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Creative Existence

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Fragment 191, word count: 371.

tags: time, metaphysics, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, ideas, eternity, spirit, subjectivity,  drama.

There is nothing to say about eternity. There is nothing interesting about it. There is no life to eternity. Both Plato and Hegel asserted that things experienced can have different degrees of reality, and that a fully real world would be fixed, final, and eternally unchanging, so completely objective. There could be no subjectivity intervening in the state of things of that world by interpreting, curating, evaluating, and reshaping things according to projected dramas of a personal genius because that would make things unfinished and always at the point of being something new. Time is blatant unreality in that view. The world that is engaged and reshaped by subjectivity is never even remotely real in the Platonic sense, and Plato took that to mean that, for philosophy, it is a distraction, dismissible trivia. Nevertheless, even though Hegel conceived a cosmos that moves dialectically toward perfectly real eternal ideality, the perfection of eternity is not Hegel’s focus. Instead, his focus is the intentional and desperate enactment of the approach to final reality. This drama in time distinguishes Hegel’s fundamental reality from Plato’s. Hegel seems to play out an intuition that, as the primordial opening for creativity, time is the core of the spirit he wants to clarify, a kind of Aristotelian spirit in cosmic nature. It is an intuition that future-projecting teleological drama is the distinctive nature of spiritual existence. For Aristotle, every particular object holds within it an idea of itself, the spirit of itself, just as every individual person does, a self-asserting idea extending beyond what is instantaneously present, beyond the sensory appearance, the perceivable attributes, an idea with future-facing formative force! Such an Aristotelian interiority to outwardly atomic objects integrates each one with a continuity of loss and ever-opening novelty that goes far beyond it, integrating it with, placing it within, an all-encompassing radically unfinished reality. In presenting this conception of ideas as one with time, Aristotle was also already departing from his teacher Plato whose Ideal Forms were strictly eternal and timeless. Maybe Aristotle wasn’t meaning to shift the conception of reality, but he was tacitly recognizing that the drama of spiritual existence in time matters in a way that eternity never can.

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is More than Nature

08 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, University, Why thinking?

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Posting 128, Word Count: 867.

On questions of politics and social order, there is always more involved than just nature, since there is always the involvement of the subjective ideality of individuals, human spirituality. Ideologues of the political right-wing make every effort to reduce political forces to a narrow concept of nature: predetermined, rigidly and unalterably ordered by eternal categories and hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being. The right-wing concept of nature includes the right of the strongest to use lethal force to exercise sovereignty over the less strong, and conceives a general flaw in human nature, much like original sin, which means that people deserve and even require subordination to sovereign supervision. Those assumptions grow out of the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and the women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The appeal to the inevitability of nature serves the purpose of defending the advantages of those who already have the greatest advantages, mainly rights attached to possession of property. Property fits well within a narrow concept of nature. However, crucial points supposedly determined by nature on the right-wing view are really features of culture, and culture is mutable.

The Mission of the Interior Individual

The involvement of individual subjective ideality in all matters of politics and social order means, first, that the fabric of reality includes crucial forces which are very unlike the concept of nature as predetermined, unalterable, rigidly ordered by eternal categories and the great chain of being. Individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the fundamental instability of actuality, an instability represented by time. The conceptions of subjective ideality and their cultural expressions are tentative and mutable under the force of deliberation and creativity. Second, the spirituality of people means that we individually have an interior source of value, gratification, and original creation that is not connected to possession of property, that is a projecting fountain instead of a deficiency that craves consumption, acquisition, and competition. Every individual has an expressive mission that goes beyond competitions for scarce goods, struggles for survival, and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, beyond submission and obedience, beyond accumulating property, and beyond aligning with narratives spun by scribes of power and wealth in a patriarchal hive-mind. Individual subjectivities have a mission to conceive and actually make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is part of sustaining that mission. Social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas since ideas are openings into a mutable future.

The reading/ writing persona that is cultivated in literacy and education has a distinct kind of autonomy of thinking and authorship. Young people have little attachment to property, but much to their unique voice and spirituality. A great deal of human fulfillment can be derived from learning and thinking, reading and writing, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity, but such a source of fulfillment goes far beyond top-down centralizing control. It is far too autonomous and individually interior for the political right-wing to endure. Right-wing interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego to intimidate the supposed inherent vice. One reason the political right-wing is anti-intellectual and struggles to narrow eduction to vocational training (STEM etc.) is to limit a general encounter with Enlightenment era ideas which illuminate an empathic and non-property based autonomy of the individual.

