instead of through arbitrary and artificial rules, judgments, and ideals mysteriously cloud-sourced from on-high.

Knowledge is impersonal, but orientation and its spiritual quest is the most personal questioning. Orientation is unavoidably dual, unavoidably subjective. As soon as an individual recognizes personal spirituality, orientation becomes more important than knowledge, because ever-mutating orientation is the being of spiritual interiority. Theory of knowledge, epistemology, used to be the centrepiece of modern philosophy because knowledge (lately science) was pitched as humanity’s great prize, even sometimes as a special achievement of philosophical thinking (from Plato’s Ideal Forms as the objects of true knowledge). Knowledge nuggets were conceived as timeless and eternal jewels to be hoarded and guarded by hierarchies of robed and hooded initiates, trophies of conquest over the mysteries of life and nature’s darkness. In modernity, knowledge is capital, a commodity, intellectual property to be hoarded and branded, licensed and marketed to the highest bidder. It is controlled and controlling.

Horizontal Idealism, with Homage to Kantian Idealism

Religions are not the only cultural constructs with a primary focus on spirituality, because idealist metaphysics has, all along, described versions of spirituality. Idealism privileges effective spirituality, although that could easily be missed from an exclusive consideration of Platonic or Hegelian idealism, which seek the perspective of eternity. The problem is that in the ideal world of eternity there are no free agents, only objects with complete-destiny-included. Nothing is happening or being created in the perspective of eternity, and so the spirituality presented, typically presented as elevated and divine, is impoverished and effectively dead. On a richer and more living vision of spirituality, suggested in the work of Immanuel Kant, for example, spirituality is recognized as effective at the level of the individual person in ordinary life. Ever-mutating orientation is the being of spiritual interiority in that perspective. The “horizontal” in “horizontal idealism” is a recognition that there is no essential connection joining spirituality to divinity or deity, nor between spirituality and religion of any kind. It is also a recognition that no spirituality is all-encompassing. Individual eruptions of spirituality, such as yours now engaged with these words, are really separate, all at the same level, and must construct interconnection with others (which truly can enlarge the power of spirituality) using powers of embodiment. In that way, transcendence occurs as a scattered multitude of distinct individuals, each personally entangled in the duality of physics and spirituality, but with an orientation conditioned from early life by socialization into some cultural system of reality. The way to encounter transcendence is to look out horizontally to other embodied spiritual beings as into a mirror.

Spirituality: Time is a Structure of Caring

Every moment of life is the encounter of personal spirituality with manifest actuality via the particularities of embodiment. The descent from culturally imposed conceptions of reality into the elements of personal experience is mainly about acquaintance with a spirituality that is inseparable from particular embodiment. In our elemental embodiment we have the personal individuality of shape and placement, and we have arcs of kinaesthetic-metabolic energy depletion and restoration which model nature as a cost-shape of effortful mobility and mobilization and shaping of other objects. With embodiment we also have ingestion, gesturing, posturing and vocalizing, usually in exchanges with other embodied spiritualities. In contrast to embodiment, spirituality is elusive as only a sense of newness and incompleteness in the form of an openness and a directionality of flight into that openness. The experience of world-openness itself is a creative non-actuality, a construct and projection of cost-shape experiences carrying an increasingly remote past that does not actually exist.

This openness of being alive, as we humans are alive, is exactly our spirituality. A spirituality’s self-awareness takes the form of a particular bearing into a semi-obscure openness of futurity, including a structure of increasingly remote probabilities and possibilities, a structure of anticipation, evaluation, and aspiration, and so, overall, of caring, an expression of spirituality. 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 memory and kinaesthetic-metabolic memory) in a construction of expectation and directionality. 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 sociability and empathy.

Idealist metaphysics is more or less always about the incongruence between spirituality and embodiment, or, in other words, between the supra-actuality of spiritual transcendence and apparent actuality. The freedom and creativity of an intelligence is in transcending the vanishing particularity of embodiment in nature, transcending its own 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 an ever-constructing incompleteness, an openness for surprise and newness. Self-creation is never self-completion.