Everyone’s personal state of orientation is always situated in and influenced by a historical, cultural, and political context which includes (prominently) efforts by hive-mind collectives to control the behaviour and thinking of every individual, to orient every individual within a certain story, a tragic drama asserting patriarchy as a metaphysical inevitability. There is no equivalence between the political left and the political right because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has always been an alternative vision of the individual struggling to express the mission of ideality against the great weight of patriarchy. The calling to account of patriarchal dystopia, its being exposed as such by the political left-wing, is a cultural earthquake, unavoidably a bitter and profound incompatibility of visions with little ground for compromise. Of course the messages of the left must disrupt traditional narratives that served as devices of patriarchal macro-parasitism to maintain submissive hive-minds.

An authentic idealist metaphysics is one in which brute nature participates in reality with the ideality of embodied and sociable individuals, in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of originality created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come, creating what comes next.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

The World that Doesn’t Matter

19 Monday Feb 2018

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

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Posting 124, word count: 750.

Without the engagement of living subjectivity the world has no meaning. It can’t be beautiful or ugly, happy or sad, good or evil. There are no ethical issues in such a world. It is a world without tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce. Whatever happens in such a world does not matter. Only the teleological consciousness of future-bound subjectivity confers meaning on anything: sensitivity, conscious intent, caring about, aiming for, and actively moving into a future with some openness for discretionary creativity and construction, for freedom; and doing so with a directionality or bearing of intent that is an interpretive construct of no-longer. The idea of freedom is a specific sense of ongoing time to come, into which relevant novelty can be projected deliberately. Since time to come and a no-longer which situates relevance are entirely ideas rather than existing actualities, we are here encountering the subjective ideality of time, orientation, and spiritual bearing. It’s this creative freedom of ideality which is transcendent, and it qualifies subjectivity as the essential subject matter of an old branch of thinking known as metaphysics, long since gone out of style in our era of empirical science. Subjectivity, fountain of meaning, is one of the two metaphysical modes, the other being objectivity. Objectivity is the world imagined without ideality, the world that doesn’t matter.

We are completely familiar with subjectivity at the level of our personal locality. Anyone’s personal subjectivity looms large in the shape of how what-there-is matters. We care about what happens, certain situations and outcomes matter to us. We also experience the intelligence of people and animals around us in how they care and direct themselves in a world that matters to them. This is reasonably straightforward but everyone’s personal orientation is also situated in, and influenced by, a historical, cultural, and political context. There has been a history of projecting conscious intent beyond the kind of embodied persons familiar to us, outward to the cosmic far horizons. Such a conception is a personification of the cosmos on the large scale, a strictly incoherent idea but one that sets up a habit of trivializing the local sensitivity and conscious intent that we live with and recognize in the people we engage in conversation. However, it doesn’t take any special kind of subjectivity to confer meaning on the world. The presence of any and every one of the ordinary sensitive and teleological people we live among confers meaning on the entire cosmos. In fact, there is no way for any subjectivity to be special or extraordinary in a way that sanctifies what matters to it as what “really” matters. When anything matters to any subjectivity, then it matters in a way that is as absolute as it gets.

The legacy of cultural fixations on patriarchal hierarchy and its projection into the cosmos at large has left us assuming that, even though the cosmos is not personified on the grand scale, there must be some especially transcendent consciousness from-on-high, maybe the mysterious genius of great men or the sum of wisdom from heroic ancestors, which sanctifies the culture of values expressed in the structure of wealth and power. However, no such special consciousness exists, and none is required for meaning in individual or collective life. The transcendence of ordinary subjectivity is the only transcendence there is.

Since meaning is always and only conferred on events and situations by sensitive and caring teleology, it is not collectives, not culturally engineered “hive minds” or discourses, that merit a privileged role in defining what really matters. Such things are not instances of subjectivity. Nothing matters to a discourse, an artifact, or a text. Discourses don’t care or think, and neither caring nor thinking is confined within discourses.