Romantic Idealism and the Mind of God

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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1517, 1789, Hegelian idealism, Johann Fichte, Kantian idealism, Martin Luther, Marxism, modernity, nihilism, Platonic idealism, Romantic idealism, Roy Bhaskar, spirituality, The French Revolution, the Kantian revolution, the mind of God, The Thirty Years War, the tragic sense of life

This is Episode 2 of The Tragedy of Romanticism

Tags: Spirituality, Platonic idealism, Hegelian idealism, Marxism, Kantian idealism, the Kantian revolution, Johann Fichte, Romantic idealism, Martin Luther, Roy Bhaskar, the tragic sense of life, nihilism, modernity, The French Revolution, 1789, 1517, the Thirty Years War, the mind of God

Informal Romanticism

The French Revolution of 1789 expressed a primal, informal, romanticism that was an inspiration for the philosophical romanticism that developed soon after. It was a projection outward of subjective aspirations, heroically, against the teeth of practicality and realism as defined by the apparent balance of forces and probable achievements. “This is what we want. I don’t care if dreams cannot come true. This expresses my (spiritual) interiority.” The romantic attitude is the opposite of “practical” and “realistic” as ordinarily used. Plans and proposals that count as practical and realistic always expresses a normative political force. In authoritarian cultures, any kind of change in the organization of wealth, power, or status, is considered unrealistic and impractical, and so romantic. That is core conservative political rhetoric and mind-set. In the conservative lexicon “romantic” means frivolous, trivial, crazy, dangerously destructive. Informal romanticism is an assertion of the power of subjectivity against objective actuality, a willing acceptance of the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, but still asserting its value and power. In addition to privileging subjective non-actuality over brute objective actuality, informal romanticism is also a certain characterization of subjectivity, emphasizing the creative, chaotic, emotionally expressive character of dreams in subjectivity. It doesn’t have to be a denial of the reality of objective actuality, only a categorical rejection of the sovereignty and sufficiency of actuality, a resistance to claims of such a sovereignty. The romantic attitude puts emphasis on the creativity of subjectivity, on subjectivity as lawless and capricious, and so on the removal of subjectivity from the pre-determination of both nature and the normative force of cultural models. (Every individual has normative social conformity requirements in addition to the fall-line of physics to limit the possibilities of overtly manifested creativity.) That removal from pre-determination is here called the spiritual interiority of subjectivity.

There was something wildly terrible, tragic, and beautiful (romantic) about the French Revolution, the doomed efforts of age-long victims of aristocratic macro-parasitism, risking their lives and a marginally viable way of life for a slim hope of justice and dignity. By the time of that revolution, Germans had long ago attempted their revolution in the form of the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther in 1517, and which eventually brought the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), down on their heads. That history left Germans pretty well intimidated, but still substantially Protestant (in very regulated forms) by 1789. However, it could be argued that the Revolution became necessary in France because the Reformation had been so quickly and brutally repressed in the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, soon after Luther launched the protestant movement. So, as a continuation of post-Reformation re-thinking of fundamental certainties and possibilities (the Enlightenment movement), the Revolution burst forth, and afterward the reactionary backlash inevitably followed, just as it had against the Reformation.

In yet another historical rebound of cultural forces, philosophical Romanticism was an interpretation of the French Revolution by the German academic, literary, and artistic class, just as the Revolution was a kind of French interpretation of the German Reformation (then more than two centuries in the past). The human interconnectedness is a medium and an echo chamber in which cultural creations get refracted by interpretations from person to person (interiority to interiority) and from group to group. In 1789 Germany was emphatically backward looking in political culture as a legacy of the Thirty Years War. German intellectuals such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814) and the artist known as Novalis (1772-1801) were both excited and repelled by the Revolution because in Germany they were immersed in a neo-medieval ideology of admiration for Christendom and its chivalrous aristocracy, even though they longed for complete freedom of thought at the same time. The young German intellectuals felt the thrill of new freedom but desperately wanted to fit it into the stability of existing (medieval) institutions in Germany. They merely wanted people like themselves to be recognized as meriting membership in the fellowship of the privileged.

Broad Effects of Philosophical Fundamentals

Those historical upheavals and catastrophes are inseparably involved with philosophical fundamentals, and especially philosophical conceptions of idealism, of which romanticism is one particular form. Idealism generally asserts that there is a category of non-actuality which is supra-actual, transcendent, and as such indispensable in any conception of reality. That category is what was described above, in relation to informal romanticism, as the spiritual interiority of subjectivity. Both of the following usages of “ideal” illustrate that special interiority. Certain politicians are described as ‘idealist’ rather than pragmatic. Idealist politicians are aspirational in the sense of striving for something not yet actual, something there is reason to believe would be better, but which might be impossible. Also, there is the sense of idealism in “idealized”, in which things are simplified and imagined in a perfected condition. The “idealized” item is distinct from any actual items, and it is commonly understood that, as such, it is interior to some or other subjectivity as an idea. In articulating the importance of a category of non-actuality, idealism goes “through the looking glass” as far as traditional social structures of all kinds are concerned, and so, much depends on the way idealism is conceived. Idealism is politically explosive because it is an affirmation and embracing of a supra-actuality, something more important than whatever nature, previous history, and the sagacious ancestors have bestowed on the current generation in terms of social norms and ways of seeing the world.