Culturally supplied frameworks of orientation always include ideas that are meant to anchor the meaning of individual and collective life in relation to the ever-looming large scale of things, the global or cosmic scale, and the only way that any meaning can be anchored is in relation to some conception of subjective ideality. Everyone feels the looming of the largest scale, and so fashions some metaphysical frame of reference in an idea of the relationship between the transcendent fountain of meaning that is subjectivity over against meaningless objectivity. In spite of the historical tendency to universalize patriarchal hierarchy, metaphysics doesn’t need any special subjectivity or ideality. The subjectivity and ideality of ordinary experience is perfectly effective at making a world that matters.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Superego

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The idea “superego”, from the Freudian model of subjectivity, identifies a learned force of personal orientation. In that Freudian model the vectors of force are the inherent id, bestial lusts for ecstatic pleasure, sparkly things, power, and esteem (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions), and the acquired superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Many other social influences must also be included: representations by teachers or in media stories, for example, of certain people iconically enjoying pleasure, power, and status, intended to motivate imitation and so to influence career aspirations and style of life. There are also role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people with various ways of making a living. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and of person. So the superego includes far more than personified authority symbols, because it encompasses the whole structure over which those figures exert authority, the whole surrounding social landscape in which any individual must make his or her way.

This superego is a learned (as such internalized) model of reality which on one layer is a strictly pragmatic set of local markers that enable an individual to navigate social structures and economic arrangements in order to survive and achieve some personal goals. However, the presence of the active social system and its material infrastructure as a whole is impressive enough to be taken as a manifestation of transcendence, of some unquestionable force of God or nature beyond the grasp of human understanding, and it is especially the most low-definition and abstract symbols of sovereign authority which claim and invoke an origin in, and proximity to, transcendence. The most local markers of collective orientation, typical ways of acting and material culture, lend a readiness for easy acceptance, inspired by the immediacy of their functional utility and their apparent clarity of foundations, to the rest of the superego construct, all the way up to those most abstract symbols of authority which claim that a grounding in transcendence sanctifies their right of primary agency overriding and negating the agency of any individual.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Fringe Philosophy: Thinking Transcendence

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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

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tags: subjectivity, transcendence, spirituality, existentialism, Kierkegaard, Sartre, The Matrix, reorientation, freedom, time

What is often too close and pervasive to even notice is not so much “the matrix”* which controls us, but instead the exact opposite of the matrix idea, namely our own transcendent spirituality. That is to say, it is our inherent personal freedom and power we fail to recognize instead of the subtle prison of cultural influences. Ultimately, the cultural matrix only works as a confinement by keeping us distracted from the transcendence that is personal spirituality. Reorienting to a grounding in that transcendence is the only reliable way to render “the matrix” ineffective. So, fringe philosophy is the revolution.

Without a personally lived grounding in transcendence we inhabit a restricted, hard-surfaced, and (except for the conversation with children) disenchanted world of rigid social norms and forms in which we raise our hungry beaks like baby birds to be given regurgitated material (or worse) to consume from masters and authorities. Rigid institutions recruit, groom, and present those authorities who always act in the interests of a faction projecting a culture inherited from title bearing crime families of medieval Europe, in control of great wealth, and using their dominant position for nothing better than to protect their macro-parasitic advantages. Scientific nearly-nihilism is so widely embraced that we live with either a secular dissociation from all transcendence, a dissociation we praise as realism, normally combined with a perfunctory glorification of art and architecture as the expression of some profound life-mystery of which we cannot speak directly; or we participate in pageants of obedient celebration of fantastic antique gods and demons and call those things transcendent, crediting them with founding and sustaining our institutions. It is often claimed that it was better in antiquity, when the fear of gods and demons was shared more completely and fervently, and when such fantasies enchanted everyone’s existence and their whole world, but it was not better in the past. Even then, there were brutal masters enforcing social categories, fresher and more personal fear of masters, and, oh yes, it was enchantment with a completely bogus transcendence.

Existenz Philosophy

That our own transcendent spirituality is difficult to recognize as such is the central point of Kierkegaard’s idea of “existence” as the peculiar inside-out way of being of subjective entities such as ourselves, entities of spirituality or intelligence. Kierkegaard’s conception of ‘existence” was a conceptual breakthrough for the philosophy of freedom without which the whole of phenomenology and existentialism would have been impossible. The description of subjectivity as “being-in-the-world” is one way of expressing the observation that the being of intelligences is inside-out. On that view, what is exceptional about us as beings is not merely our being sensitive and responsive to surroundings, but that we are aware of only what is not-ourselves. We are exquisitely sensitive to objects outside and surrounding us, but weirdly insensitive to personal self-nature because we have no definite self-nature. There is nothing to our interior except the freedom (and limited power) to create some outward expression, mark, or declaration of our being present among the other things. In that condition, intelligence is entirely and categorically outward-looking, existing without an essence (apologies to Sartre), and as such burdened with inescapable freedom in the form of the opportunity to create from scratch some placeholder for a personal essence, to construct and project an external mask or icon to represent an interior character which always eludes identification (and so remains free in a particular way).