Standard Idealism: Plato and Hegel

The directionality of any human gaze is so laden with 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) in a direction that can only be characterized as personally inward, to an interiority of spiritual non-actuality. Any philosophical idealism is some model of spirituality and a recognition of spirituality as elemental or non-reducible. In other words, idealism is some version of absolute recognition of the special interiority of intelligences. Recognizing the special non-actuality of spiritual interiority gives any position an aspect of idealism. A strong idealism asserts that the most fundamental character of the cosmos is intelligence or spirituality.

Romanticism is a kind of idealism, but not the only kind. For example, Plato’s idealism is quite different, and Platonic idealism has been the most influential by far, having established from ancient times a dominance in the European system of cultural reality that still has considerable force. Plato’s Ideal Forms are profoundly stable, eternal, removed from the space/ time and materiality of the mundane world, and so automatically associated with (the interiority of) some kind of divine super-intelligence. In Platonism, the Ideal Forms occupy a position near the top of a metaphysical hierarchy, a structure of descent from a divine One-ness at the highest level of reality down to a churning multiplicity of ephemeral appearances at the level of everyday experience. Their association with intelligence is far removed from ordinary subjectivity and from the capricious personality which some romantics have imagined as divine intelligence. Also, Hegelian idealism has been vastly influential, especially as it lives on in Marxism, in spite of the declared materialism of Marxism (dialectical materialism). The historical effects of Marxism are yet more consequences of the mutating conceptions of idealism. Hegel’s is clearly a mutation of Platonic idealism, a vision of cosmic history as the striving of all-encompassing universal Being toward full reality and self-recognition as Ideal Form. Hegel retains the Platonic metaphysical structure (including levels of reality not unlike those in Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism), but in Hegelian idealism the universal Being starts from the bottom and is striving up the “chain of ascent” to the divine One-ness at the final and highest stage of reality.

The Kantian Revolution against Platonism

Then there is the kind of idealism which occasioned philosophical romanticism, namely Kantian idealism, which maps out the necessity of personal spiritual activity in the construction of ordinary knowledge of the world, of every individual’s orientation in the world. Kantian idealism is the most personal and subjective of the philosophical visions of spirituality, especially as tweaked by Fichte. Fichte’s early work, in which he first rejects Kant’s idea of “thing-in-itself” and develops the idea of the individual subjective “I” which must posit its entire world, is the clearest alternative to top-down visions of the cosmos in the whole history of philosophy. Fichte’s vision is a re-orientation or re-conceptualization of reality as a whole, situating individual intelligence at the creative source. Such a re-orientation was implicit in Luther’s “leap of faith”, but was not fully articulated before Kant and Fichte, and there could have been no Fichte without Kant. Romantic idealism was clearly a development from Kantian idealism, although hardly a straightforward one.

Although Kant did describe his work as “a Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, it is not clear that he recognized the full bottom-up social and political implications of his personalized idealism. Kant was a social and political moderate-conservative, and as a university professor employed by the state, his livelihood depended on being seen as a supporter of the status quo, more or less. However, the spiritual entity who is the subject having experiences in Kant’s vision is self-legislating and so has no need for the Church, aristocracy, or any other social authority. Personal spirituality for Kant is almost monadic, clearly influenced by Leibniz in that way but completely free of Leibniz’s totalitarian predetermination. Kant’s personally interior idealism would logically lead to an equality of individuals based on autonomous spirituality, and so it implicitly discredited the whole social edifice of aristocracy and the hierarchy of Christendom. That qualifies Kant’s idealism as an extension of the European revolutionary movement into the matrix of ideas. That is the Kantian revolution, although it is doubtful that the early romantic philosophers understood it in that way. Nevertheless, the response in Romanticism was something altogether shocking: a declaration that philosophy as an activity should be abandoned completely and replaced by art; a call to forsake philosophical thinking, the better to seek immersion in poetry, music, stories, and images. That is why romanticism is more prominent as a literary and artistic movement than as a philosophical system. Something in their interpretation of Kantian idealism brought the romantic philosophers face to face with a vision of human tragedy from which they recoiled. The tragedy does not arise from Kantian idealism or Fichte’s absolute I. Those are not tragic visions.