Embodied Spirituality as a Grounding in Transcendence

Existentialism rests on the claim that there is nothing identifiable as a subjective interior, resulting in inescapable anguish at total uncertainty about personal identity and a sense of the absurdity of that existence. However, the freedom that is spirituality is not a formless nothing after all. It has a particular form: time as open futurity constructed of non-actual and increasingly remote possibilities and probabilities. Teleological time is the form of spirituality’s freedom, and so the form of transcendence. The existentialist interpretation of spiritual existence is properly individualistic and pluralistic, but fails to recognize Descartes’ discovery that questioning itself is a profound marker of spiritual existence, even though it is not a phenomenon. Asserting the nothingness of the interiority of intelligence completely misses the ever-present (and identifiable) rich personal orientation in a time-structure of non-actuality. A very elaborated directionality or orientation is certainly “in here”, along with (even in existentialism) the anxiety around consciousness of uncertainty, and a force of questioning and creativity. That’s quite a bit of existential interiority.

What follows from a person’s grounding in the transcendence of spiritual self-recognition is a profound re-orientation. This transcendence is not a message from anything or about anything, and yet it accomplishes a reorientation to a world which is unfinished, indefinite, always in process of being created by individuals in spiritual flight. Instead of living in a world of hard surfaces and definable appearances, we live in a world of possibilities. Nothing is in a final state or condition, and the fountains of creation are the many ordinary individual people. The world is constantly pushed off its line-of-fall by the original acts of individual people. Everything can be re-conceptualized, re-oriented, reconsidered. Social forms and categories do not have to be the way they are. Institutions are mutable, having been constructed by ordinary minds confronting specific situations from specific perspectives. Every individual has access to spiritual self-possession, and neither institutions nor individuals can own anyone. Nobody is (or could be) competent or qualified to exercise the institutionalized ownership inherent in sovereignty. The effect of all this could be described as de-cult-ing, something like what used to be called deprogramming. An important part is recognizing other people as autonomous and equivalent embodied spiritualities, each a creative fountain of original futurity instead of a consuming hollow of hungers. Nihilism is everything being already finished, leaving only endless consuming in the doomed attempt to fill the interior emptiness, but the world has to be created now by every person.

Notes

* The Matrix, movie released in 1999, written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano; produced by Joel Silver, Village Roadshow Pictures (and others), distributed by Warner Bros.. In this iconic movie, “the matrix” is a virtual construct of human experience created by a super-system of artificial intelligence devoted to solving the problems of humans by controlling everything about their experience of life, actually injecting a real time life experience for each person through a cable plugged into the brain stem. It is a metaphor for the control of masses of human beings by strategically crafted messages from an unidentified institutional entity.

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada (2016), ISBN 978-0-345-81095-3.
This is an up-to-date and absorbing introduction to the ideas and historical milieu of existentialism and phenomenology.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Freedom, Surfing, and Physics

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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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.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Nature, Transcendence

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Gnosticism is somewhat difficult to pin down. Roughly, it is a construct of ideas about what is supernatural and the relationship of humans to the supernatural. It seems to have been developed mostly in the first few centuries A.D., with an important concentration of activity in the Greek/ Egyptian city of Alexandria when that city was an international centre of scholarship, research, organized curiosity, and invention of ideas. From the point of view of the orientation being developed in these blog postings, call it Blind-Spot philosophy, Gnosticism is a metaphor or allegory (not entirely successful) for important realities of the human condition, and so possibly a helpful reference in sketching an overview of the Blind-Spot positions. There are gnostic elements in, and a gnostic structure or flavour to, Blind-Spot philosophy. For one thing, there is a fundamental dualism in Gnosticism, the dualism of spirit vs material nature, since, on that view, the whole drama of human life flows from each human spirit being catastrophically imprisoned in matter or nature. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is also a fundamental dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, or intelligence (freedom) vs brute actuality (unfreedom). What is conceived in Gnosticism as spirit has some congruence with what in Blind-Spot philosophy is called the interiority of an intelligence. The idea or fable of disembodied spirit(s) can be plausibly interpreted as an allegory for the experience of the interiority of personal intelligence.