The Tragedy of Romanticism

Radical French philosophers had made an attempt to construct a Plato-busting bottom-up metaphysics with their materialism (in the footsteps of ancient Epicureans), after the suppression of the reformation in France, and it had been remarkably effective up to a point, but it was not sustainable. Materialism and freedom are mutually exclusive. It was Kant’s elaboration of Luther’s idea of spiritual freedom which really accomplished (on the second attempt, so to speak) the bottom-up metaphysics. Kant’s idealism is clearly set at the level of the ordinary individual person because it is in continuous engagement with brute actualities of the ambient world within which the spirituality finds itself, entangled with effects of the “thing-in-itself”. However, the early romantics encountered Kantian idealism in their studies as Fichte’s philosophy students, and so really encountered Fichte’s interpretation of Kant, and they never took it seriously enough as a description of normal individual intelligence or spirituality with broad implications for empathy, sociability, and politics. Romantic philosophers lived in a very hierarchical culture and age. They would have taken value strata among human beings as self-evident givens. The grip of their top-down orientation was so strong that they couldn’t conceive the absence of hierarchy. So, they came to understand Fichte’s absolute “I” (so much more monadic than Kant’s because of the absence of a countervailing thing-in-itself) as a portrait of divine mind, the mind of God. Certainly it could be argued that the main effect of Fichte’s dismissal of the thing-in-itself was exactly to make his conception of spirituality less human and essentially divine.

As a vision of the divine mind, there was profound novelty about Fichte’s “absolute ego” as compared to the God of Abraham, of Maimonides, or even the purely rational God conceived by Leibniz (much closer to Fichte in cultural tradition). The Abrahamic God is bound and limited by goodness and by love for his creatures. However, the philosophy students who were on their way to developing the romantic vision, could not help but see Fichte’s divine subjectivity through the lens of their experience of the French Revolution, an intensely violent uprising completely justified by the stark contrast between the lives of the privileged in European society and the lives of the drudgery classes, gross institutionalized injustices, any change to which threatened the entire social order of their world. In that light, it was impossible to hold onto the idea of divinity limited by goodness. To the romantics, Fichte’s divine mind is absolute monadic creativity, an artist god, with no responsibility to any other and not bound or limited by anything. Fichte’s absolute ego, in its romantic interpretation, was not the slightest bit interested in morality or orderly civil society, and was nothing like perfectly rational as Leibniz’s God was. He issued no demands to humans for obedience, reverence, or worship, but also offered nothing to balance human suffering, no eternal reward, no redemption from guilt. Instead, he was a playful artist creating drama, emotional upheaval, and shocking beauty. In many ways, this was an historically novel concept, including a form of creativity that was broadly applicable to individual humans. With the absolute ego from Fichte, the emphasis is more on creativity than on command, control, reward, or punishment, and that removes some emphasis from command and control generally even in worldly social and political situations. It also recognizes creativity as the core of subjectivity. Fundamentally, it was gender neutral in conception, although in style and application it was full of male bias.

For Romantics, then, there is a single immaterial spirit with a personality and mental life quite similar to a human’s but with infinitely more power. The Romantic deity is an artist. This spirit has dreams, it indulges itself in daydreaming, and those dreams are the world that humans inhabit, ourselves being dream-things in those dreams. Whimsically, he picks certain people to be his prophets, and grants favours and inspiration to certain heroes and artists, like the gods of ancient Greece were supposed to do. Every landscape is an inner landscape for romantics, pervaded with dream code-work, disguises, and multi-layered associations, unrestricted by cultural norms or by the laws of physics. With the inner landscape, things display (obliquely) their emotional meaning in their appearance, as things do in dreams. What romantics saw in this new idealism was the artist God who toys with the world, and with the humans in the world, without any interest in justice or redemption, as proven by the spectacle of the Revolution and the light it shed on social organization and the force of history.

This conception of the divine mind meant that the Christian religion as traditionally constituted, with pledges of eternal reward and redemption, upon which the stability of the European social hierarchy and culture depended, was a lie. Earthly suffering has no meaning other than the whimsical amusement of an omnipotent daydreamer. Romantics saw the political enforcement of Christendom as a version of Plato’s “noble lie” (Republic), and they accepted the necessity of using that lie to preserve the organization of society, so that some small minority at least could devote themselves to beauty and ideal things, supporting and enjoying the arts, the work of artists, for their own immersion in transcendent beauty. The human artist became the example of the optimal, godlike, human being. However, the romantics also felt tragedy in the need to lie to repress the vain aspirations of the vast majority, in a world so made as to depend on such a lie. Privileged people don’t want social justice and can’t want it because for them the age-old forms of injustice are the price that must be paid so that some few (themselves) can live the higher life of refinement, beauty, and ideal things, a milieu enabling such contemplations as math and science, but above all artistic beauty, as close as possible to the life of the high God and as such the authentic heartbeat of their civilization.

On that worldview, we humans are dreamed just enough in God’s image to think sometimes that we have freedom and power to achieve justice, but that thought is an illusion, and so the human situation is fundamentally tragic. The immediate form of our tragedy is the squalid institutions of unalterable human inequality. We must either accept being deceived by the dirtiest of lies or else be parties to proclaiming that lie, and the problem with philosophy is that its history has brought it to the point of exposing the deception and undermining the civilization of the champions of beauty. For romantics, the only real power we have is to dream, to create our interior non-actualities. That is the romantic vision of transcendence available to humans, and they take it as our shield against glimpsing the ugliness of the broader human situation. The romantic idea of the deity is an emphatic confirmation that the social oppression they witnessed was so entrenched as to appear metaphysically decreed.