The primary task of early Gnosticism was escape from demonic control, especially control by the demons of stars, dictators of astral or astrological fate. Some specialized knowledge (gnosis) was necessary to enable that escape, knowledge of the supernatural origins of the human imprisonment, and of the structure and history of the supernatural world, leading to discovery of how to be fully human by the memory of being divine. The shape of power in that view is emphatically and quite literally top-down: the demons in the starry sky have overwhelming power. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the idea of disembodied intelligences, including demonic ones. However, as the star-demons represent a dominant evil, an imposing of control and subordination on people where there should be freedom and equality, there is a congruent dominant evil in Blind-Spot philosophy. In Blind-Spot philosophy the dominant evil is not supernatural but is instead cultural and historically rooted. Specifically, the dominant evil is a cultural stream of human macro-parasitism, a cultural, political, and economic faction which successfully maintains and evolves a culture (Aryan or patriarchal masculinity) of macro-parasitic control over masses of other humans, where there should be freedom and equality.

Recognizing the broad dominance of evil, injustice, and oppression within a supernaturally top-down perspective, gnostics thought there had to be two gods, a greater and a lesser, the greater one good, the lesser one evil or at least prone to catastrophic mistakes. Gnosticism is, therefore, often construed as a religion (in one form, a version of Christianity) or a religious philosophy since it has much to claim concerning supernatural divinities. By contrast, Blind-Spot philosophy is nothing like religion since it has nothing to say about supernatural divinities, except that the idea of disembodied intelligences, personalities, or ideas is not rational, neither locally nor cosmically. Blind-Spot philosophy does have a claim about transcendence, but not in the form of omnipotent or all-encompassing divinities who shower gifts or miseries down upon humans from on-high. That would be the supernatural top-down perspective. In Blind-Spot philosophy, intelligences are all embodied and individually creators of freedom, which means we are individually transcendent with respect to the brute determinism of nature or strict actuality.

As discussed in recent postings (Being vs Freedom: Metaphysics Old and New, and The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One) there are certain circumstances of human life which make it very tempting and easy to imagine a profoundly top-down shape or structure to reality. It has been traditional for cultured humans to be trapped mentally within such top-down visions. Gnostics were early promoters of a version of that idea known as The Great Chain of Being, a prime example of top-down metaphysics. That was the context in which the gnostic views of time, freedom, and subjective identity were conceived, an extremity of top-down thinking. That perspective is rejected and opposed by Blind-Spot philosophy, which recognizes embodied intelligences as individually or autonomously creative, and as such presents a strictly bottom-up perspective, yet still recognizing transcendence in human experience. Gnosticism was and is a kind of obsession with transcendence of a supernatural kind. The idea of supernatural transcendence is an allegory for the reality of the freedom of individual intelligences.

Both Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy recognize a dominant evil which perpetrates a profound distortion of reality on a mass scale, creating a ‘hidden or secret reality’ which is normally unidentified because of (cultural) distortions arranged and maintained by the dominant evil. In both, the core secret to be discovered and revealed is about the power and freedom of the individual self or subjectivity (the blind spot). Both claim that in ordinary circumstances we function in a condition of relative disability, imprisonment, or slavery through accepting misrepresentations of reality, including alienation from our personal subjectivity. The main aspiration is direct self-acquaintance, based on recognizing a difference between the crippling concept of individual subjectivity promoted by top-down culture as compared with the self of immediate and innocent acquaintance. The supernatural imprisonment or slavery of human beings depicted in Gnosticism is an allegorical identification of the imprisonment of individuals within cultural traditions which legitimize and sanctify a perpetual macro-parasitism. In both Blind-Spot philosophy and Gnosticism, philosophy is conceived and practiced as a way of evading and resisting the dominant evil, first identifying the dominant evil and then re-positioning the self beyond the control of the dominant evil. In both, it is self-recognition which enables personal liberation, achieved by an act of taking possession of personal innocence, always available (gnostic “remembering”). However, there are at least important differences of emphasis in how knowledge is conceived in these two orientations. In Blind-Spot philosophy there is more emphasis on attending to a thinking process, self-directed reorientation, than on any special knowledge (although a knowledge of human history is relevant). Practical acquaintance with the innocent creator of interior non-actualities is basic. In Gnosticism, secret and arcane knowledge of the divine origin of human spirit, passed in person from master to worthy disciple, is the key to liberation and personal freedom. However, the disciple still has to use the knowledge to “remember” innocent or primeval life, to reawakening an innocent intelligence.

There are two conflicting ethical tendencies within Gnosticism. The dominant one is elitism, special entitlement, or exceptionalism, in which those initiated into the sacred knowledge are the exceptions. People who accept the reality of The Great Chain of Being have a difficult time avoiding a supernaturally ordained hierarchy within the human collective. Fables of “the higher Being” make everyone accustomed to various forms authoritarian control, and to lack readiness to question authority in general. Gnostic dependence on secret troves of sacred knowledge makes initiates accept subordination to authorities claiming to guard the knowledge. Elitism also tends to condemn the majority of people as beyond help or unworthy of anything better than existing injustices, even sometimes declaring that misery somehow benefits the victims. However, there is a vestige of an opposing tendency arising from the gnostic conviction that all people have a divine or supernatural origin. That would tend to inspire a universality of respectful, loving, and nurturing treatment of others. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects exeptionalism and subordination, and bases ethics on the insight which must follow from authentic self-acquaintance, that all intelligences are individually transcendent creators of freedom within the unfreedom of brute actuality and the crippling dominance of macro-parasitic culture, and that, as such, all intelligences merit respect and nurture.

The conceptualization of time is also crucial to both, but the attitude to time, or the orientation toward time, is completely opposite in Blind-Spot philosophy as compared to Gnosticism. The gnostic obsession with eternity is absent from Blind-Spot philosophy, replaced by the love of freedom within time and only conceivable within time as a transcendent creation of individual intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects the quest for eternity, infinity, or Being. In Blind-Spot philosophy the transcendence of individual intelligences is not achieved by recognizing a unity or identity with an omnipotent, universal, and eternal deity on-high, or with eternal Being, but instead is achieved in individually creating personal freedom by the use of the non-actualities of interior subjectivity, so creating freedom-in-time in the process of living a particular life.

Rebel Angels

The gnostic myth of the catastrophic rupture of human spirits from their primeval union with divinity and the fall of human spirits into the iron embrace of nature and time, is recognition of a self-alienation within conventional styles of living, a sense of being misrepresented, misevaluated, and diminished by the personal identities offered by the ambient culture and economy. The gnostic myth of the Fall from Grace is an allegory for the loss of recognition of the transcendent creative freedom of every individual. The sense of being punished for some primal fault or crime is misidentification of self as blameworthy because it revolts against the determinism of nature by spinning freedom in an unfree world: the rebellion of the angels. Escaping, transcending, the iron embrace of material nature is exactly what intelligences already do in the ordinary world by constructing the conditions of personal freedom, constructing teleological time from discretionary interior non-actualities.

The differences between Gnosticism and Blind-Spot philosophy have consequences concerning social, economic, and political situations. There was a sense in Gnosticism that the world within time is irredeemably bad, justifying pessimism such that it would be pointless to invest any effort into improving the common predicaments of human life. Such quests as that for eternal Being or for the remote god beyond the hierarchy of astral demons, always provide an excuse to leave institutional injustices as they are. In Gnosticism the only hope of improvement is available to small groups of initiates, and that hope is of escape into the supernatural through arcane knowledge of invisible things and rigorous personal detachment from material nature. This is similar to systems of reality which identify salvation or resolutions of injustice only in an afterlife. Blind-Spot philosophy rejects both of those otherworldly fables. This world at hand, and only this, is the one in which the transcendence of intelligences gets to express itself. Catastrophe is not the same thing as tragedy. Tragedy is final but catastrophe can be overcome. It is true that the current state of human life generally is catastrophic, but that does not make it tragic. There is no fatal flaw in fundamental human nature, no universal taint from an original sin. Autonomous freedom is not a crime against anything. Being free is a crime only when it is exercised and practiced by reducing, restricting, or denying the freedom of other intelligences.

Some Sources

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Frances A. Yates (1899-1981), University Of Chicago Press (first published 1964. Midway reprint 1979. Paperback edition 1991), ISBN-10: 0226950077, ISBN-13: 978-0226950075.

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, written by (Dame) Frances Amelia Yates, Published by: Ark Paperbacks, an imprint of Routledge & Kegan Paul plc (1983) (first published 1979), ISBN 0-7448-0001-3.

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

Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times, written by Tobias Churton, Published by Ten Speed (2005), ISBN: 1594770352.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

The Tragedy of Romanticism: Episode One

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Hierarchy

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Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Reality

We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by the awesome vista of the starry night sky as experienced from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to the ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also by our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local parts of the vast environment, and on our bodily contact with its solid structures. Those are important but contingent and incidental circumstances of intelligence, and individuals are quite capable of maturing beyond their influence as complete models of reality. Conceiving the cosmos as the Great Chain of Being (which is always a top-down chain of command) is not a feature of human nature nor necessitated by human nature. It is circumstantial and cultural. What is far more important for a mature orientation within elemental reality is that human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of our individual subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. As long as we are caught in impressions of the Great Chain of Command, we are vulnerable to a certain sort of macro-parasitic fraud. Factions which assert their seniority, divine inspiration, natural, or even merely cultural superiority can take control of vast numbers of subordinated people by claiming to represent the great cosmic chain of command.