Romantic idealism, then, is yet another top-down vision of divine spirituality, a mutation of Platonism into a more modern idiom. The real implication of Kantian idealism was completely different, a sort of re-distribution of spiritual creativity and power down from on-high and into the multiplicity of agents engaging in ordinary experience. The romantic vision of tragedy arises by removing spiritual agency from every individual and ascribing it instead to a universal deity, imposing a completely inappropriate top-down orientation on Kant’s vision of interior spirituality. In doing that, philosophical romanticism seems to glorify subjectivity, but in fact trivializes it. The romantic call to leave philosophy and turn to art and culture is profoundly political and strictly conservative. Their nihilism was the angst of the unjustly privileged, an awareness of the stark and pointless contrast between their lives and the lives of the drudgery class.

The Tragic Sense of Life

We are still living with legacies of romantic idealism, for example in the commonplace declaration that “stories are all we have”. The conclusion and fulfillment of that philosophical Romanticism is a resolve to abandon thinking that goes beyond stories and instead to concentrate on moments of subjective ecstasy or rapture in the altered states inspired by poetry, tragic drama, music, and stories of magic, wonders, and heroes. “Since actuality is ugly, depressing, and utterly beyond our control, let’s achieve the transcendence of personal tranquility and joy by listening to awesome music, contemplating beautiful images, or absorbing our minds in narratives of heroism and nobility.” The romantic “elevation” of ideal things is completely idle, and the narrative sparkle and flash of tragic heroes, witches, wizards, demons, exotic locations, high drama, violent conflict, glory in battle, dangerous rescues, lost causes, fatal flaws, futile but beautiful gestures, narrative suspense and satisfying resolutions, are all merely hiding romantic nihilism. That turn of romanticism is very much like mysticism, which embraces the trances and altered states of consciousness resulting from sensory deprivation, drugs, or mortification of the flesh as if they were higher states of being.

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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creativity, freedom, individuality, intelligence, metaphysics, philosophy, spirituality, subjectivity, time

Metaphysics occurs as a scattered multitude of distinct individual eruptions, each personally entangled in the duality of physics and spirituality. Each spirituality is self-aware as a flight (variably desperate) into a semi-obscure future as the form of the most personal incompleteness and newness. In contrast to every instance of spiritual flight, the surroundings of physics does not care, anticipate, aspire, or evaluate. It merely falls like an ocean wave utterly frozen in timeless uncaring; and we scattered eruptions of metaphysical time stand tilting fallward on the tsunami of actuality and each carve a personal mark, surfing the entropic descent.

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

09 Saturday Jan 2016

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

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embodiment, freedom, imperialism, individuality, macro-parasite culture, metaphysics, nature, sociability, spirituality, theology

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

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

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

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

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

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

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

Embodiment and Spirituality

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

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

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

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

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

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

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

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

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.

The Use and Abuse of Spirituality

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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bell hooks, empathy, freedom, intelligence, personal identity, philosophy, politics of identity, religion, spirituality, transcendence

Thinking about spirituality is a challenge, and it benefits from going-over-it-again from time to time. Not everyone is interested or willing. Critical thinking about spirituality seems offensive to many people, although that may be unusual now in some places. Spirituality intersects with philosophy with respect to ideas and experiences of intelligence, freedom, creativity, transcendence, and on the issue of what can be known. It isn’t easy to read someone else’s writing about spirituality. However, one way to get on with a personal process of thinking about it would be to read the thoughts presented here (and other places), let them go, then search your orientation and listen for your thoughts.

Spirit

Spirit is the same thing as intelligence or personality. In Plato’s Republic, spirit (as in competitive spirit, ambition, or school spirit) was one of the three variable impulses of subjectivity or personality (along with appetite and rational contemplation). However, “spirit” has come to mean personality (intelligence) detached, like a ghost, from normal animal embodiment; intelligence as a disembodied, immaterial, free floating entity, yet still with power and effect in the objective world; also it can be intelligence ’embodied’ in an extraordinary way such as in the planet Earth as a whole, or in a star (wishing on a star) or in the entirety of existence, in nature as a whole. The category of spirits includes, for very many people, the idea of a supreme-intelligence with ultimate creative power. So spirituality is an individual’s vision of and feelings toward the self as spirit, and the relevance of self-as-spirit to disembodied spirits and especially to a supreme-intelligence at work in the world. A sense of transcendent sacredness, of something profoundly supernatural attaches especially to that super-intelligence.