The Keystone of Romanticism

The nub of philosophical Romanticism is a clash between ancient and perennial top-down visions of cosmic reality (such as the Christian doctrine of an omnipotent God, or Plato’s ideal forms) and the local experience of individual creative freedom, as evident especially in artists and art. By the time of the early work of Johann Fichte (1762-1814) the line of philosophical thinking about individual freedom that went from ancient humanists (Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic) to Luther and then to Kant should have been profound enough, finally, to support and enlarge the egalitarian forces launched previously in the radial Enlightenment. The recognition of individual freedom should have been ready to subvert and overturn the age-old top-down conceptions which always alienate creative freedom from individuals. Instead, Romanticism actually subverted that line of progress and just revived Medieval fables of exceptionalism, hierarchy, and The Great Chain of Being. The position of Romanticism in the history of ideas reveals that the top-down orientation of all codified and institutional systems of reality has been the crucial barrier to progress, the tragedy of ideas.

From Novalis

Romanticism always includes a conviction that there are forces, or a reality, that is higher than (and very different from) the ordinary everyday work-a-day world, and that the higher ‘something’ is difficult to recognize or to perceive, if not invisible (occult). It includes a declaration of the active presence of a force of spirit (disembodied intelligence). (It can do this either seriously or ironically.) In romanticism lower is fragmented and higher is progressively more unified, all the way up to a total-oneness at the cosmic level. The higher reality is one spirit, free of causation (the magic idealism of Novalis), but not merely random. Events are the caprice of a discretionary intelligence. Dreams, after all, are free of internal causal chains but not free of personal relevance associations.

Can Rationalists Dream?

Romanticism was a reaction against a misrepresentation of Enlightenment rationalism. Romantics comment on rationalism as if it were a campaign for a total focus on humdrum practicality, utility, and efficiency in all human affairs. In fact, the radical Enlightenment rationalists were campaigning for rationality as a way to improve dramatically the claim to autonomy and dignity of every individual. Rationality was their shield for every individual against the established and oppressive ideology of a universal taint in human nature itself, original sin, which benefits from authoritarian control. Efficiency and utility are top-down administrative and economic ideas which were quite foreign to radical Enlightenment philosophers, who were riding the coat-tails of the new cultural wave of scientific ideas with the hope of achieving their own social, political, and cultural improvements. Spinoza and his interpreters were rationalists and not romantics, and yet conceived the Enlightenment. Rationalists dreamed of an equal society in which all people would have rights and freedoms in a bottom-up political system operating to improve the lives of all. That is their radicalism. They embraced the scientific metaphysics of materialism as a potentially bottom-up vision of reality in opposition to Christian spiritualism, which was profoundly influenced by Plato’s idealism and which justified authoritarian control as divine command.

Failing to recognize that Enlightenment rationalism’s main intent and effect was to empower and enhance the dignity of individuals universally, romantics saw in rationalism only disenchantment, formalism, the tyranny of brute material actuality and determinism, including “laws of thought”. Searching for reasons to reject such things, romantic philosophers were inspired by the early work of Johann Fichte which places emphasis on the creativity of individual subjectivity, the personal “I”. Fichte created his innovation out of an insistence on making Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Fichte’s entry point into philosophy) consistent by eliminating the idea of an ultimate external reality, an objective “thing-in-itself”. To Fichte’s way of thinking there was no reason, on Kant’s own basic principles, for supposing that there was a thing-in-itself, although the thing-in-itself was apparently crucial for Kant’s overall vision. In the absence of acquaintance with a thing-in-itself the individual subjective “I” must perform a creative act in which it “posits” (conjectures, pretends, considers, day-dreams) its entire world, including itself.

Note on Idealism

Romanticism is an idealism, since the most fundamental character of the cosmos, on this view, is intelligence. Idealism comes from recognition of the interiority of intelligence (discretionary non-actualities), in contrast to materialism, which rejects such interiority, and restricts existence (ontology) exclusively to what is exterior to intelligence, the strict actualities of physics, pre-determined, measurable, nature. So any philosophical idealism is some model of the interiority of intelligence, and a recognition of interiority of intelligences as elemental or non-reducible. Recognizing the interiority of intelligence gives any position an aspect of idealism.