Mysticism

Mysticism is a vision, normally including practices within a simplified and contemplative way of life, of a way to achieve knowledge (gnosis) of divine things, ultimate mysteries. This knowledge of divine things, say, of flows of supernatural power through nature, is thought to be revealed to people determined and devoted enough to impose long periods of discomfort and sensory deprivation on themselves (de-emphasizing their existence as animal and material body), resulting in trances or experiences of separation of spirit from the body, in which condition the spirit can travel anywhere, meet and communicate with other disembodied spirits, and explore the normally invisible structures, origins, and destiny of the cosmos. Claims of such knowledge of the whole has been passed privately in person from master to disciple, kept arcane and secret, restricted to few initiates, because it is considered safe only in the minds of those proven most worthy. Sometimes supernatural powers are thought to accompany that knowledge. In spite of the secrecy, there have been leaks and deliberate hints and speculations about mystical experiences, to such an extent that the culture of mysticism has had widespread influence on ordinary conceptions of spirituality. Additionally, claims of mystical knowledge often appear to have metaphorical meanings concerning non-mystical but more generally spiritual or philosophical matters.

Primordial Empathy

What we are doing when sensing personality outside ourselves is primordial empathy, recognizing questions, intentions, hopes, fears, and desires that are not our own, and so recognizing other entities acting from intelligence. We are making sense of the movements of (especially) people and animals by recognizing intelligences as elemental forces. Empathy in the ordinary sense is complicated in that awareness of external personalities. Fear and enmity seem to be very common. Still, we find that the beings moved by intelligence sometimes shelter each other from the terrifying boundless darkness, uniting by physical closeness as well as by mutual nurturing and imitation-play. The first experience of other intelligence is probably mother or parent, which leads to the imprinting of an orientation toward what passes for an indefinable exterior super-intelligence in the experience of newborns, infants, and toddlers. The universal imprinting of an orientation toward an indefinable super-intelligence gets generalized and idealized, guided by a massive effort at cultural (religious) influence on every individual, with the effect that the ideal super-intelligence is conceived as transcendent and immortal, often immaterial and disembodied, or, in other words, a God or set of gods. Toward the external personalities identified as gods, people feel empathy coloured by profound fear, like fear of an emotionally distant and unreliably engaged parent. That free-floating and supreme super-parent has no other grounding than a culturally conditioned structure of orientation extending childhood dependency, but it provides a common sort of human parasite with a mechanism of profound control. By asserting the claim to be the earthly proclaimer and enforcer of divine will, a powerful faction can gain parasitic control of masses of people.

Two things converge: the universal imprinting of an orientation toward an indefinable super-intelligence, and the history of a parasitic human faction which has been spectacularly successful at sanctifying its top-down human-on-human parasitism by exploiting that universal psychological predisposition of people to orient toward a supreme external intelligence “in the blind”.

There is considerable evidence that we humans have tended to sense personality or intelligence in worldly events far too often. Humans judge intelligence by an entity’s ability to imitate (with variation/ innovation) and so to communicate understanding, act out social roles, and form social attachments. Given the fact that humans have imagined personality in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees and storms, there is no reason why we might not imagine personality in computers and robots. Seeming intelligent is not a matter of being structured and ‘hard wired’ to behave in ‘human’ patterns, because most ‘human’ behaviour is based on intelligent imitation of models in the ambient social system. From time immemorial natural phenomena were seen to be moving under their own inner motive force in coherent patterns and misjudged as being ready or capable of normal intelligent imitations as communication. Storms were seen to act out an angry outburst by a terrifying father. Fathers do not do this because of their ‘hard wiring’, but because they must imitate a certain social role. If engineers want to make machines which seem intelligent, the machines will have to do interesting imitations.

Desire, hope, fear, purpose, curiosity, or intention (teleology) as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been acceptable and often preferred over ‘brute’ natural-law cause-effect explanations. In ordinary discourse, explanation of events based on the motives of personalities as forces in the world has been privileged over brute material cause. “Somebody did it.” “A ghost did it.” “God did it.” These are all still commonly accepted among educated people as sufficient accounts of why and how something happened. There is even an inclination to fall back onto such act-of-personality explanations where they are clearly not appropriate: “There is a little guy inside the machine who counts the money you put in and drops out the change.” Anyone who claims belief in God, gods, or a deity is irrevocably committed to intelligence/ personality and its acts of reason, desire, or questioning as the final, ultimate, original, and primordial creative source and cause of everything that exists, which goes far beyond the experienced models or examples of the powers of intelligences. Since we tend to think of an act of intelligent-will when the question of cosmic creation comes up, it seems that the experience of intelligence necessarily includes creative power and freedom. A sense of the sacred that is connected to ultimate creative power comes with the fact that it is gob-smackingly inexplicable that there is anything rather then simply nothing, but it is neither necessary nor helpful to project a fanciful pretence of explanation onto that. It doesn’t help to say that the world rests on the back of a giant tortoise, and it doesn’t help to say that the world was created by a disembodied super-intelligence. The pre-existence of a divine intelligence isn’t enough since the inevitable, unavoidable question is: how did the divine intelligence (or the tortoise) come to exist?