Kant vs Fichte: A Bottom-Up Re-Conceptualization

Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself” (noumena) retained the old top-down orientation, in spite of his recognition of individual freedom. His main emphasis was on scientific knowledge, on the importance of, and difficulty of, achieving acquaintance with what was external to and vastly more elemental than individual intelligence. However, 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. (The atomic materialism of Democritus is another contender, as suggested above, and so is Ockham’s nominalism. Ockham was, of course, Christian, which is an assertion of a top-down supernatural model of reality. More on this later.) The main importance of Fichte’s vision is his unprecedented 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 Fichte.

Fichte and Luther: The Personal Power to Posit a Reality

Fichte’s concept of subjective interiority, the personal “I”, in its creative act of “positing” itself and the cosmos, is doing something comparable to Luther’s more Stoic and more strictly personal “leap of faith”. Both are subjective and deliberate acts of creativity going beyond acts which can be guided completely by previously acquired knowledge, direct acquaintance, or rational calculations. Both Fichte’s and Luther’s creative acts are assertions of a particular intelligence, acts of self-declaration, self-definition, or self-creation, with both the intent and effect of projecting the peculiar power and freedom of that intelligence. Both acts are projections outward into nature and culture of inwardness, of the freedom of an intelligence. However, Fichte’s idea of a subjectivity “positing” dreams leaps well beyond the sort of creativity required by Luther’s leap of faith. There is still a leap, an assertion and a projection of the freedom of an intelligence, but in Fichte’s conception the projection has far more shape, content, and self-sufficiency. It is not just Luther’s act of embracing or assenting to reports of a divine plan supposedly revealed to some distant source and passed along. Fichte’s subjectivity is its own transcendent source. The freedom of Fichte’s subjectivity is richer by far than Luther’s at the same time as being rooted solidly in Luther’s vision. That is the basis for claiming that, in spite of problems, early Romanticism represents a philosophical advance in conceiving subjectivity and its creative freedom.

For the “I” to posit a world, as it does according to Fichte, is not to create an actual world (which would be a thing-in-itself) but rather to create a subjective non-actuality, interior to a particular intelligence (with the unbounded malleability or mutability of such interiority). Romantic philosophers recognized the difference between objective actuality (thing-in-itself) and subjective non-actuality, and they recognized that culture is mainly a construct of non-actuality, that is, orientations which are internal to individual subjectivities. However, they could not accept that individual subjective non-actuality is the matrix of real creative freedom. What prevented them from recognizing that truth of freedom was their (romantic) inability to get past the age-old top-down conception of reality. Anything profoundly original had to come from “on-high” somehow. So the problem for romantics was how to reconcile their top-down conception of reality with their subjective idealism. The easiest way out is to universalize and unify subjectivity and posit a single top-down omnipotent subjectivity, thus to conceive everything as a play of ideas in that divine subjectivity, and that is pretty much what romantic philosophers did. Considering this from another perspective, the problem with dismissing the thing-in-itself is that it seems to license dismissal of other-intelligences-in-themselves also. That would leave a single absolute subjectivity as the entirety of existence, and, in fact, that seems to be the way Fichte’s thinking developed. Such an absolute subjectivity or intelligence is a variant of the concept of God.

Romanticism began with an assertion of individual freedom by Fichte, who picked up and developed the radical Enlightenment thread of empowering and enhancing individuals in his early work on the all-positing I. The Fichtean “I” is the reality of freedom. That in itself is congruent with Enlightenment rationalism up to a point, but of course it cannot accept materialism and determinism as conceived by Spinoza and his fans. So, even though the Romantics were reacting against (a misrepresentation of) Enlightenment rationalism, they were also building on the main feature of that rationalism, up to a point.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar, published by State University of New York Press (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3272-6.

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Bottom-Up Metaphysics

12 Thursday Mar 2015

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

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Re-Conceptualizing Individual Intelligence

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

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

Re-Thinking Transcendence

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

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

Actuality vs Non-Actuality

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

Top-down Systems of Reality

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

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

The Pluralism of Freedom

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

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

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

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

Re-Conceptualizing Community and Transcendent Self-Possession

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

Note: Here are some views of Fichte:

Romanticism, A German Affair, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Robert E. Goodwin, published by Northwestern University Press (2014), ISBN 978-0-8101-2653-4.

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, written by Anthony J. La Vopa, Published by Cambridge University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0521791456, ISBN-13: 978-0521791458.

The Roots of Romanticism, written by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, Published by Princeton University Press (2001), ISBN-10: 0691086621, ISBN-13: 978-0691086620.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.