A Quarrel with Religion: Malign Effects of Imaginary Super-Parents

What can never be passed off as benign about any religion is that religion is the ultimate legitimation of the way things are, of the existing order, the status quo. Religion is always a celebration of submission or subordination to some super-version of the universally imprinted parent, a psychological relic of childhood. Since such a super-parent is assumed to arrange every detail of the cosmos as it wills, the condition of the world is necessarily a direct expression or manifestation of the divine will of the unquestionable super-parent. Even Buddhism legitimizes the inequalities of social hierarchies through the idea of karma, since moving up the moral hierarchy of lives requires the inequalities of a social hierarchy. Such a religious acceptance of, or reconciliation to, the way things are, can produce feelings of calm and a certain sense of transcendence, of rising above all the injustice, misery, and futility, through uniting with the totality of being, the great turbulent river of being. However, feeling good isn’t enough. It’s a withdrawal, a kind of profound personal refusal of the freedom of intelligence.

The Imprinted Parent Lies About Who You Are

A main problem with the universally imprinted parent is that it tells you who you are, and you are inclined to accept what it says because it is the unquestionable internalized parent. What the voice of the imprinted parent always tells you is that you are a belonging, specifically their belonging, that you are their possession and as such you exist for their purposes. Whatever they choose to do with you, such as sending you to war, or confining your work and thinking to what you are told, you obey because it is their asserted right as the owner to use force or kill you if you hesitate or resist. However, that is all a lie because there really is no super-parent, only fraudulent pretenders representing particular social factions and using this age-old psychological back-door to appear to come from inside your head. The pretenders lie about who you are because they benefit from the results of people generally believing the lies. Anything, such as a state, family, religion, or the economic organization of production and distribution, that claims the right and competence to assign your identity is inappropriately playing on the psychological imprint of the parental super-intelligence left over from childhood, which in fact ceases to be legitimate as every person becomes adult. What makes personal self-possession possible even in that extreme (but normal) situation is that elemental or innocent intelligence remains outside any cultural influence, and so can think outside and critique any kind of cultural effect including the imprinted parent.

Not Saying It

An enormous amount of energy has been devoted (academically and politically) to not saying that human societies are structured as forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Historians do not say it even though it is the most obvious thing that jumps off the page from a little reading of history. Social scientists and established political parties don’t say it even when credible studies (Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page) reveal completely dominant influence on (nominally democratic) governments by organizations using massive accumulations of capital. There is no doubt about the reason this cannot be said: the junta of parasitism is still very much in power and feels confronted and threatened when identified as such. The legitimizing ethos of the ruling ownership faction is crime-family culture (fig-leafed by patronage and supportive consumption of art, monumental architecture, and high culture), which licenses any deception or brutality to secure its parasitic advantages. In the ideology of modernity the idea of social progress is headlined in large print, but the system of human parasitism continues getting more strident and overt in many ways, such as in explosive inequality in wealth and income. The whole intellectual culture of human societies has been systematically distorted by not saying the reality of political power.

More than Love

Love is not effective in getting beyond or overcoming the power and grip of entrenched human parasites, but neither is hate or rage. Getting in touch with the supposed cosmic unity of all things or of all sentient beings is also proven to be completely ineffective. It is certainly not helpful to be immersed in an inescapably negative, dark, or stressed emotional state, but, although feeling calmed by a feeling of love for all creation is certainly better, it is not in itself good enough to create a more widespread improvement. Improvement will be a process rather than a single mental accomplishment, of course, but progress on the path must begin with a certain single mental accomplishment, namely elemental self-identification or self-possession. The reason elemental self-identification is crucial is that it is the route via which the transcendent becoming of every other individual intelligence can be recognized. It is the way via which the sense of sacred transcendence is redistributed away from some imaginary super-parent and instead recognized where it truly is, in every separate person.

De-effacing the questioning directionality in any human gaze, as discussed in posting 72, The Question of the Gaze, is a requirement for freedom of thought and agency. Without that interior-oriented grounding of self-identification, a person is, by default, in the grip of super-parent supplied (culturally supplied) criteria of self-identification, (personal identity in terms of family, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, language, socio-economic stratum-of-origin, level of education, personal income, net worth, trophies, titles, occupational skill set, accumulation of possessions, appearance, athletic ability, …) all of which have the effect of making the individual a property of currently reigning avatars of the universally imprinted parent, which in reality is an institutional system of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Full agency requires self-possession of the innocent intelligence which so easily slips into the blind-spot of the outward gaze. A universal imposition of diminished self-recognition is enforced through culturally legitimizing and obscuring the parasitic core of the capitalist economic system. It is not going to be possible to conceive a superior replacement for capitalism without first advancing a reformation in spirituality.

Branding the Construct of Power: imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy

The problem with bell hooks’ concept “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” is that those cultural structures and the personal qualities they are taken to express are (regrettably) widely respected and even considered admirable. Empires and imperialism are spoken of with adulation: Alexander of Macedon is not remembered as Alexander the Diabolical, but as The Great, and his conquest of the known world of his time and place is hailed as a great achievement. The supposed glories of the Roman and British Empires, for example, are staples in the teaching of history. Historians and politicians normally glorify imperialism and war generally, and a strong ideological undercurrent of white supremacist racism is included in that glorification, something like: “European races prove their superiority by exercising dominance and imposing their glorious achievements on all other people.” Masses of regular people just hold such assumptions as unquestionable truths, even people who do not consider themselves racist. On capitalism, in the most economically developed societies of the modern world capitalism is the reigning ideology and it is continuously gushing forth streams of admiration for itself in mass media, including declarations of its unshakable inevitability, so that it is difficult (nearly criminal) to imagine anything different within that matrix. As for patriarchy, it has mainly managed to retain its original branding as meritocracy, and so again as something good for everybody, with maybe a little tweaking needed here and there. Regrettably, the negative-sounding concepts used by hooks for the normal organization of society are (although accurate) full of cultural ambiguity, and consequently sound like name-calling, unfairly harsh characterizations of arrangements at the core of society. They sometimes provide an excuse to dismiss the important message. Parasites, however, are not widely admired, and it is the (false) cultural legitimation of top-down human-on-human parasites that needs to be identified and exposed in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

De-Colonization

Colonization, even in the most literal sense of British capitalists and armed forces assaulting, occupying, and imposing their possession of India, for example, is always some form of asserting ownership by a pretending avatar of the universally imprinted parent. Accepting any form of unthinkable super-parent, even on a persona level, is an invitation to parasitic colonizers to come here and do their thing. Any personal process of de-colonization requires identification of and critical thinking on the issue of the imprinted parent in general, followed by a personal process of getting beyond the internalized parent in all forms. Nobody’s personal identity includes being the possession of some other intelligence, embodied or disembodied. No intelligence-as-such is a belonging. Identify the internalized super-parents in personal orientation, and then move past them, help them fade away. Identify all the culture-imposed criteria of personal identity (self-identification, self-definition, personal evaluation) and then move past them, help them all fade away. Something remains, an elemental questioning or accumulating orientation, innocent or elemental personal intelligence: the authentic grounding of personal identity. As a being in the world you are still not beyond the power of the human parasites, but your personal interiority is ready to open up the creative gusher of curiosity, pleasures, emotional responses, and impulses to craft expressions, and to re-orient more generally through those experiences.

When you begin the process of de-colonization, how far do you go? Can there be an arbitrary stopping place that retains some or most cultural value assignments but discards personally offensive ones such as the pigeon-hole assigned to your race, gender, or sexual orientation? What if you don’t stop? Is there anything at the end of that rainbow? Socrates looks like being another person (roughly two thousand years before Luther and Descartes) who kept going and de-colonized from everything he possibly could, which accounts for his declaration that his only wisdom was knowing that he knew nothing, a state of elemental innocence. Now that’s de-colonization, and it didn’t leave Socrates passive or reconciled to the status quo of his society. It released him as a questioner, as an active intelligence. At the end of this rainbow is innocent intelligence-as-such or personality-as-such. Before anyone has a gender, race, or language, before becoming a child of a certain religion, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, every individual is already a particular intelligence/ personality, and those other features are just cultural variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so to judge the malign effects of otherwise unquestionable super-parents, is personal innocent intelligence, deep underneath the layers of colonization by culture.

Spirituality is Transcendence in Time

The rejection of super-parent religion is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creation of time. Time is freedom into which an intelligence creatively projects itself, a personal hyper-space of 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 intelligences build lives. This is a startlingly unfamiliar idea, but time is the foundation of freedom from nature and as such it is the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze 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.

A New Philosophic Empathy

The sense of the sacred, previously and currently reserved for an awesomely powerful super-parent, a centralized and externalized transcendent supervisor, urgently needs to be redistributed. The reason elemental self-identification is crucial is that it is the route via which the transcendent becoming of every (other) individual intelligence can be recognized. It is the way via which the sense of sacred transcendence is redistributed away from some imaginary super-parent and instead recognized where it truly is, in individual people. All the super-parents must be allowed to fade out and pass away and be replaced by a sense of the sacredness of each individual intelligence.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Tag Archives: spirituality

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